Dishammer--Under the Sign of the D-Beat Mark

Punk rock is a form of music that, though I believe that it has decayed past the point of recognition as a genre, is near and dear to my heart.  I used to be a punker the way that I am a metal d00d; I didn't dress the part but had a nerdy obsession with finding underground music that nobody listened to, and the less of it normal people could stand to hear, the better it was.  I used to comb through the record bins looking for interesting stuff to listen to, my friends and I coming home with albums from The Missing 23rd, Ill Repute, Conflict, Total Chaos, and myriad other bands with silly haircuts and t-shirts turned into loincloths.  I sort of miss those days of carefree music consumption, where we would trade CD's with each other, somebody's Against All Authority albums being swapped indefinitely for somebody else's Adolescents and Exploited albums.

Sweet, sweet nerdery.  How I....still totally participate in you.

This kind of admiration punk rock is what leads me to Dishammer, the super-crusty D-beat metallers from Spain who put tits on every one of their albums covers.  Seriously, Google "Dishammer" and look at the images.  This album isn't the only one with some gnarly boobage, no sir; Dishammer deals in blackened, thrashy crust punk draped with black and white images of naked ladies.  Exclusively!  And you can totally see bush on at least one of them, too.  It's like I'm 11 and watching HBO After Dark with the sound turned all the way down all over again.

I liked Dishammer before I ever heard them, of course.

Dishammer have all the earmarks of the crossover crust artist, appealing to both punks and metal crusties in equal measure.  Is it Lo-Fi?  It sure is.  The sound is completely DIY and trashy.  It sounds like they recorded the whole album at their practice space and didn't bother to do any mixing, just like my first band's demo tape (which I engineered and produced before I had any idea what "mixing" and "sound quality" were).  Are the drums and guitar riffs masterfully crafted and executed?  Hell no.  As an avid fret-watching guitar nerd wiener, I can tell you for certain that the riffs sound like they, are at times, almost too much for the band.  This isn't a Decrepit Birth album, and it isn't supposed to be; the charm of this kind of music lies in the execution, which can range from clumsy and amateurish to solidly implemented, though the riffs tend to lack ornamentations that would qualify as "flashy," or "impressive."  Because being able to really play your guitar is gay, man.  You don't have time to learn when you're relistening to all of Jello Biafra's spoken word albums and totally agreeing with them because "THIS DUDE KNOWS, man, he's in the Dead Kennedys, but not anymore, because East Bay Ray is a total fascist."

Punk as fuck, man.

But metal d00dz will also enjoy this, because of the black metal-style "hissing pterodactyl" vokills, easy comparison to Motorhead and Discharge, and song titles like "Rusty Coffin" and "Welcome Death," both of which sound totally metal.  Indeed, the entire album sounds like a bunch of friends got together in their garage to approximate Motorhead covers while their pterodactyl record player does the vocals (in this scenario, it's also necessary that the band lives in the same time period as the Flintstones, where pterodactyl record players are as normal as the witty quips made by the record player about what it is forced to do).

"Meh, it's a living!"

And my favorite thing about Dishammer is that, though they are very preoccupied with your raging D-boner (I mean, look at the title of the album), they're also very helpful when it comes to your regular old, meat-and-potatoes, non-drumbeat-influenced boner.  Seriously, have you Googled it yet?  They just throw all sorts of naked ladies into the mix!  It's nice too, because your growing record collection could also double as your growing crust punk erotica collection, or at least give you some solid material to file away in the old spank bank.

Go check out Dishammer here , and if you like it you can buy it or steal it or do whatever makes you most comfortable.  I'm fine with whatever you do, my little lamb.