HeWhoCorrupts
The Smell Of Money
(Eugenics Records)
When you were, just the other night asking yourself, "What exactly is grindcore?", Jesus heard you. He hears the pleas and queries of all His little children, and he has dispatched me through His Divine Will to find you an answer. Unfortunately, like all quests with a root in spirituality, the goal is nebulous, the specs are for shit and the road to the resolution is long and fraught with peril. So I turn to the only people I can, Those Of Darkness, and They opened up their smoky holes and delivered me a quick, concise answer. Thanks Satan! once again, you come through with flying colors! now where is that thing you wanted me to sign?
The exemplis grindcoris here is the short but amazingly expansive EP from Chicago's HeWhoCorrputs. The hook with this rather elaborate package for an 8-minute EP (including a scratch and sniff sticker that "smells like laundered money") is that they have a corporate tyrant thing standing in for the usual frost giant oathery that comes with most metal. And while it makes for charming one-sheet copy, the music is all screeching mayhem and jackhammer tectonics. all 5 songs clock in under 2 minutes, but contain enough disparate elements to feel like a full length record. The songs flow together like a herky-jerky flailing pack of zombies with great titles like "Whose Ball Bearings need Greasin'" and "Grinding for Jesus" and contain thumping drum clunks and a guitar fuzz that sounds like a power station going into overload. The singers shrieks like a caged baboon that didn't sign up for captivity, and among all the other stunt musicalities that make up grindcore, this is a surprisingly catchy record.
I'm not saying you will catch yourself humming the Tourette'ss and busted snare interplays of "Fuck You and F That" while standing in line at the bank, but you might be like me and be on your third cycle of the EP before you know what hit you, gain and again. If you like Mike Patton's hyperspazz impalement's, but wish they were strangely a little rawer, and want something that will drown out all around you. I highly recommend this short little enfant terrible. And when you do, tell Jesus thanks in a little prayer at bedtime, so He will get off my back already.
OH and I almost forgot to mention that included on the disc there is an interview and a video for "Master of Profits" that starts out like a corporate training video and has them going all Jackass in an office, culminating with a mostly naked band member shitting money all over the rest of the band huddled around a conference table. Need I say more?
is an odyssey from the backwoods bars and small-town dives to the swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns of a Louisiana Saturday Night. Don't leave Heathrow without it. His first book 
