Monthly Archives: April 2011

There’s kind of a long story behind how we stumbled across today’s band, so bear with me. It all started when a reader named Steve posted about 87 suggestions for bands we haven’t featured yet. Most of them we’d either heard of or (sorry, Steve) didn’t sound all that interesting, but one jumped out at us. Partially because the band’s name is—pardon me while I copy-paste this shit—Omphalectoicxanthopsia. And partially because Steve, after obsessively including links and/or long descriptions of every other band he mentioned (if you’re really bored, you can read his whole post on our Submit & Vote page), suddenly got all cryptic on us.

“A friend told me they were weird,” Steve wrote. “so I googled them, saw some weird pictures, and just thought ‘I’m staying the hell away from that.’” And you know us. Anything that makes normal people (and even weirdos like Steve) say “I’m staying the hell away from that”—we dive into it like it’s a swimming pool full of unicorns and rainbows.

So we too Googled Omphawhatchamacallit, and here’s where it gets interesting. It turns out that this band makes something that even I, degenerate that I am, had never heard of before called “pornogrind.” (They also call it “pornoise,” but that seems to be a term they just made up.) And they’re not the only ones. There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of bands out there tagging their music as “pornogrind.” Apparently I lead a very sheltered life.

At first, based on the first tracks of Omphalectohforfuckssake we could find, I thought pornogrind was just a really harsh form of grindcore on which everything’s so sped up that it just sounds like an ugly smear of ear-fucking noise. That’s basically what their tracks all sounded like, although one did have a wacky acoustic guitar solo buried in it. Then we Googled “pornogrind” and learned that—duh—it’s basically exactly what it sounds like: Grindcore with really, really foul porn-related band names, song titles and I guess lyrics—although the lyrics are without fail completely unintelligible because they’re delivered in that guttural Cookie Monster style that afflicts so much bad metal these days.

Anyway, long story short, there’s a LOT of these pornogrind bands floating around out there in cyberspace, and after you spend a few hours Googling their names for more info, you’re going to have to spend many more hours clearing your browser history so your girlfriend doesn’t kick you out of the house. Most of the search results for things like “Enema Bath” and “Cock and Ball Torture” (yes, actual band names) are not music-related, is what I’m saying. You have been warned.

Still, we plowed through as many of these pornogrind bands as we could stomach because, hey, the whole damn genre is pretty weird and hey, when you see this much horseshit in one place, there’s just gotta be a pony in there somewhere, right??

Well, no. Here’s the thing about pornogrind: It sucks. All of it. It’s just sped-up death metal/grindcore noise with porn samples and titles like “Anal Cum Shot” and “Regurgitated Semen.” In a way, it’s actually the opposite of weird—it’s the sort of shit 10-year-old boys dream up to gross out their friends, played in a we’re-just-pounding-the-fuck-out-of-our-instruments style almost totally lacking in any of the more technical aspects of true grindcore and extreme metal. It’s probably all meant to be funny on some level, but listen to enough of it and—much like actual porn—it just becomes depressing. Who spends days, weeks and months of their lives writing, rehearsing and recording music in their garage, and then decides, “Hey guys, let’s call ourselves Engorged Vaginal Abyss (yes, another actual band name) and write songs about raping strippers”? Sad people, that’s who.

It was in this context that we stumbled across Rancid Penguin Molestation and their pornogrind parody song/video, “Placenta Pudding Polka.” After all the necrophilia and pedophilia and coprophilia and whatever-philia, it was like a breath of fresh air. Actually, Rancid Penguin Molestation appears to be the work of just one man, a dude from Wisconsin named Cody. Here’s his MySpace page, on which he declares that “Except for grindcore, I detest anything else that ends with a -core.” Amen to that, brother!

So thanks, reader Steve, for sending us down this particular internet rabbit hole and indirectly leading us to so-stupid-it’s-awesome charms of Rancid Penguin Molestation. And in case I wasn’t clear on this point: No, we won’t be featuring any more pornogrind bands. So don’t even ask.

P.S. No, we’re still not sure how being “fart raped” differs from being actually raped. Pretty sure we don’t want to find out though.

Links:

• Madderbass’s YouTube channel (creator of Rancid Penguin Molestation)
• Madderbass’s aka Cody Linder aka Sergeant Nuclear Chicken’s MySpace page