We just listed the original Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds CD this week, after it being out of stock here at Crucial Blast for several years, and it

just so happens that Enterruption just released a vinyl version of the same album...or so we thought, at first. When these LPs arrived here last week, I was

surprised to see that this is actually a totally different, alternate recording of Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds that was recorded in the

bands practice space in 2000 on an 8 track reel-to-reel machine by Enterruption boss William Rage, about a month before the band went into the studio

recorded the Tumult album. And amazingly, this is even more brutal and savage than the second round of recordings that would make up the Tumult

version - no small fucking feat, if you're at all familiar with the original release. Seriously, I fell in love with Burmese all over again listening to this

LP, as every song sounds even more noisy and distorted and blown-the-fuck-out than ever, the two bass guitars slamming huge feedbacking sludge riffs against

the raging improv drumming, the vocals pushed way out to the front this time, making Burmese sound like a completely wrecked death metal band more than ever

before. Holy shit, is this crushing. This record also has their devestating cover of Black Flag's "I've Heard It Before" that was previously released on

their now out-of-print Treaties of Greed and Filth 7".

Here's my take on the CD version, which still applies here: These songs mark the spot where I first fell in love with the bone-shattering power of Burmese,

at the time a mere trio of two bass players and a drummer, recently relocated to the Bay Area from Iowa City of all fucking places. I remember hearing about

them when my old band toured through Iowa in the late '90s, but it wasn't until Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds made it's way into my mitts that I

finally caught whiff of the unbridled violence of Burmese. This album is like the heaviest noisecore record ever, opening with the tumbling free-jazz

percussion avalanche and tangled bass guitar noise of the title track, and proceeding to tear and gnash it's way through minute long assaults of heavyweight

improvised violence like "WWWIII", "Dragged Through The Streets", and "Corpses Sealed In Concrete Floors". Massive feedback drones collide with vicious

grindcore, chaotic, deformed death metal, and impossibly dense, sludgy free-noise-jazz, which had Tumult comparing 'em to a cross between Earth and Drop

Dead, a descriptor that admittedly had me drooling when I first read it. And this album definitely lived up to my expectations - it's still one of my

favorite albums ever, and it led to me eventually doing that split CD between Burmese and Fistula that we put out on Crucial Blast in 2004. It all ends with

the twenty minute long "Man Never Forgives Ape, Man Destroys Environment", a monstrous dronescape a la Earth 2 that sends out huge ripples of

malevolent subsonic filth, twisted smoking electronics, and screeching garbled vocal noise, and then drifts off into an icy glacier wind of fuzzy turntable

noise and feedback. Highly recommended!

Excellent packaging for this LP, a silkscreened LP sleeve that features the original artwork from the CD, the interior of the jacket is all black with a

few striking live shots of Burmese in all of their club-destroying glory, inside the sleeve is the thick vinyl pressed on burgundy colored wax and slipped

inside of a white inner sleeve printed with the track listing and record notes, along with a big stack of flyer reprints from various Burmese shows from the

same period. All limited to 500 copies!