I loved the extreme hardcore scene of the 1990's. Especially all of the West Coast, Slap A Ham, Fiesta Grande, "powerviolence" stuff. And especially all of the terminally weird bands that were coming out of the West Coast hardcore explosion, bands like Man Is The Bastard, Gasp, Suffering Luna. And Crom. Based out of L.A., Crom were hands down one of the weirdest bands to come out of this whole scene, an enigmatic outfit that never toured and rarely even played their hometown, putting out a bunch of 7"s and splits and compilation tracks before they assembled The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989, their only full length album to date. It's like some kind of fucked up concept album fixated on Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian, weaving together tons of samples from the Conan movies with brutal, awesomely sloppy and noisy grind/hardcore a la Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard, 80's metal, and chunky thrash metal riffage, strewn across a cut-n-paste landscape of pilfered samples of Black Sabbath's 'Changes' and BOC's 'Don't Fear The Reaper', 70's pop hits, howling winds, funk metal riffs, riffs stolen straight off of Van Halen, Leeway, Celtic Frost, DRI, Slayer and tons of other, hilarious stage banter from Venom, collaged into a hallucinogenic drug dream sprouting from the cracked open skull of the past three decades of heavy metal, closing out in an eight minute expanse of icy wind, flamenco guitars, and explosive grind. This sounds like absolutely nothing else that came outta the Cali extreme HC scene, it's almost more of a plunderphonic tape collage experiment soaked in bong juice and 80's fantasy airbrush art, seriously fucked up and hilarious, but equally heavy and completely insane. And yet as chaotic as all of the different samples and sludge/grind parts and sound effects seem to be, everything is stitched together in a way that, uh, makes sense. And it's all delivered in a full color case adorned with some crazy quasi-Frazetta album cover art of a leather-bikini clad warrior-huntress riding the tundra astride her saddled polar bear steed; fold the booklet out and it reveals a mighty barbarian god snortin' lines off of the same glacier.