The 2007 powerviolence-grind-cutup-comedy-acid-trip clusterfuck masterpiece from Crom has just been released on vinyl courtesy of Forest Moon Products. I highly recommend this one. We've got a couple different vinyl colors in stock, but only one or two of each, so all orders will get 'em picked at random.

Out of all of the weirder bands from the power violence/ Slap A Ham / Pessimiser scene of the 1990's, none were weirder than LA's Crom. Formed in the early 90's by Phil Vera (also of 16 and Despise You), Crom combined an over-the-top obsession with Conan The Barbarian (as you might've guessed from their name), crushing metal and hardcore riffs, whacked out sample frenzies, and loads of inside jokes and bizarre humor and created one of the weirdest hardcore/metal albums ever, The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989. Ostensibly a concept album about Robert E. Howard's Conan character and hardcore cocaine use, Cocaine Wars was a pastiche of samples from the Conan movies, sloppy, raging grindcore a la Man Is The Bastard and Crossed Out, 80's metal and thrash metal, pilfered classic rock samples, the sound of howling wind, and other weirdness. After that album came out, Crom disappeared from view, but have continued to build a cult following based on the sheer wackiness of their music. When we listed Cocaine Wars in the Crucial Blast store about 2 years ago, I thought that they were a footnote in the annals of extreme hardcore and metal, but lo and behold, the mighty Crom has risen again and bestowed this brand new full length that picks up right where their previous album left off. Right off the bat, the ridiculous cover art of five dungeon-faring adventurers traipsing into view and the one in the middle giving us the finger tips me off that Crom is again out to fuck with us. The Conan obsession is still in full effect (see song titles like "Sons Of Set", "Zamora", "The Ballad Of Subotai" for evidence), maybe even moreso than the previous album if thats even possible, and the music is again a studio-assembled collage-cum-clusterfuck of sound that burned a hole straight through my brain. Old school thrash metal, hardcore, doom metal, grindcore, and noise rock are all combined into these songs...it's hard to call the songs on here "songs" at all, really, as the tracks will just trail off into nothing, or appear out of nowhere, but when the music is happening, it's crushing, pulverizing metal with crucial riffs that prove that these guys are adept at all modes of metal. In amongst the thrash riffs, crushing doom dirges, and fried out grind are samples from Conan The Barbarian, bits of Middle Eastern sounding music, network TV sound cues, weird almost-silent tracks of room ambience, layered whispered vocals, fragments of that song that Reggie Bannister plays on his acoustic guitar in Phantasm, Warren Zevon, Manowar, bits from other Schwarzenegger overlaid with Conan samples, samples from old thrash metal records, and tons of other unexpected and disorientating samples and sounds. It's essentially an uberfucked plunderphonic album made by heshers, but it's not as random as you might think....all of these sonic elements have been puzzled together into a warped, pot haze sword and sorcery saga that kind of makes sense, although a hefty bag of weed might aid your decoding of Hot Sumerian Nights.