For more than twenty years, Anal Cunt has prided itself on being the self-described "worst band in the world" and offending anyone and everyone that they possibly can. Like some kind of PC-baiting, ultra-confrontational musical/comedy act, these goofs have made an art form out of combining ridiculously short and noisy assaults of blurr and hardcore punk with offensive (and often hilarious) song titles, and enough transgressive subject matter to make your eyes water. It's like having the essence of all four issues of Answer Me! boiled down into twenty second blasts of tuneless improvised grindcore. You either love 'em or hate them, that's for sure, and you've got to give credit to a band that has managed to go down in history as one of the most notorious and controversial extreme music bands ever, right? Pretty crucial listening for fans of early Naked City and Boredoms, too, since AxCx was one of the few other bands of that era to blast through the conventions of extreme music to the same degree that those bands did. Anyways, we've stocked four of their Earache albums for the first time here at Crucial Blast, so now's a perfect opportunity for grind/noise/improv freaks to add these to their collection.

The 1996 album 40 More Reasons To Hate Us from Anal Cunt doesn't deviate from their patented style of tuneless, hyper-brutal grind and metal/hardcore parodies, at least compared to the more song-based direction that they started to take with Top 40 Hits, but there are a couple of things that make this album stand out from the rest of the AxCx catalog. First, 40 More Reasons... is noteworthy for being the only Anal Cunt album to feature Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer/Agoraphobic Nosebleed fame on guitar, and his chunky thrash-style riffs break through on a bunch of these songs (when the band isn't exploding into a blast of full-on Merzbow-strength noise, that is), resulting in some of Anal Cunt's heaviest jams thus far. Secondly, while I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't want to recommended this to your usual Pantera / Down / Superjoint Ritual fan, it is interesting to hear Phil Anselmo all over this album, playing guitar on "Van Full Of Retards", contributing backing vocals to almost half the songs, and playing guitar and singing on the absurd (and awesome, in a frontal-lobe damaged sort of way) cover of Manowar's "Gloves Of Metal". Aside from those two points, this collection of forty-two tracks is another hateful, ear-ripping grind/noise assault that shifts between their signature blurr-core assaults, the stoopid Sockeye-style falsetto vocals and sloppy punk, and CRUSHING grindcore, with a brain melting rendition of "Theme from Three's Company" lobbed like a frag grenade into the middle of it all. As always, half of the appeal of any Anal Cunt album is the song titles, which range from "You Looked Divorced" and "Al Stankus Is Always on the Phone With His Bookie" to "Johnny Violent Getting His Ass Kicked by Morrissey", "Van Full of Retards", and "Everyone in the Underground Music Scene Is Stupid". Pretty hilarious, as usual.