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.

Anal Cunt's second album came out in 1995 and featured forty tracks that are divided up between blasting improvised grindnoise, brain-damaged punk, and fast, ripping hardcore, with a handful of ridiculous "covers" thrown in. When the band launches into their ultra-noisy blasts, they achieve that same Merbow / Incapacitants-level of sonic rumble as their earlier album, but at least half of Top 40 Hits is more song based, for whatever that's worth. The fucked-up punk rock stuff reminds me a lot of Ohio "tard-core" legends Sockeye, and indeed A.C. front man Seth Putnam can be seen in the booklet sporting a Sockeye shirt, so there's obviously some of that band's influence floating around here, as well as lots of brutal death metal riffing and other weirdness, but this album will probably always be best known for the completely bonkers covers that the band included. There's Rupert Holmes's "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)", Elton John's "I'm Still Standing", The Guess Who's "American Woman", the theme song from The A-Team, and the totally ridiculous "Stayin' Alive (Oi! Version)", all delivered via Anal Cunt's skull-wrecking psychosis. Other "hits": "Living Colour Is My Favorite Black Metal Band", "Benchpressing Effects on Kevin Sharp's Vocals", "Stealing Seth's Ideas: the New Book by Jon Chang", "Morbid Dead Guy", "Don't Call Japanese Hardcore Jap Core".