For years, I've been hoping that the Buzzoven back catalog would be reissued, as everything that these southern sludge legends ever released has gone out of print, even more recent reissued like the Welcome To Violence collection that Alternative Tentacles out a few years ago (which is also now available again and listed in this week's new arrivals list), but for a while now, it's been tough to get ahold of anything from Buzzoven without having to deal with collectors prices and used bins. Now that the band has announced a run of shows on the East Coast this fall and appears to be rising from their long slumber, we're finally beginning to see their stuff becoming available again, starting with this new reissue of At A Loss, the last album from Buzzoven from 1998, originally released on Off The Records. This thirteen-song album featured a new lineup; with founding member Kirk Fisher joined by drummer Ramzi Ateyeh (also of Sourvein) and bassist Dixie Dave (Weedeater) for a new bout of filthy, liquor-soaked sludgepunk and scumbag metal.
While At A Loss isn't as crushingly metallic and chaotic as their legendary Roadrunner debut Sore, the band still sounded utterly violent and ready to tear your jugular out with file-sharpened teeth, grinding through the quick, lurching gutterpunk of the opening title track and junkie sludge anthems like "Dirtkickers" and "Useless", lacing the songs with samples from Taxi Driver and other nihilistic films, dropping sledghammer vomitpummel and tar-gunked bass on "A Lack Of" and two minute blasts of hardcore punk savagery with "Flow" and "Whiskey Fit", slipping into the deformed Sabbathian swing of "Kakkila"'s and "Crawl Away" and grinding out one of their most abject and narco-fucked jams in "Loracei", a bleak, nauseous dose of ultra-slow crawling doom and howling feedback . Buzzoven always infected their noxious sludge with weird, trippy aural hallucinations too, which appear here in the haunting acoustic guitar, droning vocals, feedback and samples of "Heal", the grueling cover of Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down" that reinvents the classic rock chestnut into something infinitely more foul and bilious, bits of strange scraping industrial loops, and ending the disc with the psychedelic sample/noise-heavy doom of closer "Left Behind", which ends up decaying into nearly half an hour of minimal electronic pulse and static.
In my opinion, Buzzoven were the only band to actually rival Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of filthy, drug-fueled southeast hardcore sludge. Their
crushing, groovy mutoid Southern rock riffing fused to detuned, distorted metallic crush and scorched snarling vocals that would at times remind you of Eyehategod, but these guys sounded even more frantic and violent, their thick, meaty recording on At A Loss covered in alcohol sheen and vomit, and they possessed a volatile front man in Kirk Fisher, whose gut-churning vocals sound totally psychotic, schizophrenic mewling, snarling, screaming the negative, nihilistic lyrics, his throat spewing multiple voices piled on top of each other. A punishing bad-mood listening experience, crucial for fans of Southern scum metal like Eyehategod, Weedeater, and Antiseen.
This new Emetic reissue comes in a full color digipack and includes all of Arik Roper's original artwork.