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BOY DIRT CAR  Winter  CDR   (RRRecords)   5.99


We just dug this disc up out of the RRRecords bins; there's been a few versions of this album, beginning with the original Lp release on RRRecords in 1987 and a later reissue on Aussie label Lexicon Devil. This is a barebones CDR release of Winter from RRRecords that became available not too long ago, packaged in RRR's signature style of Xeroxed, hand assembled paper sleeve. While Winter might not be a classic album, it is a dark, fascinating album of early American post-industrial that fans of Wolf Eyes, Hair Police, and other Midwestern noise bands should check out, if for no other reason than to see that this sort of creeping, sinister industrial skuzz came into being more than a decade and a half before Dread. Featuring members of the legendary thrash/post-hardcore band Die Kruezen, Boy Dirt Car was one of the oddest bands to crawl out of Milwaukee's post-hardcore underground in the late 80s. The band devoured classic UK post-industrial/PE and the music of Throbbing Gristle and the experimental guitar music of Rhys Chatham and spit these influences back out into a weird mix of grimy trailer-park power electronics, punk energy, and occult atmosphere.

This fifteen song disc opens with "Smear", a pounding dirge of metallic percussion, scraping noises and harsh feedback, gut-rumbling bass frequencies and dubby effects. It's noisy and abstract, a pounding machine-shop dirge molded into an almost hypnotic blur of noise. But with the second track "Control Broadcast", the band turns into a kind of plodding industrial dirge-rock, grinding out a lurching scrap yard sludge that's interspersed with blats of random television signals and looped noise. That's followed by the strange noisy punk of "Western Nile", which sort of sounds like Flipper wandering around in a laboratory next to a discotheque where they're blasting Throbbing Gristle Lps, the air full of primitive thud and disembodied voices. "Invisible Man" is total old-school power electronics with raging ultra-distorted vocals over an ear-splitting muck of chaotic guitar noise and amp rumble, buzzing feedback and monstrous bass throb, followed by the industrial creep of "Forms Forced Surrender", a Broken Flag-esque blat of abstract electronics. Melodic guitar rumblings and buzzing engine noise are combined on "What Never Ends, Begins Today", as bells toll against a backing rhythm of a steady hi-hat click. And the album's other foray into ear-splitting extremity comes with "10,000 Years", a brutal harsh noise exercise that is almost on par with something you'd hear from Incapacitants or Pain Jerk, later moving into a cacophony of junk metal and oscillating moans and chittering insect noise. The rest of the tracks have the band wandering through more fields of creepy power electronics, static low-end drone, random metal percussive sounds, digging noises, crushing bass-drone, and guitar racket.

The disc also has the five songs from Boy Dirt Car's split Lp with space rockers F/I added onto the end. This material is darker stuff, apocalyptic ranting over hellish swirling industrial drift, demonic vocals and warped guitar noise, and menacing machine shop dirges; it's with this music that you can hear the raw DNA for what bands like Wolf Eyes would be doing roughly a decade later.


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