Need some more Beefheartian stoner metal lunacy in your life? You're going to get it with the first new release from Kalmex and crew in a decade; Ultra Sonic Holocaust is a long-in-the-works album that features this bizarro crew from Redwood City, CA teaming up with Eric Wood's Bastard Noise for a nine-track decent into lysergic hell. Made up of assorted members of some of the more demented Bay Area hardcore / grind / powerviolence gangs like Agents Of Satan, Plutocracy, Immortal Fate and No Less, Kalmex And The Riffmerchants were a short-lived but thoroughly wonky outfit that delivered an experimental derangement of Shaggs-esque shamble, Kyussian sludge, brain-damaged space rock and cracked-out power electronics during their brief run. Before splitting up, the band recorded a collaboration with the Man Is The Bastard electronic noise offshoot Bastard Noise, but a variety of obstacles prevented this album from ever seeing the light of day until now. After being shelved for nearly a decade, this day-glo psych mutation has finally surfaced on Hear More, and it's as intensely fucked up as I'd expected.
The LP kicks off with a weird intro noisescape made up of answering machine messages, piercing electronics and trippy flutes, all congealing into a druggy sonic haze, then lurches into the Riffmerchants' brand of fucked-up atonal "stoner rock", a brain-wrecking mess of psychedelic wah-splooge and shambling spaced-out grooves, blotted with outbursts of ugly hardcore punk and noxious Eyehategod-esque sludge all smeared in gorked psych-guitar noodling. It's a virtual free-for-all, as they throw in assaults of hideous slow-motion powerviolence and brain-damaged Slayerized riffing, insane vocoder-fucked singing, airy folk-pop tunes with bestial vocals and more of that tuneless flute accompaniment, suddenly bursting into weird thrash metal parts, or spew out Casio keyboard melodies over meaty stoner-rock chug-fests. There's Mike Patton-esque crooning, and lots of random fucking around in the studio that suddenly shows up in the middle of a song, even abrupt blasts of low-fi technical death metal that come out of nowhere. The Merchants layer all kinds of stream-of-consciousness weirdness into their songs, out-of-place noises and trippy guitar tracks, lots of improvisational experimentation no doubt spurred on by copious drug ingestion, and there are large expanses of music that actually sound like you're hearing three different bands all playing at the same time. And all throughout this, they've incorporated Bastard Noise's squealing, swarming electronic noise into their songs, sometimes subtly, sometimes allowing it to totally take over the track as they spin out into a madness of improvised clatter and swirling locust-noise. In a word, fucked.
Along with this completely insane album of berserker psych rock, you also get a killer twenty-page booklet filled with extensive liner notes on the saga behind this album, as well as lots of full-color artwork from Aaron Guadamuz, who also did the sleeve art; his fevered hallucinatory illustrations are filled with bizarre mutants, twisted biological horrors, and insane technologies that come across like some batshit cross between the psychedelic sci-fi scribblings of Voivod's Michel "Away" Langevin and the repulsive cartoons of underground artist Mike Diana. Limited to five hundred copies.