16. SOUTHERN HOSTILITY - ANTiSEEN.
Dear sweet jesus christ. This is THE album. You will never find an
album meaner, dirtier, or uglier than this jagged load of brutality. To
say it turned my world upside down would be an understatement. How
could four guys from the Carolina hills go into a makeshift recording
studio and emerge with this? How? In the canon of popular music, this
album will one day be "lost" and then eventually rediscovered and
rightfully heralded as one of the most important recordings of the
twentieth century. The musicological world will clamor to find out more
about the men who recorded this. Full blown mythologies will spring up
around it. They will say that only the devil could have handed someone
a sound like this. It will be like the second coming of Robert Johnson,
and the world will feel the reverberations of this epic kill shot. It
will be dissected and discussed and poorly imitated. Professors and
"musicians" and scholars and other squares will make pilgrimages to the
South in search of its roots. They will seek the gravesites of Jeff
Clayton and Joe Young, and they will ramble on in magazine articles,
collegiate treatises, and private journals about that which they know
nothing, trying to make sense of it all.
It would be far too easy to say this is the best punk rock album ever
recorded. It is only punk in the sense of the distribution avenues and
poor categorization techniques that it was subject to upon its release.
This album defies classification. It is the only album of its kind ever
made. It is its own category. It is the proverbial lightning in a
bottle. It could never be made again. It is the product of a singular
moment in time where everything was perfectly aligned. Thank your gods
that someone was there to capture this primal scream before it slipped
into the ether, never able to be reproduced. It is grit and
claustrophobia and frustration and sweat and the unbearable heat of the
South etched into vinyl grooves, perhaps by the devil's own tail. Or at
least that's what they'll say a couple hundred years from now.
Few recordings pack such a visceral punch. Robert Johnson - perhaps.
Dock Boggs - maybe. Most desperate cries of this magnitude were let
loose from the tops of mountains and the darkness of hollers as last
attempts to appease sanity and curb the desperate urges that drive
people to their fates . This album is that kind of dark night of the
soul preserved for everyone's examination... Southern Gothic at
ear-shattering decibel levels.