Somewhat recently my partner had a day off and with that opted to clock in for some valuable “couch time”. During this time I was in the other room where I occasionally heard blasts of a blinding falsetto voice waft throughout the flat. I then went to check out where this was all coming from, finding out that my partner started watching a fan-based documentary about Mercyful Fate and King Diamond, the classic Danish heavy metal band and its singer’s solo career respectively. At that point I sort of forgot the productive things I was in the middle of doing buckled in for an entertaining watch in which the subject matter contained a lot of corpse paint, blinding guitar solos, falsetto wails and a whole list of songs with amazing, over-the-top song titles. As this was a fan-based documentary, the said fan, who was the narrator, proceeded to obsessively rate the albums over the whole career span of both Mercyful Fate and King Diamond up until the current day.
As this documentary was playing through YouTube, once it was finished it automatically started a new documentary (due to the algorhythm) about the early days of Motörhead and their first releases on the UK label Bronze Records. We thought, “Hey, let’s watch this one too!”
This particular documentary seemed to be from the early 2000s, and had that classic VH1-style music documentary format where it consisted of extensive, long-winded and frankly hilarious interviews with former band members and those affiliated with the band. I couldn’t help being reminded of the genius accuracy of observation that a film like Spinal Tap “tapped” into with the whole hedonistic metal/rock scene. The satire of these infinite details is almost too much to handle.
There were also plenty of archival photos, live performance clips and segments of music videos with the live moments that were captured on film and video being absolutely stunning. Motörhead definitely came into their element in the live setting, hands down.
Throughout this film there were segments featuring some of Motörhead‘s greatest tracks, including “Overkill”, which features a punishing double-kick drum assault (apparently one of the first metal tracks to do so) and many, many false endings only to have the song kick up back into action again. The segment about this track in the documentary had rather over-enthusiastic summaries and analyses by a random cast of various rock journos, grey-haired music business types and fans, which at their lavish praise of the band and this track could only bring out a bit of laughter out of myself.
When watching the footage for this track, these “false endings” in the track “Overkill” reminded me of one the best “false endings” I know of but in the hardcore/punk genre, courtesy of a short-lived yet explosive group called Universal Order Of Armageddon (UOA) from Baltimore, Maryland (USA), who were around for an incredibly brief period — 1992 to 1994 — in which they released a string of singles on labels such as the legendary San Diego-based label Gravity, as well as a couple of 12″s on the Olympia, Washington-based Kill Rock Stars label.
In that brief time the band packed in an incredible amount of touring around the USA, playing community halls, basements and other such “non-bar” venues — which was common at the time — lining up with the DIY ethos of that era of punk and hardcore. The best description I’ve read of their live shows was something to the effect of it being like “turning on a vacuum cleaner at full volume for 15 minutes” (see clip below), which I thought was apt. Like most hardcore bands in the underground at this point, their tenure was usually brief — a massive flash of brilliance, energy in one giant fireball explosion only to implode a couple of years later.
Two records of theirs I have on vinyl are a Gravity 7″ and both their Kill Rock Stars 12″ EPs, one of those being their flagship The Switch Is Down 12″ which came out in 1994. The opening track of this album, “Visible Distance”, opens up with a hard-hitting drum intro that was perhaps somewhat iconic in the hardcore underground at the time. This track is just 1 minutes and 30 seconds long and concludes with an outro that is the same as the intro — making it some sort of punk/noise anagram.
“Stepping Softly Into” is a sparse, plodding number packed with starts and stops underneath a thin, chromatic guitar figure. One of my favourites is the concluding track on this release, “No Longer Stranger”, which I lifted as a name for the first Soft Riot release. It’s a more atmospheric track, expansive in length and for the most part is a minimal shuffling drum pattern; a clanky, looping bassline; and spoken word over top, only to be punctuated with a couple of insane blasts of hardcore fury.
The titular track “The Switch Is Down” is the third track on side A — one that never held as much interest for me as the other aforementioned three until recent years, although not any less powerful. It’s more of a straight-ahead, punk/hardcore juggernaut with some occasional wire-y guitar work and Anthony Malat’s bass guitar lines rumbling underneath.
However, the absolute pinacle of this track is the “false ending”. The song sort of crumbles into a long passage of feedback, scraping of guitar strings and erratic bass guitar noodling, only to have the ending of the song come back in with a thundering four-count drum fill that brings in a feeling that I can only describe as being driven over by a massive truck in some endless mosh pit.
In recent years labels like the Numero Group and Solid Brass Records have been giving the luxury re-issue treatment to an incredible number of bands from this glorious period in underground hardcore, including Unwound, Indian Summer, Shotmaker, The Red Scare, Grain and more, with Numero giving UOA a deluxe 2xLP re-issue of their various recordings only just this year.
After the band, well, imploded, a number of bands followed from former members including The Great Unravelling and The Convocation Of, but none seeming to have the impact that UOA did. Former members of the band still continue to do music here and there but oddly enough the biggest “star” to rise out of the band was drummer Brooks Headley, who become a coveted pastry chef in a 5-star New York City restaurant, only to leave that job and start up the now renowed vegetarian fast-food style joint, Superiority Burger — a venture that became so popular, with glowing critic reviews, that they had to close down the original location and re-open in a larger space in central Manhattan!