Anyone who follows my music reviews posted on Bricklaying the Charleston possibly will have noticed the name of Harsh Noise Movement cropping up on a couple of recent occasions. Harsh Noise Movement is both a label and a musician, and possibly one of the strangest, most genre-defying, and certainly the most prurient I've encountered, which is saying something.
The most recent HNM release I've had the pleasure of receiving is a cassette copy of a split album with one side by Dr. Heathen Scum of the Mentors, the other by Harsh Noise Movement. I was quite surprised at the musicality of the material by Dr. Heathen Scum - outrageously offensive lyrics set to traditional pounding heavy rock. It reminded me of something I'd tried to record with Andy Martin back in the days of UNIT. We had this discussion which somehow ended with the conclusion that the thing we had most enjoyed about heavy rock before it went all emo and admitted it also listened to Wire and Joy Division was the sexism, by which point we were laughing so much that our stomachs hurt. You probably had to be there. That week I set to work on a few tracks and wrote some lyrics. Andy played lead guitar and sang on one of them, and then we just kind of ran out of steam; which personally I blame on Andy's nagging mother in law being up on the blocks that week, leaving the remaining three instrumentals as damning metaphors to men as a species finding our voices unfairly silenced by all those man-hating period ladies and being all for women's rights but feminism has gone too far etc. etc.
I once played these tracks to Stan Batcow, and I think his comment was very funny, then shame on you, or something of the sort, and with Andy and myself having moved on to other things, that seemed to be the end of that; until I mentioned these tracks to HNM's CEO and he suggested releasing them as part of a split; and so here they are at last, presented in unholy union with a fat slab of Harsh Noise Movement at their most violent and confusing, and free if you're too tight to feel like paying.
Download it here, and please accept my apologies in advance. Stan was right about us.
