Bong-Ra: Full Metal Racket
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Glowstyx: Class of 1992
Cock Rock Disco

Utrecht 's Jason Köhnen (aka Bong-Ra) pays homage to his favourite thrash, doom metal, grindcore, and hardcore bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s on Full Metal Racket, a repackaging of thunderous tracks from his Grindkrusher and Sick Sick Sick vinyl releases. A one-time member of metal bands Prejudice (in 1987) and Celestial Season, Köhnen comes by his love for the genre honestly. Hammering beats and throat-slashing guitars roar at light-speed in the blistering “Terrorizah” and howling “Earache” while maggots crawl from the rotting corpses of “Necrogoat” and “Bloody Cenotaph.” Speed-metal riffing collides with deathly vocalizing in “Ram Waster,” flesh-starved zombies drag themselves from their graves for the death anthem “Slaytronic,” and “Jo Bench” might even sound funky if it wasn't buried under an avalanche of axe-and-beats insanity. For those keeping score, Doormouse and Sickboy visit Bong-Ra's butcher shop for “Grindkrush” and “Painkiller” remixes. Recorded in, ahem, “Horrorphonic,” the ten-song collection is so ridiculously over-the-top, you'll run screaming from the room but laugh uproariously when you do so.

Glowstyx's blistering rave collection Class of 1992 is credited to one “Ebenezer Gurnsville” who is Köhnen again, this time riding a fluorescent green wave of furious breakbeats, wailing divas, and piano breakdowns. Issued on Jason Forrest's madcap Cock Rock Disco, Glowstyx's “debut” was purportedly three years in the making and constructed from a four gigabyte archive of “old-school rave nostalgia” (according to the liner note, it was recorded “warped in the summer of ‘92”). Charging cuts such as “Bunny” and “The Dabbler” would give dancers whiplash if they tried to keep pace with the tracks' hyperamped BPM (vocals become Chipmunk-like when cranked to match the beats). The dozen feverish tracks include a fifty-minute parade of ecstasy-fueled (“E Launch A-OK”) and galloping house breaks (“Aethema Remix,” “Diva Shining Deeper”). “UR Mine” even lifts a vocal fragment from Cdatakill's “Yesterdays,” which itself plunders Billie Holiday's original. Given that it's a Cock Rock Disco product, no one should be too surprised that Class of 1992 is as mental as it is.

March 2008