New (2023) remastered reissue of the classic deathrock / wyrd-punk album Cacophony, presented in jewel case CD, vinyl, and cassette. Here's my write-up, slightly edited, of the previous Outer Himalayan edition :

Few new releases this year have had me as jazzed as the sudden and rather unexpected surge of re-mastered Rudimentary Peni albums that have been coming out from Outer Himalayan. There's an upcoming reissue of the band's ferocious 2004 EP Archaic coming out in the next couple of weeks that I can't wait to get my hands on, but while we're waiting for that to materialize, we've picked up the second and third Rudimentary Peni albums that came out earlier this summer as part of this ambitious reissue campaign, both of which are pretty much essential for anyone into dark, macabre punk, early death-rock, and occult-obsessed hardcore.

It would be very hard to overstate just how influential these albums have been on an entire class of bands that followed in their wake, and you can now hear echoes of Rudimentary Peni's spiky, angular punk and bubbling madness lingering on albums from all kinds of hardcore punk, avant-rock and even black metal bands. They have always been grouped in with the early 80's anarcho-punk scene that flourished in Britain, but aside from their early connections with the band Crass (having released their 1982 Farce 7" on Crass Records), Rudimentary Peni had very little in common both musically and thematically with most of the other punk bands that they were associated with. Their music was so much darker and more enigmatic than almost anything else happening in British punk at the time, with much of the unique sound and vibe coming from front-man Nick Blinko, a visionary lyricist and artist who has struggled with mental illness and long periods of hospitalization throughout the bands entire career, and who brought his increasingly deranged visions of disturbing deformed characters, rampant paranoia, and withered horrors to the bands music, drawing influence from the works of H.P Lovecraft and the occult. For fans of dark, outre punk rock, the Rudimentary Peni records are absolutely essential; all three of the band's albums are crucial slabs of twisted, menacing rock, and even their EPs are minor masterpieces of macabre weirdness. They've never put out a bad record, and I actually think that their more recent stuff, while heavier and different from their classic early records, is just as amazing as their earliest, most legendary recordings. All are classic albums of malevolent weirdo punk, presented with complete lyrics and lots of Blinko's amazing obsessive pen-and-ink artwork.

The follow up to Peni's seminal debut Death Church, 1989's Cacophony continued to pursue the band's melding of twisted, angular punk rock and cosmic-horror imagery, going so far as to become a kind of Lovecraft-obsessed death punk opera. Instead of paying homage to the author’s body of work work merely by trying to channel the "The Music of Erich Zann" like most other Lovecraft-obsessed bands, Peni instead created this weird concept album that retold the story of Lovecraft's actual life through a series of bizarre vignettes, the narrative unfolding across short, ferocious blasts of fast-paced punk, with some of the songs appearing as instrumentals with strange spoken word readings over top. The rest of the album features those short minute and a half long blasts of quirky singing and ferocious pogo hooks, dark, driving bass lines, spiky angular riffs and fast-paced drumming that sometimes surges into near-hardcore speeds, the songs often degenerating into a maniacal din of seemingly random voices, strange sinister whispering and squalls of ear-rupturing guitar noise. This is some of the coolest stuff that ever came out of the British punk scene of the 1980s, for sure. Songs like "The Only Child" are stomping, death rock-esque punk rock with some of the most disturbing lyrics you'll ever hear on an old punk record; other songs might contain just two words, "flamelike / sunset", repeated over and over, or turn into a string of bizarre gibberish. There's the metallic hardcore punk eruption of "Nightgaunts" that opens the album, the dark goth of "The Evil Clergyman", the dissonant noise rock of "Brown Jenkin" with that maddening, incessant police whistle blowing through the whole song, the jangly psychedelia and electronic hissing of "Sarcophagus" and drug-addled pop punk of "Lovecraft Baby". And all through the album, in between the band's blasts of heavy twisted punk, there are these short sections where a bunch of different voices will suddenly appear all speaking over one another, giving you the impression that you're listening to some weird Vaudevillian radio theatre performance taking place, playing out the strange events that make up this disturbing re-envisioning of Lovecraft's life and work. Brilliant.

It's crucial to have this classic album of creepy outsider punk available again. Sounds as good and as weird as ever, too.