Back in stock - and according to the label, some of the last copies of this reissue!
A reissue of legendary Japanese heaviness that could not have come one minute sooner, Zeni Geva's first album Maximum Money Monster from 1990 has been resurrected by Cold Spring for this new CD release and beefed up with three devestating additional tracks that are appearing here for the first time. When this album first came out on Pathological almost twenty years ago, it decisively put Zeni Geva on the map of monolithic heaviness that was being charted by likeminded dirge technicians like Godflesh, Swans, and Big Black at the time. I can't imagine how punishing it would have been to hear the slurred opening blast of "Slam King" for the very first time; K.K. Null's monolithic grinding riffs were joined by Mitsuru Tabata on second guitar and fit like machine teeth to the irregular rhythms that drummers Ikuo Taketani and Tatsuya Yoshida (also of Ruins) were laying down (the album features each of the drummers on alternating tracks), and abrasive psychedelic noise and feedback is piled on top in huge amounts, and occasionally shot through with searing, screaming guitar solos on tracks like "Sweetheart" that'll strip the enamel right off of your teeth. K.K. Null's vocals combine crazed shrieks with his patented "samurai warrior" battle roar that still sounds every bit as terrifying today as it did in '90. There's a relentless martial intensity much like that of early Swans at work here with each song being comprised of just one primary riff that the band bashes out over and over in search of the ultimate mindcrush heaviosity, but Zeni Geva were in their own way a vastly heavier beast than any of their peers, almost undefineable as they combined elements of atypical time signatures, atonal thrash metal melted down into a hypnotic trance, sludgy death metal and arty industrial-psych noise, blasting way out beyond anything going on in metal at the time and harnessing some of the most crushing music of the time. An absolute devestator of an album that meshes perfectly with the current zeitgeist that is producing a renaissance in harsh experimental rock forms and reissues of seminal albums like our redux of Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper. This new edition of Maximum Money Monster combines the original album tracks with three bonus live jams ("War Pig", "Skullfuck", and "Dead Car, Sun Crash") recorded in Tokyo in 1990, and all three sound crushing.