Now also available in a limited-edition 2022 "shit mix� colored vinyl edition for all of you distinguished aesthetes out there.

In 2016 year of our lord, it's almost unfathomable that this rare beast could have once stalked the face of the earth. But when I need a real social palette cleanser, I turn to the late 80s GG Allin stuff. And this motherfucker is top of the pile, one of the filth-king's rattiest and nastiest albums. The fifth album from Allin and originally released on Gerard Cosloy's Homestead Records, Freaks captures the beast during my favorite period of his career: with this particular expression of his monstrous Id, Allin enlisted the talents of Bulge, who otherwise belched out a couple of rippin' thrashcore releases on Ax/ction and Fudgeworthy in the early 90s, and who featured members of Gonkulator, Jesus Chrust, and Psycho. Bulge's drummer Charlie Infection had already previously worked with Allin by including the song "I Wanna Suck Your Cunt" on the Welcome To Ax/ction Island compilation. Bulge was a relatively tighter, more "stable" band compared to Allin's previous backing group, so the team-up made sense.

That said, this album is a warzone: a pitch-shifted GG lays down the law with the spoken word intro "My Revenge", then throws us headfirst into a nineteen-song orgy of drug-damaged blues riffs and monstrously fucked-up hardcore punk. His vocals sound totally scorched here, like the man has been swilling gasoline in between vocal takes. "Be My Fuckin Whore"' offers a litany of degradation and misogynistic abuse set to primitive hardcore, with some almost Greg Ginn-level guitar warp going on when it rips into a solo, followed by the thirty-second noisecore-esque blast-chaos of "Suck My Ass It Smells". "Dog Shit" delivers what is possibly my favorite line from the guy, "...Get the fuck outta my bread line...", and that general mean-spirited, ragged hardcore attack makes up the bulk of Freaks.

Other scorchers include sickoid mid-tempo rippers like "Anti Social Masterbator" (sic)and "Last In Line For The Gang Bang" that collectively climb right into your head and won't leave. You've got a nod to David Allan Coe via "Outlaw Scumfuc". And with the messed-up and overtly brain-damaged moments like the lumbering, tuneless skull-beating on "Wild Riding" and "Crash & Burn" , Allin and crew puke up a kind of Flipper / Kilslug / Black Flag-style scum-dirge that's swarming with gruesome guitar skronk, grating atonal synthesizer, go-nowhere sludgepunk riffing, and some of the more unsettling and orgasmic vocals we've heard from Allin. Goddamn awesome stuff. The closer "My Bloody Mutilation" is a drawn-out, industrial nightmare, a fog of clanking, metallic atonality and tortured invective screams, raving madness set to a oily black shimmer of deformed ambience, almost Abruptum-like in it's sheer abject hideousness. But if I had to give you just one reason to pick up this atrocity, it's the song "Die When You Die" (actually itself a sort-of cover of Destroy All Monsters's proto-punk classic "You're Gonna Die" ), a perfectly formed piece of anti-social, anti-human punk rock that has gone on to be covered by countless punk and black metal bands in the decades since. It's one of the greatest Allin songs of all time.

Bottom line is this- fans of fucked-up and demented 80s' hardcore who haven't heard this stuff are missing out. This is hanging out on the most terrible fringes of hardcore. The height of anti-social art-psychosis and chaos-invocation in the latter half of the 1980s. The Freaks album could sit nicely alongside other albums that I would term "outsider hardcore", in spite of some probable pushback from members of the punk scene. But GG and the Bulge beasts were not interested in working within the parameters of the then-current hardcore scene. This is so much more transgressive, more bizarre, more genuinely deranged and incontrovertibly misanthropic, more dissident and self-destroying in every possible way. Allin himself considered this album to be one of the best of his career. A sodomatic , Dionysian immolation rite, pursuing ultimate physical transcendence in a manner not unlike the Aghori sect. And man, nobody ever came close to hustling the way that GG did. It's a sight and sound to behold. Everyone else was performing theater. This was the real deal.