ESSENTIAL! You heard it. In the realm of wall-busting, form-exploding extreme music, PainKiller were one of the most intense, most insane bands to sully the waters of avant-garde heaviness. Seriously. This is a band that I recommend to everyone I know who listens to extreme music. PainKiller are that crucial. The band featured three of the biggest names in underground experimental music at the time: John Zorn, who had already become part of the foundation of the downtown NYC avant music scene and was fresh off of plundering death metal and hardcore in his pan-genre ensemble Naked City; bassist and shit-hot producer Bill Laswell; and drummer Mick Harris, who had just invented fucking grindcore a few years earlier in Napalm Death.

The band (in this form) was only around for three years, recording all of their studio material between 1991 and 1994; the first two were the Guts Of A Virgin and Buried Secrets EPs, followed by the groundbreaking Execution Ground double album that was released on Laswell's Subharmonic imprint. The group's aim was ambitious, seeking to fuse together dark dub and ambient music with grindcore, hardcore, and jazz in a completely improvisational setting; the whole notion apparently came about after Zorn had become obsessed with the death metal and grindcore albums that were coming out on Earache in the late 1980's, and the correlations that he was making between the nascent extreme metal scene and the 60's free jazz scene that inspired Zorn's sax playing. The result was (and still is) absolutely fucking explosive. Painkiller sounded like some new mutant entity instead of a clumsy conglom of styles, a genius bomb-blast of menacing dub snaking through screaming free jazz and the machine gun fire of Harris's blastbeats. Heavy and alien and utterly evil sounding at times, PainKiller would become a massive influence on pretty much any band that followed who sought to fuse the energies of jazz and metal.

For a while, the different studio releases from Painkillier could be hard to track down, especially after Subharmonic fizzled out, but Zorn's Tzadik label finally stepped in and assembled this hefty four-disc set that contains all of the band's studio material plus some primo bonus stuff, in the form of the live album Live In Osaka which had previously only been released as a Japanese-only disc availble in a few select stores in Japan, and a previously unreleased track that features PainKiller collaborating with Keiji Haino and Makigami Koichi!

The first disc contains Painkiller's first couple of releases: 1991's Guts Of A Virgin, 1992's Buried Secrets, and the aforementioned Haino/PainKiller track. Guts Of A Virgin was originally released through Earache, and it's a total skullripper. Twelve tracks in twenty five minutes, Guts blasts one song after another, each one a brutal eruption of free jazz sax squeal, shapeless hardcore riffs, hyperspeed blastbeats and insane vocal gibberish, sometimes finishing a song in under ten seconds. The EP opens with "Scud Atack" and it's like being jackhammered in the face with Boredoms, Albert Ayler and Napalm Death all at the same time. And if yer as mutated as I am, this means it's total bliss. A cathartic, violent eruption of improvised power and chaos delivered at mach 10 force.

Buried Secrets saw the crude free jazz/grind power of Guts Of A Virgin develop into a more expansive sound. It's on this EP that Laswell's evil dub bass really begins to take center stage, the jet-black tentacles of low-end throb worming around Harris's brutal drumming and Zorn's squonk and squeal. PainKiller's sound becomes darker, more dynamic and more fearsome, and not only does Laswell's dubby basslines create a sinister bottom end, Zorn also begins to inject his sax playing with darker, more lyrical melodies that have a jazz noir feel. One of the standout tracks on Buried Secrets is "The Toll", where PainKiller is joined by Godflesh for a crushing, industrial-powered slab of grim jazz/dub/dirge massiveness fueled by huge booming drum machine beats and Justin Broadrick's howling mantra. Sweet. The final track on the first disc is "Marianne", the previously unreleased track that has Keiji Haino (Fushitsusha) on guitar and Makigami Koichi on vocals with PainKiller covering the tune, which was originally performed by the cult 60's Japanese psychedelic band The Jacks.

Execution Ground makes up the second and third discs. Originally released as a double disc set on Subharmonic, Execution Ground is generally considered to be PainKiller's defining moment, a perfect fusion of the brutal thrash/free jazz and the dark dub sides of the group. The first disc features three long improvisational pieces that explore the trio's use of heavy dub and free jazz in an extended setting. The second disc, sometimes referred to (at least by myself) as Execution Ground Ambient, takes two of the tracks from Burial Ground and completely mutates them into a sprawling slab of blackened, dubbed out ambient sound. It's as crushing and ominous a slab of isolationist drift as you'd hear from Scorn or Lull or Lustmord.

The fourth disc features the Live In Osaka live album, recorded in 1994. A bunch of the tracks on the live album feature Yamatsuka Eye from Boredoms on vocals, and not surprisingly, his freaked out histrionics fit perfectly with the screeching hyperfast jazz-thrash of the older PainKiller jams. The opening track "Gandhamadana" kicks the set into high gear with Mick Harris sending sputtering blasts and expressive freeform rhythms careening through Laswell's fluid basslines, creating a heavy foundation for Zorn's violent sax squeals and unexpected shifts into cool jazz. The set is ferocious, bursting forth with the first four jams that bludgeon the audience with their patented jazz-thrasha, then at the end breaks for a series of shorter duets between Zorn and Eye. This encore is listed as "Black Bile/Yellow Bile/Blue Bile/Crimson Bile/Ivory Bile", and has Eye shrieking and gibbering along with Zorn's abstract, Carl Stalling inspired sax lines.

It's almost too much PainKiller to take. If that is possible. Personally, I don't think it is. Packaged in an oversized jewel box, Complete Studio Recordings presents all four discs with the original artwork. some of which was banned in England when the original discs were released. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!