It doesn’t get much gnarlier than the Gonk. I have long bowed at the altar of the almighty Gonkulator, ever since discovering them through a sketchy-looking ad in an early 90s issue of Maximum Rocknrolll, via one of the Ax/ction Records ads, and these guys were inarguably a progenitor of the more recent black noise / sludge / avant-dirge scene. I've mentioned it before but it cannot be stressed enough: this band, made up of members of the New England hardcore punk underground, have been bashing out a bilious, belligerent brand of blasphemous skuzz that for the most part resembles a cross between early Beherit, primitive grindcore, and the stumbling art-damaged punk-sludge of the Kilslug / Drunks With Guns / Flipper domain. No strangers to the loud / heavy / pissed mode, the corpse-painted members of Gonkulator had quite the pedigree: vocalist Baron Von Gonkulator is in equally brain-damaged metal oufits Bone Ritual and Goat Thrower; bassist Strep Cunt is aka Cody Maillet (Cryostasium, Witch Tomb); guitarist Thyroid Von Schnivel of sleaze-punks / occasional GG Allin backing band Bulge; and of course, drummer Charlie Infection is a staple in the Boston-area underground with his work in proto-grindcore rippers Psycho, notorious doom-thrash weirdos Goat Felch, outsider hardcore legends Cancerous Growth, bizarro punk squad Jesus Chrust, the aforementioned Bulge, and running the iconic Ax/ction Records and Fudgeworthy labels. And like many of the Gonk's other releases, the sleeve art for this is handled by the great Paul Ledney (Profanatica, Havohej). It's a whos-who of chowder-land maniacs, who specialize in a majestic black mess that has been an influence on bands like Ride For Revenge, Enbilulugual, and probably half of the Legion Blotan catalog, and are contemporaries of Havohej and Black Mass Of Absu. This band has great genetics.

On Reborn, Gonkulator deliver about as much music as you can cram onto a 10" record, just shy of half an hour long. With the A-side titled Baron and the flipside Cemetery, this platter pulls you down into a stench-filled quagmire of diseased scum-metal. It really doesn't get filthier than this: the band pukes out ten tracks of lurching, damaged necro-sludge, opening with murky vintage monster-movie music as a gruesome chugging riff enters, pounding caveman drums and wispy, bizarre vocals, "Excruciating Pain in the Form of Religious Rubbish " blooming into a gnarly no-fi nightmare of garbled sickness and nonsense black metal riffs, that pummeling percussion like logs on wet cardboard fished out of a dumpster after a night's rain. The music lurches back and forth between dragging doom-laden noise and squalls of hideous guitar noise and those sudden, unannounced bursts of primitive blasting chaos. This seasick slop-a-thon continues unabated through ugly sing-a-long scum-anthems like "Hail the Baron " and the mid-tempo bulldozer sludge of "Violating the Virgin Mary ". Totally rambling and covered in sores, songs breaking apart halfway in, a fucked-up improvisational messiness infecting everything that is going on. Musicianship is nil; these tracks are pure unchained barbarity, getting particularly mangled when you get to stuff like the Kilslug-gone-war-metal trash-dirge of "Spilling the Blood of the Holy Ones ". The Baron's disgusting guttural grunts and wheezing sits atop occasional forays into gutter psychedelia, broken and bent song structures slathered in mucus and ectoplasm, instruments slowly sliding out of tune, a cloud of noisome distortion and hiss enfolding around each burst of bestial chaos. Occasional eruptions of brain-damaged punk and monstrous clots of electronic gurgle. Are those choral synths moaning in the distance? Total catharsis on the level of ther most primitive early hardcore, but strained through this foul blackened atmosphere that leaves everything sounding rotten and putrefied, finally leaving you drenched and soiled in the closing "Storms of Thunder over the Sacred Cemeteries of Schlagen". br>

Once again, Gonkulator achieves an apotheosis of brutal outsider black metal-adjacent carnage. It's a spectacle of appalling shit-fi ultra-violence, and I can't get enough of this stuff. Note to self - I am in desperate need of a CD collection of all of this vinyl / tape - only graveyard grind. Bonus points for the hilarious piss-take of "Crazy Train" that is "Ozzie Is Old". Also love the full-color inner sleeve that has a bunch of photos of these corpse-painted freaks jamming out in the middle of a snow-covered forest. "Kvlt", indeed.