Blacktusk
Taste the Sin
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Beastly Georgian trio, Blacktusk, bring hell’s hammers down heavy on their sophomore effort, Taste the Sin, like they’re taking out a whole bushel of rotten peaches in one abominable swing, splattering black juice and insidious worms all over the goddamn place. Baizley wrapped and disastrously brackish, Taste the Sin picks up where ‘08’s debut, Passage Through Purgatory, left off by heaping a whole mess of redneck rage onto the sludge metal artistry of bands like Baroness and Torche. The angry, pounding riffs burn like fire on the surface of an oily swamp and every one of the album’s 11 songs seethe and foam like acid on an open wound. Imagine the Cancer Bats with longer teeth or Zoroaster with shorter songs and you’ve got the Southern stoner death thrash of Blacktusk.

Note: I’ve seen the band’s name written several different ways, including Black Tusk and BlackTusk, but I have opted for Blacktusk. If any of the fellas in the band would like to offer up the official spelling of the band’s name, please drop me a line. Until then, I will stick with the one word, lower case ‘t’ version. For better or worse.

Listen to “Snake Charmer” from Taste the Sin!

In the first movie, you’ve got these six chicks, all of ‘em adrenaline junkies, who take a vacation in the Appalachian Mountains to go cave diving. Although it’s more like cave crawling, because these are unexplored caves without much room, see, and since the goal of these movies, as much as I can gather, is to make you squirm one way or another, they lean heavily on the claustrophobic button. So there they are, crawling through rocky cracks deep in the Earth’s belly, in these unmarked, unexplored caves (because that’s more of a thrill despite the fact that no one knows where you are) with dust, debris, and water falling all around them. They don’t really know where the hell they’re going, so they just keep making their way deeper and deeper. Then there’s a mini avalanche of some sort and their only way out has just been cut off. The rocks also fell on one of their equipment bags; the one with the rope, so that’s a major setback. Anyway, this shit goes on for about an hour, and will only really make you uncomfortable if you hate the dark and have a major fear of being trapped in a small space. Or buried alive. For everyone else it’s 60 minutes of watching six women crawl around in caves. But then, finally, the cave monsters show up.

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Bad Taste Barbies
Bad Taste Barbies
Self-Released

I don’t know if this six-song offering from Britain’s Bad Taste Barbies is an ugly, low-rent, tin can glam rock demo or a transmission from Planet Trash that’s been intercepted and cleverly repackaged for distribution throughout the global drag community, but any cartoon character who likes to suckle at the heaving bosom of all things fabulously fetish will go gaga for the sugarcoated proto-punk and lipstick sleaze-pop found here. Responsible for this mascara mess are a quad of means and queens – known individually as Crystal Grenade, Kurt Dirt, P. Baby Fontaine, and Stu Gibson (yep, he’s back and stranger than ever) – who beat the hell out of decent decorum with steel stilettos and cat claw riffs.

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