Fuckface

What a difference 15 years makes. It’s hard to imagine a band as scary, weird, and enthralling as Fuckface existing in Milwaukee in 2010, making its long-delayed self-titled CD—recorded in 1995 and finally released on Latest Flame Records—a crucial document of a period when the town was known to bring some seriously loud, ugly noise. An assemblage of malcontents from legendary Brew City bands like Die Kreuzen, Boy Dirt Car, and The Crusties (including current Decapitado!/Put Her in the Trunk bassist/screamer Dan Kubinski and drummer Erik Tunison), Fuckface lived to pound skulls and flay minds with a crushing ensemble of guitars, bass, three drummers (no snares or cymbals allowed), and “metal percussionist” Karl Paloucek, who sent sparks flying into the audience from his grinder. The result was a primal juggernaut that, at the time, may have sounded analogous to Ministry’s industrial rock, but owed far more to the band’s own pedigree and their Midwestern “pigfuck” contemporaries Cows and Killdozer.

Fuckface consists of the originally aborted 9-song album, along with seven bonus tracks, making this as complete a Fuckface document as you’re going to find. Clocking in at 75 minutes, it’s about as overwhelming as the band’s ever-dangerous live show, but it rumbles, swaggers, and disorients like a David Lynch road movie with Leatherface in the lead role. The mutated blues riffs and random guitar licks on tracks like “L.A. Song,” “Thorn” and “Snitch” just barely keep the songs rooted in something resembling earthly music while vocalist (and former Earwaves store owner) Dave “Blue Boy” Szolwinski growls and thrums over layers of steel wool abrasion and pounding, pounding, pounding. (Have we mentioned this band had three drummers?)

The bestial clusterfuck “Black House” leads into a surreal cover of the Pixies’ “Wave Of Mutilation,” followed by—of all things—the audio from an aborted 1980 Black Sabbath show/riot right here in Milwaukee. It serves as a division between the proper album and bonus tracks like the original “Thorn” single, a Zappa cover (“Why Don’tcha Do Me Right?”) and, appropriately enough, a live version of Die Kreuzen’s “All White.”

It’s horribly cliché to refer to a recording as “important” or “essential,” but if ever a disc fit the bill, it’s this one. Grab it and get forcibly yanked back into a time when having eight people on stage didn’t mean you were in for a night of banjo-led chamber pop—it meant you were about to have your teeth kicked in.