July, 2023: Gimme Radio is dead, and I don’t feel so well myself. It’s been a couple of months since the streaming radio and live chat parts of Gimme went dark, preceded by a flurry of frantic social media info exchanges, Discord server launches, and other plans for listeners and DJs to stay in touch and keep the community that flourished in the Gimme Radio chat alive. Some DJs, like Alex Kayne, DJ JET, and MT Casket, went DIY and moved their shows to other platforms.
At this point in 2023 I had been between jobs for basically all of the calendar year to date—one of the bleakest and most crushing experiences one can have in 21st century America—and my Gimme Radio show Grave Convulsions had become my primary hobby and creative outlet. Losing Gimme at this particular time sucked really bad for me. The obligations of a regular radio schedule, the work of Gimme’s uniformly awesome producers, the real-time feedback and fun of the chat were all excellent motivators to keep the show going in its original run, and the idea of essentially starting over again and doing everything myself during this particularly garbage era of my life was pretty daunting. But as Gimme went down I assured everyone I’d keep Grave Convulsions going, so I had to do it.
The voice tracks on episode 135, the first post-Gimme episode of Grave Convulsions, sound like shit, straight up. Between being out of work and just not wanting to be yet another middle-aged white guy with a beard buying podcasting equipment, I recorded this one with a headset mic. It sucks. Dumb idea. What’d I tell you about those Gimme producers? This wouldn’t fly on their watch.
Musically, though, this one kinda kicks ass. Early in the Gimme run of Grave Convulsions, I played a lot of really blown-out war metal and blackened noise that might not fit every Gimme Metal listener’s interpretation of what “metal” means, so sometimes I’d start the show with a track or two of traditional metal or speed/thrash metal that still fit the GxCx vibe, usually by being Satanic and/or weird. Sort of like, here’s something definitively metal in case it gets too esoteric for you later. It was never ironic, but hunting for tracks to do this made me appreciate these styles of metal more and now they’re a regular part of my listening diet. Armageddon Label’s then-recent reissues of the first two Hirax albums, Ragng Violence and Hate, Fear, and Power fit the bill for sure: building off what Slayer laid down a couple of years earlier with Show No Mercy, injecting some hardcore punk energy, with vocalist Katon DePena going absolutely wild in his idiosyncratic, trad metal-informed style. This shit rules.
Melissa’s second EP is just as good as the first, if you ask me. A couple of absolute maniacs traveled from Philadelphia to NYC to see them based on me playing the first one on Gimme. That was cool. Uzkost continue to clear the very low bar of not tolerating fascists. Also cool! Throne of Katarsis are one of my favorite Norwegian black metal projects and hardly anyone else seems to know about them—I’m not even sure if Candlelight Records knows they released The Three Transcendental Keys in 2013.
“Under the Whip” by The Crown is from their 2002 LP Crowned in Terror, the one with At the Gates vocalist Tomas Lindberg taking over for Johan Lindstrand. This one illustrates Lindberg’s talent for writing punk rock lyrics using the vocabulary of death metal; based on the rock ‘n’ roll leanings of the band’s previous records, you might assume “Under the Whip” is some Satanic S&M action, but the references to whips, sadistic bondage, and injected pain all serve to evoke a society locked in cycles of oppression and decline. (As I mentioned on the show, you can hear the album with Lindstrand on the mic as Crowned Unholy.)
SLAM! Another storyline from the Gimme run of Grave Convulsions was my journey from semi-ironic appreciation of slam metal to sincere love. Early on I’d play all kinds of meme slam and super ignorant shit (not to pat myself on the back here, but I tried not to play stuff with overtly misogynistic art or themes, which eliminates A LOT of slam releases), but eventually I found projects like The Heretic’s Fork that were using slam riffs to create infernally evil, ultra-brutal death metal, or Diphenylchloroarsine, who slow their slams down to the point that they resemble sludge metal. I followed Fat Tub of Lard Records on Instagram around the time I made this show and I’m here to say that is a risky follow if you browse your feed in public.
Oh yeah, the intro to this one says “even hip-hop” in the breakdown of what I play. There’s none on this episode, but stay tuned…
GRAVE CONVULSIONS episode 135
- Hirax – Demons—Evil Forces (Raging Violence)
- Hirax – Hate, Fear and Power (Hate, Fear and Power)
- Exploding Corpse Action – Robotic Surgery Malfunction (Inter-Dimensional Annihilation: Complete Transmissions 1995-1997)
- Melissa – Lara (II)
- Lucifuge – Enemies of the Sun (Monoliths of Wrath)
- Pest – The Crowning Horror (The Crowning Horror)
- Heretic Cult Redeemer – Ascending Perfection (Flagellum Universalis)
- Úzkost – For Property and Profit (For Property and Profit)
- Thou Shalt Suffer – The Goat of a Thousand Young (Into the Woods of Belial)
- Kaal Nagini – Lord of the Two Doors and the Seven Portals (Refracted Lights of a Blind God)
- Pustilence – Extirpated Conquest (Beliefs of Dead Stargazers and Soothsayers)
- Satyricon – Skyggedans (Dark Medieval Times)
- Darkthrone – Sacrificing to the God of Doubt (Sardonic Wrath)
- Unholy Craft – En Sjels Pinsle (Naar All Tid Er Omme)
- Throne of Katarsis – Mesterens Tilbakekomst (Ved Graven)
- The Crown – Under the Whip (Crowned in Terror)
- Valgrind – Millennium of Night Bliss (Millennium of Night Bliss)
- Vrenth – Curse of the Living and of the Dead (Succumb to Chaos)
- Anarchus – The Entity in the Room (Final Fall of the Gods)
- Blasphemy – Emperor of the Black Abyss (Desecration of Belo Horizonte—Live in Brazilian Ritual Fifth Attack)
- Fatuous Rump – The Airtight Bag in the Freezer (I Am at Your Disposal)
- Visceral Explosion – Unanesthetized Hypothalamotomy (Malevolent Dismemberment of Entire Putrefacted Gastrointestine)
- Nihilith – Black Sacrament (Tragedies of the Wicked)
- Vibrations Felt in the Void – Public Blasphemer (Public Blasphemer)
- Nightfell – Never Comes the Storm (Never Comes the Storm)
- Amebix – Drink and Be Merry (Arise!)
- Death SS – Schizophrenic (The Story of Death SS)