Milligram

This Is Class War (Traktor 7)
by Craig Regala

Jesus Penis!! This is what fucking killer punk rock is all about. Like the savage offspring of 1980 Black Flag, Negative Approach, and Fear (without the jokey shit) cut with a harsh, wavering, way-past-Monster-Magnet psych fuzz cackle, these guys throw a huge stone through the window between “stoner rock” and “punk rock.” Like Scissorfight, they take their source material and wring all the good shit out of it and add their own. No filler, all blitzkrieg head-slams, door cracks, man-goes-berserk tunes. Yes, these are actual songs. They jam’m full of high-tension wire leads pared down and amped up until it all just hums. As kickass as the great modern dirt masters like Zeke (R.I.P.), or Speedealer, but with no overt nods to anything as structured as those guys’ steelshod boogie/speed metal roots. This thing rose out of the primal muck. Harsher and noisier than the previous records, this bites down until its teeth click.

This is the re-ish of the initial pressing on Traktor7. And I quote: “The Small Stone version contains more than 30 minutes of additional music, including most of the outtakes, some remixes (drums and vox only, to illustrate that a majority of the distortion is on the drums) plus tracks of the ambient/noise (generated on a Mac G3/266, in Sound Edit) that used to be played before and during Milligram live sets. The band broke up in the summer of 2002.” After the ambient/noise tracks, there’s an absolutely beautiful 20 minutes consisting of a 12-minute over-modulated hum from guitar/bass (?) harkening to the first record or two from Earth, the worst-selling Sub Pop act (but ever highly-influential in doom/psych circles). This leads directly into a version of “My Private Altamont,” which they first recorded for their Black and White Rainbow EP. It’s a slow, boiling up-ratchet on slow, acid punks’ canker-ridden soul. The true raw opening where art bleeds out of way post-white boy Stooges blues.
(PO Box 020007 Detroit, MI 48202)