Plague of Strength

Music

Malice
Malice is a tiny band onto which I was turned by randomly clicking links, as I recall.  After posting about the song I heard on Facebook, the brutal-as-fuck chick singer of the band let me know they dropped an even harder track with even more brutal vocals.  I have never jocked a band because of their novelty and usually disregard chick fronted bands due to the fact that they usually use effects on their vocals and rely far too heavily on sex appeal to draw fans.  Malice, however, is just about being harder than a gay man’s cock at a Liberace look-alike convention, and I get the sense their singer is likely the toughest person in the band.  Whatever the case, if you like old Hatebreed, Misura (they had their album on Bandcamp for free, so fuck it, here it is, and check out Icarus first), or old school New Jersey toughguy/beatdown hardcore, you’re gonna love this shit.  Aussie broads bring it hard.

I’ve got Candice from Malice keeping me updated on their merch and EP if you love this shit half as much as I do.  In the meantime, here’s their old song again in case you want something awesome for your lifting mix.  Support your scene, motherfuckers!

At the end of what was perhaps the most pants-shittingly insane roundtable discussion I’ve ever heard in one of the coolest used bookstores I’ve ever visited, one of the presenters mentioned he was in a band whose EP and split with Vow of Hatred (who I mentioned here) I’d just purchased off Amazon.  I then leapt out of the stacks pretty much screaming about how much I loved the band (I’d had a lot of Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Genius that day), and after everyone calmed down and realized I wasn’t about to beat the dude to death for some reason, I bought him a couple of shots at the bar next door.  There, we decided to cross promote brands, and he subsequently gave me their full discography for your beatdown satisfaction.

If I had to label SCF’s sound, I’d say they’re metallic hardcore in the vein of late 1990’s Victory bands- a mix of No Innocent Victim and In Cold Blood (both of whom you should check out, actually).  Gang vocals, tough guy lyrics, two step parts, and breakdowns are all there in abundance… which means they fucking rule. Also in the discography I posted for you guys is SCF’s split with Vow of Hatred, so their epically tough beatdown is in there for your listening pleasure as well.

New Jersey Bloodline
This band is one about whom you’ve never heard, but definitely should have.  A mainstay in every badass East Coast show in the late 1990s, NJ Bloodline was at the forefront of the toughguy hardcore scene in its heydey.  I’ve been keeping in contact with the the guy who wrote all of NJ Bloodline’s stuff, Frank Gallo, who in spite of his hardon for Mike Mentzer and HIT is actually cool as fuck.  When I told him none of the kids in the scene or in lifting seemed to have heard of his band in spite of the fact that their song Fist has accompanied the first song they ever wrote, Blackout #2, on my lifting playlists since the early 2000s, he was horrified.  Thus, we agreed to put their entire discography online for everyone to enjoy, because this shit goes hard as fuck and is next to impossible to find anywhere.

Years Since the Storm
For some reason, I have a feeling that posting this band is going to hurt some butts, as I know there’s no shortage of metal snobbery in my readership.  For those of you who think that black metal’s worth playing, just go ahead and skip this band, as you’ll likely start screaming “mallcore” the second you realize this band has groove parts.  For the rest of you, you need Years Since the Storm in your playlist- they’re both brutal and groovy, and are basically what a band like Soulfly might have become ten years after producing Primitive if they’d not become the Soulfly they are today.  Look past their propensity for taking zany photos and just enjoy the fact that a brutal band can actually settle into a fucking groove that will get your head nodding.

Plan To Prosper
I would be remiss to post about music these days without dropping a badass sludgewave band on your faces.  Plan To Prosper is djent sludgewave, with enough groove that when the breakdowns hit you’re already nodding.  There’s not a band I can really liken these guys to, which is good, because sludgewave has a tendency to all sound the fucking same.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I love sludgewave more than a fat broad loves Twinkies, but it’s always nice to get a little variety even within the boundaries of a specific thing- you don’t always order the same toppings on your pizza from the same pizza place, do you?  Nah.  And just like you occasionally have to flip a bitch onto her back with her head off the bed and ram your cock down her through until you can feel her duodenum tickling the tip of your dick, sometimes you want a bit of weirdness to go with your brutality in sludgewave.  Chugxcore aleady posted their stuff for download, so hopefully they won’t mind me posting it as well- just remember to snag some merch if you ever get the chance.

Books

Go Kill Crazy
This was my first introduction to horror novelist Brian Smith, and the book was actually purchased for me by a badass redditor with a penchant for posting booty pics but who seems to have svunted, but shouts out to her and her booty anyway.  Go Kill Crazy has nothing whatsoever to do with Reddit or the internet in general, and is instead a sort of Natural Born Killers on meth and steroids, wherein three bisexual psychopaths snort a ton of blow, fuck everyone within arm’s reach, and then randomly torture and murder people for no reason.  There’s a subplot involving a Jim Jones-esque cult, and eventually the two juggernauts of insanity go head to head, with the mob assisting on the psychopath’s behalf.  It’s gory, jammed with unnecessary amounts of drug use, graphic depictions of torture and dismemberment, and gratuitous sex.  In short, it’s everything you could possibly want in a book.  Snag it on the Amazons if your interest is as piqued as mine.

This Dark Earth
I just gave this book away on the Chaos and Pain Facebook (might want to like that shit if you haven’t already) because it was the best book I’ve read in a hell of a long time and I wanted to give it to a good home.  John Horner Jacobs brought the fucking ruckus in This Dark Earth, a post-apocalyptic zombie novel in which shit goes down the way it actually should, the protagonists are intelligent, and Jacobs ACTUALLY HAS PEOPLE ARMOR UP.  Without question, the only zombie novel worth reading outside of Last Man On Earth unless you’re a fucking masochist with a fourth grade reading comprehension level and a burning desire to limit your intellect by reading the produce of the minds of halfwits.  I bought this on a whim on Amazon, and that shit paid off in spades.

Movies
Quite frankly, I’ve not been overawed with a lot of movies of late, and let me tell you, I watch a lot of bullshit to separate the mounting piles of chaff from the wheat.  What follows is the best of a mountain of movies I’ve watched in the last couple of months, and all three of them made for a decent way to waste a couple of hours.

The Family
If I’m honest, I’m not a fan of De Niro or Michelle Pfeiffer, really.  After the Meet the Parents series, all I wanted out of De Niro was the man’s funeral, and Pfeiffer has never really impressed me, though she has aged better than anything in history but fine wine and Sophia Lauren.  The Family, however, was a fucking triumph over their collective desire to produce family-friendly dreck.  In it, DeNiro and the rest are a family in witness protection, sent to France because the entire American mob wants them dead, and they keep killing random people in the towns to which they’re relocated.  After tearing through a small French town’s asshole like it was made of tissue paper, The Family gets discovered and all hell breaks loose as the mob sends hit men to whack them.  Think a teenage blond is worth fucking with?  This movie might make you think again.

Old Boy
For those of you who’ve seen the original, you might scoff at the idea that the remake could be better.  I, however, will contend just that- Josh Brolin took the source material and made it even harder.  This is just as dark as the original but with a better hammer scene and just as much fucked-upedness.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the clip below.  You need to see this.

Raid 2: Berendal
Hardest movie ever.  I shouldn’t even need to explain this movie, so I’m not- just watch it, because it’s fucking amazing.  There’s no real romantic subplot, and nothing in the movie other than murder, by the bushel.