Search - Merzbow :: Merzbox Sampler

Get bogged down in the Swamp!

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 11/08/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Man, you don't need to listen to the rest of this disc. Buy it solely to have "Swamp Metal," the highlight of Merzbow's "industrial metal" period (1984... long before the term "industrial metal" was even coined). Screeching looped guitars, banging metallic junk, violent attacks of static wash. It's everything a Merzbow track should be, and it may well be the single most fully realized piece of sonic violence ever committed to disc. You NEED this (especially if you've heard the gorgeous source loops for the track that are on the RRR label's _Loop Panic Limited_ release). Okay, now that that's out of the way, the rest of this is pretty nifty, too. It's hard to pack close to twenty years of Merzlicious material into sixty-eight minutes, and like most compilations of its type, it's not a consistent album sonically (this one more so, as Merzbow has remade his own image so many times over the years). But as a teaser to get you to run out and spend the half a grand it'll cost you, it's as good as Extreme could have done."