Welcome back to The Lazarus Pit, a look back at should-be classic records that don’t get nearly enough love. Today we’re looking at Gore Beyond Necropsy’s 1998 full-length debut, Noise-a-Go Go!! It was the Japanese band’s only album on Relapse, and on so many levels it marked the height of absurdity, maximum pain, maximum gain, maximum noisecore.
This was a time when high production values were hitting Relapse in particular, the label taking underground grind and power violence and giving it an exciting shine, either sonically or just visually (hello Nasum for the former, Benümb the latter), and then arrived Noise-a-Go Go!!, confounding us all, Relapse delivering this album with a mile-wide grin. The record features approximately 9 million songs in 11 minutes (fine, 59 in 25), the band having all the musical sophistication of early A.C. but somehow managing to make things even more gurgly and burgly, the spirit of goregrind delivered with the attack of noisecore and the production levels of my toilet that gets clogged up constantly.
Lyrically, it might actually be a sliver smarter than the outrageous song titles would have us believe. But I want to believe, believe in “Harshit Shock!” and believe in “Shitgobbling Hate Generation” and believe in “Garbage in Sewage.” I want to believe in Gore Beyond Necropsy when it feels like it’s hard to believe in much else; I want to put this on my headphones and have the blasting, grinding, harshit shock just drown out everything, the absurdity of it all nothing less than the perfect distillation of pure art.
Or, it’s just garbage that any group of six year olds could have accidentally created. Either way, man, I’m not sure intent matters—or maybe it completely matters—when the end result is something as unexpectedly transcendent as this record.
I recall an elder statesman of rock journalism asking me, probably around the time this record came out, how I enjoy grindcore so much, how I listen to it, how I process it. And I had a hard time explaining, saying it was about the full experience of listening and letting the music take you away, pure energy and feeling, just absolute satisfying immersion. I’ve had what could best be described as spiritual experiences listening to Anticapital, to Human 2.0, to Sounds of the Animal Kingdom. I’ve had what I guess could best be described as really good bowel movements listening to this record, but that’s not to minimize what’s happening here, and it’s also not a way to introduce an extended metaphor about using the toilet because as appropriate as that would be, man, I’ve got a hernia right now, so my lower torso region is just gross enough as is without dwelling on it too much.
So let’s move up, up to the brain, up to the question of how do humans enjoy music like this? Is it a joke? As much as it may seem like it, no, it’s not. Is it smart, post-modern commentary on something, anything? Again, when I’ve got a beer or two in me and I start thinking about noisecore, maybe, but generally speaking, nah. Is it just pure, animalistic enjoyment, with a smirk and a grin because good god we need to smirk and grin sometimes? Absolutely. And I can think of no record that I’ve stumbled across in this lifetime of listening to extreme music that captures that ludicrous power of noisecore and the energy of goregrind better than Noise-a-Go Go!!
I had this thought in 1998 but never willed it into my consciousness, it just sat and brewed in me, and now I realize it, all these sour decades later: it’s Gore Beyond Necropsy’s world, we just live in it. Yes, it’s true, it’s the gore gore goreality, it’s a harshit shock, but today, I throw my arms up in defeat, I admit it. With tears of joy in my eyes, with fists held high, with a hernia gurgling around inside me, with the sound of toilet noisecore raging in my headphones, faster, faster, faster. This is all I know, and it’s taken me a lifetime to get here, but I’m happy to report back to you, and I repeat: It’s Gore Beyond Necropsy’s world. We just live in it.
