trash

Fuzz garage trash rock's best-kept secret is a multi-headed, twin-drummer-driven thing that eats the frail and aged and comes from Switzerland. The aptly-named Monsters have three albums ("Birds Eat Martians", "I See Dead People" and "Youth Against Nature") to their credit, and this compilation on Australia's busiest underground label compiles their best, adding a couple of exclusive bonus recordings.

Too much Lux is never enough for some people and Finnish band The Country Dark are clearly lifetime members of the Interior Fan Club. This is Album Number Three for the five-piece from Somewhere Near The Arctic Circle (where the fuck is Kuopio anyway?) and just like the output of The Cramps, it’s laced with humour dark enough to eclipse the sun during the depths of a Scandinavian winter.

The Country Dark play rockabilly-trash rock with lashings of twang. Appearances count for something when you mine that groove and from the cover picture of a hand with a dismembered pinkie to song titles like “Useless (Like Tits On A Boar)” and “Two Dicks In One Hole” (it’s a detective story, you porn fiend) it’s evident what you’re getting.

This pigeon pairing of albums by Switzerland's finest garage trash band The Monsters isn't so much chalk and cheese as the musical equivalents of festering offal and last week's maggot-ridden steak. They're offensive, distorted representations of rockabilly and its variants, chopped up and put through an industrial shredder. Which is exactly why you need them.

Whoever took the danger out of rock and roll forgot to tell The Monsters. Thank fuck for that. "Masks" is the "lost album" from 1989 andthe product of The Monsters going into a studio for the first time. Long-gone label Record Junkie Records (an off-shoot of the shop where Beat-Man worked) saw fit to issue it and it's been long out-of-print.

Monsters leader and Voodoo Rhythm label owner Beat-Man thinks "Masks" is embarrassing - although not to the point that he stopped short of re-issuing it. He need not recoil from the amateurish nature of parts of this record. It's raw, lyrically perplexing and a lot of fun, recorded to two-inch tape in the most basic of studios with needles bordering on the red.

Everybody into this sort off music raves about The Mummies and fair enough, but for mine The Monsters are better. I mean, there's nothing on "Masks" likely to surprise, but the guitar sounds grates in all the the right places and the drummer in this line-up had a bit of swing. Beat-Man's vocal swings from angry yelp to tonsil-shredding croak. Plus, they massacre "Wild Thing" in a way The Troggs could only dream of.

"The Hunch" (named after one of Hasil Adkins' nom de plumes) dates from 1992, is half-studio and half-live and much better recorded. There's a bunch of covers sprinkled throughout and one of the cuts ("The Creature Form The Black Lagoon") made it onto Dionysus Records. It's proof garage punk doesn't have to sound like abysmal shit to stay true to its roots.

Hands up who wasn't a Cramps fan in the late '80s and early '90s? This version of "Drug Train" is pretty great. "Day Of The Triffids" and "Drag Is Back" have their rockabilly roots on show and pulse with energy.

The live side picks up a couple of songs from the first record ("Teenage Werewold", Wild Thing") and prominent covers ("Be Bop A Lula" and "The Witch"), and is a little light on the bottom end but who's going to pick nits? My guess is they ran out of studio time or got bored. This stuff should never be too polished.

You’re Class, I’m Trash – The Monsters (Voodoo Rhythm)

Two weeks to write, a fortnight to record - cynics would doubt both claims - and the eighth album from these Swiss lunatics is testament to what you can achieve when you set out to annoy the living shit out of audiences.

“You’re Class, I’m Trash” is unadulterated fuzz guitar abrasion, a boil on the arse of commercially safe and bland music, with occasional diversions into sonic weirdness. And it sounds fucking great.

What a strange, fuzz-drenched trip this boy-girl duo from Naples in Italy take us on. The Devils are as basic as rock and roll comes, playing music that’s stripped barer than a Christmas leg ham in a tankful of piranha.

The story goes that Voodoo Rhythm honcho Beat-Man was in the same French studio as The Devils when Jim Diamond was recording this, their first album. It was love at first listen and Beat-Man had a pen and a contract in their hands quicker than you can say: “Fuck me, that shit sounds distorted.”

One of Europe's top trash garage and go-go weekenders, The Wild Weekend, is coming to Australia for the first time. The three days of monstrous mayhem will run in Melbourne. From December 31 to January 2.

Presented by The Luwow & Zombie Zoo Productions, The Wild Weekend has been held in Europe since 1998. This insane weekender has blazed a trail for other trash festivals across the world and brings a wealth of entertainment experience and an insane level of production detail to a crazy event.

Zombie Zoo Productions’ Skipper Josh and Babz Collins present a weekend of retro fuzz, crazy Ccstume parties and vinyl throwbacks, set in various venues in the Melbourne CBD. The Wild Weekend features top retro trash bands, gruesome go-go goddesses, deviant decor, dastardly disc-jocks, crazy cabaret, mad movies, a boat cruise to nowhere and the Surf-fink Swap-meet.

Full details and tickets are here. Here’s the band line-up: