clickbliss

Let’s get transgressive.

By: Omar (@siegarettes)

Sometimes you don’t want the saccharine candy sweetness of modern music, or the polish of AAA videogames, filed so smoothly no edge is showing. Sometimes you need something more immediate, something raw. With that I bring you this week’s recommendations: psychedelic noise rock recorded in the pit of gods’ stomachs and some fuck you punk deathmatch. 

Les Rallizes Denudes

There’s really not a single album I can recommend from Les Ralllizes Denudes. That’s because their discography bounces all over the place, with various versions of songs with a variety of alternate titles sometimes appearing on each compilation. There aren’t many proper Les Rallizes Denudes studio albums, you see.

In fact there isn’t much on the group at all. The most info you’ll find is their description on the iTunes store of all places. Born of the 60’s student group and aligned with radical communist politics, the group was obscure even in Japan, their discography is impossible to track and made almost entirely of bootlegs, and there’s a shroud of secrecy to the whole group.. One member was even arrested for being involved with a hijacking of a plane. 

As for the music, well it’s a sonic wall of wailing guitar feedback, trance-like slips into repeating chord progressions and distorted vocals. Some say they’re like the Japanese Velvet Underground, but I’d say that’s doing them a disservice. If you can find it their ‘77 Live disc comes recommended. Otherwise you can find Heavier Than A Death in the Family and Blind Baby Has Its Mother’s Eyes on iTunes or Amazon, iTunes being the only storefront that seems to have digital versions of it at all. 

XEvil

XEvil is an early 2000’s deathmatch game that I played as a kid off a CD titled 300 Arcade Games, back when you were apparently allowed to sell shareware and freeware games off a CD. Not the registered versions either. Hey, the net wasn’t what it was today, ok?

XEvil is graphically all over the place, the physics are buggy as hell, and the music can only be described as “spookytown MIDIs”. XEvil is also fun as sin. Which is good, because the game is all about sin. Your damned soul is sent to hell and made to fight in a tournament to see how you place in hell. From here you’ll control the bodies of various sinners that act as your character class. Ninjas, GI Joe style American heroes, robotic walkers and Xenomorph ripoffs are all among the cast. There’s also a LEGO made deathmachine built by a M.I.T. student using a backpack flying machine. (As an aside, the character profiles are good humorous fun). 

The walls are graffitied with messages telling you to do everything from “not eat your vegetables” to “strangle your dog”. It’s seems to be born of the same response to the “games are bad for you” outrage that inspired games like Derek Yu's I’M O.K. Every few levels of the campaign you’ll come across stages such as CLUB THE BABY SEALS that will declare “YOU LET TOO MANY OF THE FAT BASTARDS GET AWAY” if you fail. Powerups take the form of drugs (which you can overdose and die from), and picking up SINs allow you to sell your soul for various superpowers. 

After it’s all over you’ll get a ranking delivered to you, anything from “Hell’s Semen Taster” to “Hell’s Gatekeeper” or some equally crass nonsense. It’s stuff straight out of the margins of some deranged teenager’s notebook (in reality developed by an MIT student). 

Somehow my ten year old self managed to play hours of this while my mother snatched away the copy of Soldier of Fortune 2 my brothers had borrowed in horror. Obviously it’s made me a murderous psychopath unable to function in polite society. Videogames are dangerous, I tell you.

*Download Xevil here and use it to start killing your friends, or just some baby seals.