RAW CHILD will be released in November 2007CE on Animal Disguise.

Side One

1. Walking Through The Gates Of Hell (18.59)

Side Two

1. Fuck This Place (9.35)
2. Secession ’61 (8.12)

Walk Like An Abortion

Imagine buying a plot of land high up in the sweaty fastness of Crete, hiring dodgy local builders and asking them to design as well as construct your dream home, then arriving to discover that the finished article is just a pre-fab bunker of boulders and aggregate based on a WW2 pill-box, with concrete foundations 15 times thicker than agreed upon. It ain’t what you expected, but dammit the thing sure won’t ever leak! With that in mind, yooz now approaching Cadaver In Drag’s mutoid pleasure zones, i.e.: these Icebergers are 7/8 below the surface with barely 1/8th left for the creamy melodic topping. Primitive as Khanate covering Flipper’s ‘Sex Bomb (My Baby)’, as brutally simple and as monolithic as Les Rallizes Denudés’ ‘The Last One’ (choose your version for comparison as there’s about 50,000 different ones), and as relentless and shark-eyed as the current Wolf Eyes line-up playing Brain Donor’s vile and stentorian ‘Just About Now’, RAW CHILD is possessed of the kind of effortless rock’n’roll spirit that most musicians only glimpse in the opening moments of each band rehearsal, plugging in without tuning, turning the dials way up, then delivering brief but incandescent blasts of un-self-conscious Mung Worship before some hung up turd soon-to-be-ex-band member screams: “Enough! Let’s do something proper now”. Luckily for us, there ain’t no such anal retentive type within 12 miles of Cadaver In Drag’s practise room; shit, these shirefolk wouldn’t even let that bastard chauffeur ‘em there. Instead, these munters is rampant, wanton, and each one wholly determined to out-gun the others on the super highway to Uber Cuntedness, i.e.: Josh Lay plays the drums like he’s only got cymbals, anguished guitarist Ben Allen plays like a thalidomide victim wielding a kid’s Strat copy, and bass player Jason Schuler seems to take his vocal inspiration from legendary English actor Jack Hawkins AFTER they removed his larynx! To top it all off, Schuler’s colossal bass is as loud as Om’s Al Cisneros and even more basic… which is precisely what makes RAW CHILD such a result for rock’n’roll… or rather OUR rock’n’roll. This ain’t Noise Rock, Kiddy-Kats, no more than Khanate is Noise Rock. Instead, the music of Kentucky’s Cadaver In Drag should become part of the Fundamental Absolute Survival Kit essential for all Truth Seekers determined to quit the 20th century, kiss their sorry nostalgic asses bye-bye and strike out into genuinely unknown territory. Cadaver In Drag is heathen, almightily heaving, and it dares to stare Oblivion in the phizzog without ever congealing to a halt. Better still, as month-after-month I’m sent umpteen re-hashes of new bands that claim to be Blue Cheer-influenced but sound like Deep ‘fucking’ Purple, it’s wonderfuel to my aching heart to report that these Feist Meisters’ o’fishul day-boo is quite thee most listenable turgidness I’ve been waylaid by in what seems an age. Cadaver In Drag. Good name, too. Reminds me of Cherie Blair.

RAW CHILD commences with ‘Walking Through the Gates of Hell’, a side-long beyond-basic Tiger B. Smith glitterstompf almost 20 minutes in length, and so musically retarded that almost outmanoeuvres Les Rallizes Denudés’ BLIND BABY HAS ITS MOTHER’S EYES title track for sheer dogged insensibility. And despite these opening bars sounding more or less like any Thrones/Khanate-influenced combo, Cadaver In Drag have soon set out their stall in an entirely different part of the carnival. For ‘Walking Through the Gates of Hell’ is entirely its own trip, being replete with far-too-quiet scratchy up-the-neck Neon Boys/SPIRAL SCRATCH-style guitar and those aforementioned “vocals”, both unlikely elements (in this context at least) that, despite their entirely non-Garage Rock setting, still re-direct our melting plastic brains towards the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’. But what’s it all about? I mean is this just pure nihilism or is there a point to be made? Or does it even matter so long as they help clear our psychic custard, you know, help us harvest a vision or three by burning off a few thousand unnecessary brain cells. I’ve checked out this lot on Youtube and their audience is almost as united in its head-banging as any TV footage I’ve seen of Mosques full o’Musselmen banging off to the sacred Kerrang. So, whilst (according to the press release at least) Cadaver In Drag’s lyrics ‘weave a tale of misanthropy and disgust’, the reality is you cain’t make out a single word because the aforementioned ‘vocals’ are the sound of some poor sod being simultaneously wet-shaved AND garrotted. Nice. My own lyrics would probably become equally misanthropic if I were being similarly ill-served by humanity. Now, garage nutters out there among ye will most serpently have heard this Man Mountain vocal style before, fronting the Novas’ humungous 1965 wail-o-thon ‘The Crusher’. Suffice to say, adding this unlikely curveball to their (an)aesthetic casts the musical net of Cadaver In Drag way out of the heavy metal/stoner rock loop, dumping them instead into the kind of brutally brain dead hinterland inhabited only by those aforementioned sonic barm cakes (oh, and maybe Peter Hammill’s hewn-out-of-millstone grit 1978 live double-LP VITAL credited to Van Der Graaf). But no fuckers on earth this side of Rallizes have, thus far at least, managed to reduce their rock’n’roll to such a potent coma/fundamentalist broth as Cadaver In Drag achieves on side one of RAW CHILD. Indeed, even these guys themselves suspect they’ll need maybe one more string to their bow in order to complete the whole LP. And so side two slightly cops out by showcasing not one further 20-minute behemoth but, instead, brings forth two sub-10-minute tracks AND with an invited guest synthesizer player, too! Luckily for us, however, this synthesizer player is as much of a largactyl addict as mine hosts, choosing to dollop wayward Sikorsky Sea King hellychopper blades full of rudderless juddering across… well, more of the self-same bile that infected side one only speeded up a bit, i.e.: the Crash Bash Crash has, by side two, mutated/devolved into Crash Bang Wallop. Progressive? Nah, not quite. Now, as Cadaver In Drag generally inhabit a pretty damned parochial cassette’n’tour CD‑R culture down there in Kin-TUH-kee, I ain’t gotta clue what their previous releases sounded like. But if these druids is as true to their metaphor as I suspect they must be, every single rarity listed below is essential and I’m headed for eBay as we speak (hey, I’m two hours ahead of you so don’t even bother!). Then again, with such truth seekers in our midst, I may just hang fire on the paranoia and wait a coupla months for the next release to turn up, because – unless the sun has fallen out of the sky – the three gentlemen of Cadaver In Drag are entirely committed to… well, y’know, getting committed, white threads’n’everything, just so they can take advantage of the free Electro-Shock Treatment they’ze guaranteed to be eligible for. Stretchers please, nurse. Now wash them up and get them ready.