Cancerslug

From DriftingOrpheus 10/12/2022 18:06

From Pure Hate to Acquiescence: The Wicked Vitality and Creeping Necrosis of Cancerslug

Part II: The Creeping Necrosis

"I have hunted flocks of angels
I have snorted all their dust
And the world kept spinning on
I'm here trapped in eternal darkness
Pushed aside by man
And I know the sun will never shine over me"

-The Sun Will Never Shine


DECAY, verb, [Fr. dechoir, from Latin de and cado, to fall, or decedo.]

1. To become weaker; to fail; as, our strength decays, or hopes decay


Cancerslug was native to 1999, tailored to an era where communication and technology was markedly underdeveloped as compared to the advancements of the 2010s. It was in the last dying embers of the 20th Century where the titanic resiliency that encompassed the band's distinctive spirit was forged. An artist like that cannot exist as freely within the modern musical landscape, just as a large fish in a small tank isn't free to explore and expand amidst an outside world consisting of endlessly observant eyes. When one starts to analyze Cancerslug's post-2009 output, they get reminded of a line from an obscure tune. In 'Pixie Anne', Alex Story warns his muse, "Pixi Anne don't you let this world use you like it used me," but this advice is ignored by its creator.

From DriftingOrpheus 09/05/2022 14:01

From Pure Hate to Acquiescence: The Wicked Vitality and Creeping Necrosis of Cancerslug

Part I: The Wicked Vitality

"We are lost
They have taken everything
We have thrown ourselves away
We won't see another day
As we cross a thousand eons
Just a few more steps to go
Our realities converge inside of thoughts they could never know
On endless winter"

-Endless

These are lyrics, not of a song, but of a spiritual force of nature. This entity once stalked the vast, uncolored plains of the turn of the century internet as a primal beast, one more suited to the less connected web, which rewarded those who were interested in seeking rather than being shown. This less transparent, digital landscape was where Cancerslug was brought to violent, demonic life, in a chalice of blood in 1999. They came into a realm in which tired shock rock had seen its day and the Horror Punk scene was in a desperate cycle of repackaging and unconscious retread. They awoke, seemingly from an ancient slumber, not to bind the ligaments of the genre's past with its future, but rather, to burn the diseased residue to the ground and build a cathedral of malice on the bones. This soon to be realized warpath, was a labor of love coiled within a vile sonic package, required scarce material motivation and produced some of the most arresting, serrated, and hauntingly beautiful music of the 21st Century.

"And we have eaten the flesh
Of the older gods that we remind you of
And we have taken all that they had left to give"

-Of the Black

Cancerslug's swift evisceration of its contemporaries was noted from the onset with 1999's 'Whore'. On the band's unabashedly southern, nihilistic debut, horror film iconography can be found within its unnerving stanzas, but featuring a stark contrast which effectively ostracized them from the myopic crop of tired acts in makeup. This distinction had less to do with the surface value of merely employing horror-centric subject matter and more with using it as a conduit to signpost a fathomless, insidious, unholy evil lurking beneath the topsoil. This unnervingly blurred the line between merely being an act inspired by make-believe devilry and, perhaps, being the real thing off the stage. For instance, opening track 'The Raven' seems to suggest a relation to Poe's timeless tale, but the listener is immediately resituated with the opening line, "Taking baby out for a treat tonight, fuck her up the ass with a switchblade knife; I don't know if its love but it's alright." Combine this grey sheen that permeates as the album unfurls and the lack of information regarding the band at large, and you have a recipe for a phenomenon and a renaissance in dark music.

"I am no savior
just an injured beast
twice as deadly now
my claws are unleashed."

-Empty Eyes

After absorbing 'Whore's' 18 tracks, it becomes clear that a singular, artistic vision is pouring coal into the engine of Cancerslug's creative machine. Concisely named and performed tracks such as Greed, Nothing, Succubus and Remnants represent a cold, calculated societal abnegation which never ceases to highlight the repugnance of the human race. It's clear that these are hymns of rebellion, but on unique, personal terms. These are conditions driven home with war hammers, put into action by way of primordial incantation and dispersed with vitriol onto a target audience and no one else. In a bevy of ways, Alex Story is Cancerslug and vice versa. He has been the figurehead and lone constant of the outfit for the entirety of its 20-year lifespan. His collaborators inhale and digest his uncompromising visions, resulting in slices of a discography that shapeshift sonically but retain the same black-hearted gravitas (at least in the early years). The band's genesis is catalyzed by a desire to simply exist in an increasingly vanilla musical landscape and exude as much wanton destruction in their swampy, stomping grounds of Decatur, Alabama. So, naturally the band's music was released digitally, free of charge, to those game enough to listen and others who identified with the band's dissatisfaction with societal structure and harbored a similar disgust for homosapiens in general. So, the band began work on their second creation with an entry already under their belt and undeniably shrouded in anonymity. It was as almost if the band preferred to be a shadow, a perfect ecosystem for what would certainly become the finest period of their career.

"This copulation brings the darkness of a thousand dreams
As a piece of it now grows inside of you
More of an animal than man
A child of the storm
A creature born to plague this land"

-New Death Song

'In the Dumpster, Behind the Clinic' (2000) represented the shape of the band as Y2K arrived. The album's production is notably hazier, less silvery than the steel-stringed 'Whore' the year before. The muddied biosphere continued to furnish an image of a band that didn't exist in the flesh, very reminiscent of the Spectre of Newby Church (which dons the cover), and required more audience projection to piece together their visage. The songwriting hasn't lost its venom either as swaying anthems like 'Fetus Milkshake' and 'Death's Call' are unveiled in their elemental form. The latter, a fatalistic epitaph on expiration which congeals into a quasi-manifesto for the group itself, proclaims, "Everywhere I go, death comes calling to take me home." It's a mission statement that could be affixed to any tragic horror film monster, but more astutely represents a earthly tragedy with tactile consequences. The album served as a formidable bridge which lit the path to the band's next landmark in 2002.

"Staring her pain in the face, and accepting its grace
She will call it by name, while embracing it."
-My Black Angel

Some would say, 'Alabama Bloodbath' features a collection of the group's most revered works in their most identifiable form. It's important to note that Cancerslug often reimagines, repackages and re-records material to fit the shape of the band at the present time. The ethos they carried in 2002 may be one of their most idiosyncratic incarnations, finding the perfect balance between cryptic misanthropy and unabashed brutality. Across the 18 tracks, the drums of Mike Horgan establish a foundation which never neuters the anthemic, swaying and even catchy nature of the ghastly passages. On '3 Days She Bled, 3 Days I Bathed', Story laments, "I'm not looking for for answers; it's not answers that I need; Just a stupid bitch to fuck who has a few days to bleed." This is an artist not concerned with listenership, judgment or consequences and it manages to go over as something wholly refreshing in its relentlessness. During this time, the band never ceased to be uncloaked reflection of their callous, sonic centerpieces,; untamed and unyielding. This channeled acidity would reach it's boiling point as Cancerslug would produce their second record of 2002 and their first, undisputed masterpiece.

"We will bathe in the blood of your children
who are fresh from the baths of their sins
and our kind will rule the night forever more."

-Demighoul

2002's 'Soulless' represents an artist at the peak of their powers from a songwriting perspective. Up until this point, Story's lyricism was unapologetically blunt, still insightful and astutely tailored to the timbre of previous records. However, the band cultivated their aggression and drew upon an eminently mystical, occult kind of depravity for 'Soulless'. This shape ushered in the finest era of Cancerslug, spanning from 2002 to 2007, and features boundless examples of the act's effortless ability to juxtapose visions of beauty and bloodcurdling horror. On the title track, the band wastes no time establishing an occult subtext within their haunting prose. Story growls, "She beast of Pagan lust, awaits the blood to covet us; I know she's not afraid to slice my flesh and bind the trust." Immediately gone is the sheen of any preconceived notions that this is an artist which masquerades. The imagery is heightened on sixth track 'Cycle of the Wolf' as guitars bay, "The hunger burning in these veins to feed, to fuck, to live unchained, to bend the back and walk the earth on all fours." These nightmares are always to be taken at face value and Cancerslug refuses to add a wink or a nod to settle it's audience. It's raw, unfettered and leaves a bloody corpse behind, once again signaling a band who embodies a mythological demon rather than flesh and blood performers. The best summation of the seamless synthesis of real-world bodily dream and occult mysticism comes from eighth track, 'Demighoul'. "Just fucking show your face and I will lay you on a broken altar to be torn apart; you are the angel fallen", warns Story, as Cancerslug's repugnance has exceeded any previously established thresholds. 'Soulless' stands among the giants of the genre and in some ways, occupies it's own mountaintop.

"So I'll kill off anything I see
Cannot save your life
Not a savoir I
When I live a life of alibis"

-Anything

For a band that was sporting an impenetrable sheen of abominable brilliance, a flawless, complimentary double- feature of records in 2003 was child's play. However, both entries are motivated by two distinctly divergent visions. Where 'The Beast with Two Backs' embraces the brute force, southern, break-neck aggression of albums like 'Whore' and 'Alabama Bloodbath', 'Curse Arcanum' prioritizes eidolic songwriting paired with satanic imagery. Both are equally scintillating, once again displaying the flexibility and infallibility of the force of Cancerslug's creative mudslide. 'The Beast with Two Back's' tangible, weighted emphasis on percussion injects shadowy parables like 'Of the Night' and 'All Hallows' Eve' with a substantial amount of toxin. "Will watch them burn like candles to light up the unknown, relax before beginning, breathe in deeply the cold," Story declares on 'All Hallows' Eve', as his vocals hover above the instrumentation with omniscient menace. The LP is Cancerslug at its most distilled and concentrated. The result is another aberrant masterpiece. 'Curse Arcanum', conversely, is bathed in mystique, never fully orating it's ungodliness. If 'The Beast with Two Backs' was a hyper-naturalistic surveillance tape, then "Curse Arcanum' could only resemble a twice-hexed, gothic nightmare come to life more concerned with ritualistically sacrificing virgins rather than solely expunging them. The album, unusually, features mostly uncharted material, all perfectly cast as accursed hymns sung at a 17th century witch burnings. There's a waterlogged heaviness to the production, lending credence to an aura of ancient evil, which hangs like a thick vapor in the air. By accentuating reverberation and turbid acoustics, 'Curse Arcanum' feels more thematically cohesive than previous LP outings. On 'The Final Harvest', Story prophesizes, "Now like instinct I harvest the land; Death within me, your life in my hands; All of this worlds filth is drenched in your blood as it rains down around me." This may be the band's most crystalline example of chromatic imagery, sharing DNA with countless tales of heinous folklore with Alex Story as its dark evangelist, and it's without question, one of the band's most overlooked.

"I am the teeth of the machine
Sent here to grind your world clean
I've seen so many dead, but I can have no sympathy."

-So Many Dead

The precedent had been set with contemporaries left in the dust, Cancerslug had reached a creative zenith that most artists can only dream of. The only thing left to do was to release a magnum opus which would forever crystalize them as sovereigns of their own idiopathic genre and would torch everything that came before. In 2004, this pyre took two forms, with 'Battle Hymns Part I and II' containing many of the finest configurations of Cancerslug's prior work. The pair of albums were not intended to traverse new terrain, but rather, to hone, sharpen and strop Cancerslug's revulsion to a capstone and provide a plain of existence where the band could domineer at their most Mephistophelian. Upon shaking hands with 'Battle Hymns I', one can quickly surmise that this is the band's rawest outing yet. This lack of pasteurization, however, doesn't lend itself to scarcity of refinement. These are intended, tumultuous production choices, which effectively makes the recordings sound like lost media, undoctored 911 calls and demonic chants heard through the walls of hexed abodes. Guitar strings screech, tracks refuse to omit lead ins and chatter and, above all, traditional imperfections and sonic impurities are encouraged. This breeds a hazy cocktail of maximalist noise where no airspace is allowed to remain undefiled. Sonically, its an ungodly deluge of aggression. However, when one regards the implementation of metaphorical purpose, its a masterfully filtered declaration of macabre animus. Take track five, 'Endless', for example, which arrives with guitar resemblant of a chainsaw devouring the airspace as Story's ethereal poetry, which was stated at the start of this examination, resonates deep within the deepest recesses of human wickedness. Final track, 'The Beyond', no doubt takes inspiration from Lucio Fulci's 1981 film. It commences with what sounds like an 80-year old vehicle starting, as reverbed guitar rings and Story's choruses sound like a spectral voice carried on the wind, pleading for salvation. "There's a reason that you live, there's a reason that'll you'll die, there's a reason if I snap your pretty neck in the night," Story wails. 'Battle Hymns I' remains one of the band's most united statements, even if it is a "demo" record. It effortlessly incorporates elements of No-Wave and sonic maximalism while never ceasing to be rife with blackened earworms doled out lurid, breakneck canisters. Still, the blood-soaked oil painting of 'Battle Hymns' was still incomplete.

"Suspend the circles that form around my life
They serve to guide me around what I despise
I have only this shell of a life
Sometimes I feel like the god of the knife"

-Circles

'Battle Hymns II' is the less-benevolent, more-scornful, dastardly twin of its predecessor. The album's production picks up where it left of, continuing it's crimson, dissonant rampage. Now, Story's vocal performances have become even more apparitional, adorned with even greater reverb and hovering over the music like an unseen force or more akin to 1000 collective voices; a choir of the undead. 'In the Graveyard', track five, is notably prophetic and a worthy exemplar for Cancerslug's thematic frame of mind. "And any thoughts of preservation are left there to bleed, torn asunder from creation, nothing left but our deeds." Story howls. These morbid anecdotes are penned with such cinematic vividity that one could mistake Story for a reincarnated, blackened priest, further fanning the flames of the legend of early Cancerslug, a multi-pronged being which functioned as something far more sinister than a horror-infused musical outfit. The passion which spawns from within the odious parables is so concentrated that it seems to percolate from its source and chill the air around the listener. It doesn't seem to be a byproduct of human hands or the audible fruits of man-made objects. To call it a devilish rallying cry would be a deplorable grievance. 'Fetus Milkshake', track fifteen, makes more use of Story's "beyond-the-grave" serenading, as he details a coat hanger abortion while declaring "Stillborn babies know how to hold their mothers tight". The track may be the most indicative of the sound of 'Battle Hymns II' with guitar throbs which slice through the ambience and cymbal crashes which envelope the entirety of the soundscape. Simply put, it's a masterpiece, one achieved without even trying and no doubt devoid of a clear recollection of the accursed night it was conceived. The wicked dyad comes to a close with track 22, 'More than You'. It serves as one final avowal of sinfulness awash in an elixir of self-deification. The curtain call is a disembodied croon from Story as a patient guitar melody lulls its passengers to the afterlife, "Is it nothing anyway, to throw your fucking life away; I am nothing but I am more than you will ever be." The coda is a final whisper from a weather-beaten soldier on his deathbed.

"Now that these alleyways and ditches burn a hole into existence
I will be forever tearing it open
And if this wound is in need of stitches
Just know that I won't let you sew it shut
Because I can't let you forget"

-Alleyways and Ditches

By now, Cancerslug was firmly entrenched in their era of unshakable brilliance, where everything thrown at the wall culminated in another jewel in their crown. But as 2004, their finest year, was drawing to a close, they had more ghastly offering from their fanbase with 'Book of Rats'. Featuring original album art which couldn't be more tailor-made for their brand of debauchery and bloodshed, the album is another heavy, miasmic triumph of raw power. The production still resembles a coagulated river of which the music needs to power through, a sound still foreign amongst the band's peers, and most certainly never outdone. However, the poetic content seems to be more introspective and dare one say, romantic at times. Ballads such as 'I Love Pain', 'Demonic Angel' and 'Mistress Death' remind the listener of Cancerslug's pension for aphotic analogy, best represented on the former's chorus of "Love and suicide go together like the flowers and the rain", cluing us in to the universal truth that nearly all love is ill-fated and as natural as the changing of the seasons. The exploitation odyssey, 'Within Her Skin' is maybe the band's finest three minutes of storytelling, detailing an abused damsel who gains murderous liberation. Story ponders, "She had enough and couldn't take anymore; What would she be a murderer or a whore; No fire down in hell below could match the pain of the life she had known." Here, a slight shift in thematic intention is perceptible. Now, an attempt to understand the origin of the wickedness that human beings do onto each other with a tangible line being drawn to the source coming into view. Still, this isn't a more sympathetic Cancerslug, just one more aroused by the metamorphosis from wide-eyed innocent into carnal miscreant. This is best exemplified by sixth track, 'Hateseeker', where Story goads the world into animosity, determined to bring society down with him. "Walk into bars and I see empty faces, blood starts boiling at these human disgraces; I don't know what the future may hold but a beast likes to prowl, so it's prowling I go," Story declares. 'Book of Rats' is a carcinogenic case study, spring-loaded with detestation.

"Tonight, where's your pain?
Conscience kills all the same
In the night
Sleep in vertigo
Erase the hell you know, never to let go."

-Your Problems

After a stunning triple masterstroke in 2004, the band went into hibernation, slithering back into the depths in order to recoil for a new era. This era wouldn't see the light for three years and would subsequently cover the final days of the barbarous empire which made them underground icons. After a few demo releases, mailed personally by Story himself, the ground around the band's volcano began to swell. Finally, the earth's crust was blown apart once again with 2007's 'Unnameable', a notably hasty, no less powerful studio return. Less crusty and disheveled than where the band had left things, 'Unnameable' was a hybrid of familiar material and new sonic ground. The record is seen by fans as transitionary, a necessary cog in the machine which powered the band in a new direction. The truth is more indicative of a stand alone success, with the highlights consisting of a blistering version of 'Circles' and 'Teeth On a String', the finest of the new cuts. Fan favorites such as 'Fetus Milkshake' and 'In the Graveyard' return with razor guitar work, in lieu of the walls of sound found on the 'Battle Hymns' duology. With 'The Conjuring', Cancerslug effortlessly slips back into the role of satanic harbinger and bystander to turpitude. Story sings as the drums drive, "Let this song conjure up the nameless shadow; May the listener know it's true form; May the night sky hear the howl of the dogs; May the listener become blood born." The track remains one of the band's more intriguing mid-tempo anthems, deftly walking the line between the formless production of 'Battle Hymns' and the sharp musicianship Cancerslug was beginning to hone. This direction surely powered the pistons of their next project, 2008's 'The Ancient Enemy'.

"Light one last candle
Take the razor to every vein I find
See my reflection in the warm pool
Drawing power from the dimming light"

-Ritual

As the band's profile began to expand ever so slightly, even being called the crudest, rudest and most vile band in America by Rue Morgue Magazine, a moniker that would don later demo albums, the plot was still being lost when it came to the group's true artistry. The small conglomerate that paid attention to Cancerslug's music, a group confined to horror rock aficionados, was hell bent on centering the bulk of the praise on the vulgarity of the music and relegating the juxtapositional nature of their stained poetry to the backburner. It's an incredible oversight brought to the ultimate place of irony, subsequently, by the band itself in the latter half of their career, but here, in 2008, Cancerslug would forever wave goodbye to their evocative brand of terrifying nocturne. 'The Ancient Enemy', much like 2003's 'Curse Arcanum', is often overlooked and treated as stepchild to other, more recognized Cancerslug LPs. Therein lies the early seed of tragedy which would later comprise the band, a rampant rejection of the ethereal by those who listened, a rejection which came full circle with the performers themselves. 'Alabama Bloodbath', though a brilliant record in every detail, still cannot produce the expressive, incorporeal majesty of which 'The Ancient Enemy' and 'Curse Arcanum' are comprised of. It's through this methodical implementation where Cancerslug ascends to its most evolved and abominable, rising above the instant gratification of the band's more immediate volumes to a place of ever-present spiritual relevance. Take opening track 'Ritual' for example. As the metallic guitar leads into the more pronounced, heavier melody of intimidation, the mood is immediately set, free of gimmick and well protected from misinterpretation. It's vast, theatrical and crystalline, without a hint of restraint. Story recites, "Draw the circle of forming; Carve your name into the flesh of the rotted dead; Feel the power growing; On my cock I will wear your head." There's a infectious belief in the diction which effectively wards off any misconceptions, even those of the brainless, sexual nature which would permeate throughout their later work. The sexual innuendo here is a terrifying, threatening and most certainly not played for laughs. Later, the line between love and hate is drawn again by the LP's title track. "Summoned to breed the world's destruction, creature of seduction; I've bound our hearts and been torn apart, I know she will be the death of me," Story laments. Awash in stop/start guitar pulses, Cancerslug paints a picture of a smitten acolyte, fully aware of repugnant nature of his lover but too transfixed to break free of her spell. This gives credence to, in Story's view, "the ancient enemy" being the female species. Surely a necessary evil, but one primed to deal out equal helpings of pleasure and pain until the end of time. There's fragments of what could be perceived as a concept album, running throughout as common links of occultist romance dot the track list. This is nothing sort of a virtuoso conceptual and musical instillation, a metaphorical triumph mostly unheralded in the band's catalogue. The record comes to rest with the magnificent 'Of the Black', one of the band's last paragons. On display once more, a coarse launch and descent of screeching strings and aggression with the idiosyncratic, angelic bridge tethering the two segments. It's a Cancerslug structural calling card but it would go dormant shortly after this period. Story warns, "The true lords of man, beasts on hind legs stand, ready to take our place of dominion." Painting with wordplay once more, mental imagery is once again child's play for the group. The track's monument still remains, however, the chorus, where Story speaks of "eating flesh" and "Older Gods" which is signified by a dissonant chord and powered by swelling instrumentation headlined by Mike Horgan's pounding drums. It's one of the band's must sublime passages. 'The Ancient Enemy', morosely, would be Cancerslug's final masterpiece.

"Take your sons and daughters
They are lambs to the slaughter
Spreading dermal corruption
Bathing in blood eruptions
Seekers of destruction
Waking into nothing"

-Necrosis

The band would end the 2000's with a pair of albums mostly consisting of reworked and repackaged content. Both 'Tales of a Butcher' and the aptly named 'A Decade of Decay' are both worthy additions to the Cancerslug canon, the former being a pedal-to-the-metal realization of some of their most exquisite cuts and the latter unfurling as a gelatinous, tranquil of (mostly) unearthed cuts. Despite the respective proficiency of both, their arrival and passing was more symbolic of the end of an era, an era which saw the band operate at a level which no horror rock band had before or since Churning out records of quality like a demonically possessed printing press, Cancerslug defied expectations and limitations in their first ten years of existence, blazing a trail through a genre prison which too often restricted the creativity and ingenuity of their peers. They seemed to ooze a realism that others did not, while remaining mostly incognito, further elevating their dark art into a place of isolation. The tangible results within this first decade are likely never to be duplicated and are eternal reminders of a group that seemed to transcend era, space, and the ceremonial frontiers of underground music itself. However, deals with the devil are eternal, inflexible and cruel, and Cancerslug watched as it's ethereal life force was ripped from its chest at the conclusion of its ten-season reign of terror and revelry. The price of this era was their souls, and the band could only stand by, fully unaware of the universal truth that they became creatively poorer after the extraction. They had to enter, single-file, into the cesspool that they staved off for so long. Cancerslug would be ushered into it's second decade as another face in the horror punk crowd, witless and oblivious to their loss of potency. Now, 'Soulless' was more than just a song, it was a solemn descriptor of a pale reflection, which none recognized.

"And if I tied you a noose in the mourning
Would you swing for me
And if I told you a new day was dawning
Would you pluck out your eyes and bleed for me
Or blow out your brains let the past slip away
Bleed for me silently"

-Silent Bleeding

End of Part I