Subotai: I pray to the four winds. And you?
Conan: To Crom. But I seldom pray to him. He doesn’t listen.
I first discovered Crom in, of all places, Salt Lake City, which is not the kind of place where one expects to randomly come across an album by a band named after a Sumerian god and entitled The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989. But there it was in all its axe-wielding-female-warrior-riding-a-polar-bear-across-a-frozen-plain glory, and it was love at first sight. It’s a metal record that samples other metal records by artists like Venom, Ozzy, Van Halen, and, yes, I think even the Doobie Brothers, and mashes it all together with dialogue from the Conan movies. On Life in the Vinyl Lane v1.0 I wrote:
Frankly I’m surprised that the creation of music didn’t just come to a complete halt upon the release of this record. It obviously marks the endpoint of music, the one album to which a century of recorded music, a few centuries of classical music, and a few millennia of tribal music, had all been working up to. It’s the finish line. It’s a black hole that swallows all before it. It’s a singularity. Crom won. They got there first. They reached the pinnacle.
Later I picked up their sophomore record Hot Sumerian Nights (2007), but there isn’t much else in their discography other than a pair of split singles. Or I should say wasn’t, because last week a copy of the newly-released Early Shit 1994-2004 arrived in my mailbox, 43 tracks crammed onto two sides of psychedelic (described as “PCP Color”) vinyl. CRROOMMM!
Early Shit 1994-2004 is exactly what the title says – early shit. We’ve got demos, songs from comps and singles, some live stuff, and one unreleased track from the previously mentioned Cocaine Wars. As you can imagine, with 30 songs packed onto the A side the tracks hit right out of the gate, and you’re out almost before you released you were in. Crom is at their best, IMO, when they’re playing heavy. Often hardcore speed isn’t conducive to generating heaviness, but Crom can pivot from being one of the fastest bands you’ve ever heard to being one of the doom-iest. As is often the case with collections of demos and previously unreleased material, the sound quality is a bit of a mixed bag, though overall it’s decent. The B side is the better of the two to my ears, both sonically and in terms of the songs themselves.
You can give Early Shit 1994-2004 a listen on Bandcamp HERE. Two versions were produced on vinyl – one in black, the other on “PCP Color”. Both were put out in editions of 200, and per the Bandcamp page both are sold out – which is great for the band, but maybe not so great for you if you want to buy a copy. There is also a cassette version (also of 200 copies) that is still available, if that’s your jam.