Aggression

It's time to completely jettison my reviewing niche for a moment thanks to a pang of nostalgia that's been slithering up on me as the years go by and funerals start to become a more common form of 'extended family reunion gatherings’ than weddings. SGM was one of the soundtracks to my existence back in 1989, and it essentially reflected my personality spot-on during that time. I was a borderline nutcase that did a lot of really stupid shit, constantly cracked obnoxious jokes and drank beer as if all other food and beverages were just annoying sustenance that had to be tolerated so I could live to drink more beer. I wasn’t even of legal age yet. Aggression is an album created and performed by teenagers with a mindset that agreed to my worst traits back in the day. And like how life either evolves or ends, by the early 90's I had completely forgotten about this release, and two decades later when I began recalling a song with lyrics involving someone receiving "hemorrhoids of the ear" I couldn't even fathom what the band name was for weeks until it finally popped in my head. Hearing it again, I can say that it's just as wild, absurd and occasionally as stupid as ever.

While deemed a 'crossover' release, it fits that genre tag in only a marginal sense. The album Aggression is not a thrash metal meets hardcore punk cyclone, but more akin to a combination of heavy metal and late 70's punk rock. Basically, this Seattle-based band dishes out an early brand of grunge, albeit on the heavier side of things, sonically more aligned to early Alice in Chains than Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Aesthetically though, it's like the bastard child of Mudhoney and Guns N’ Roses, and we're talking about a seriously bratty fucking child. The lyrics are chock full of self-aggrandizing, junkie lifestyles and pure sleaze with no shortage of off-kilter humor and head-scratching in-jokes. Considering that this album seems concocted by a gang of misfits, the production is actually quite good with a metallic guitar tone that adds enough bite to the relatively simple riffs to qualify the band as at least somewhat metal despite the hard rockin' nature concerning a lot of these tracks. They do throw in some glammy guitar solos and thankfully the drummer tosses in enough rolls in defiance of the sterile robotic techniques incorporated in mainstream metal in the late 80's.

Essentially, it sounds like an album that should have eventually flickered out from my memory permanently, except that there's one element involved that just cannot be denied in leaving one hell of an impression that still floors me, and that dude's fucking name is Mike Loser. Aggression wastes no time in throwing that rabid son of a bitch right into the center of the ring, and he immediately starts tearing new assholes left and right. His singing is the equivalent of Brian Johnson foaming at the mouth in a straitjacket. His general delivery could transform "You Shook Me All Night Long" from a hard rock FM staple into a horrific and unmarketable ode to deviance and degradation. Every ludicrous line in that opening track “Back in Circulation” is like a lash from a bladed chain whip as Mike wails away about enthusiastically killing hippies and shit. On top of that, when he tones down the insanity level a bit, the fucker actually has a decent albeit slimy singing voice.

"Back in Circulation" is the perfect opener, a stellar composite of what these guys do in all its loopy animalistic glory, but it's no surprise that the tune with the biggest impact for the few of us that actually heard the fucking album is "Blow Job". A groovin' sleazeball monster replete with chunky riffs, it takes the back-alley attitude of Guns N’ Roses and LA Guns and magnifies the raunch by tenfold while gobbling down some magic mushrooms for good measure. Usually when a man brags about his large male appendage, he tries to at least keep shit in perspective to some extent, and not wax poetic in a Mike Loser fashion, howling to the world that "35 INCHES IS WHAT I'M ABOUT!" And as the song, and the drugs wear on, Mike's lyrics snowball into more profane and demented ramblings:

[i]So long and wrinkled, I'm ninety years old[/i]
[i]Now come taste the pleasure of wine that is gold[/i]

Shit like this wouldn't jive so well if it weren't delivered with such an unnatural swagger, but the band as a whole truly came together for this ode to sexual depravity. But there's a couple of other gems worth mentioning, including "Mrs. Brown", which again takes an AC/DC template and exaggerates the fuck out the filthy aspects, replacing the shifty-eyed hustler with a desperately horny sanitarium escapee. "Gutter of Pain" is another cool escapade, as it seems as if that awesome riff that opens the chorus of that Rush tune "The Manhattan Project" was swiped and an entire song was subsequently built around it, with Neil Peart’s introspective nuclear warfare lyrics ditched in favor of ruminations on grungy street life misery amid steaming potholes and trashcan campfires.

Honestly though, without the crazed mentality of their frontman, this metallic grunge stew gets old after awhile, and a couple of clunkers like the needless KISS cover and a rap-rock ode to partying called "Tap the Keg", featuring rhymes delivered by the drummer (who sounds like an absolute dweeb), do the album no favors. Granted, at that time white punk/metal rockers rapping was still a fresh cesspool of liquid shit getting ready to bubble over and SGM's contribution with that lone song plays more like a parody of that scene than some ill-advised stab at being ‘contemporary’.

Hearing this shit again was a pretty fun nostalgia trip, and despite being more than a bit on the juvenile side of things, some of the songs have aged pretty well while others didn't. As for the band, they didn't last too long after this release, with the departure of the singer to focus on his studies or some shit. It's kind of a bummer, because as a proto-grunge act, they might have found themselves swept up in Seattle fever if they had kept their mojo together to 1991. Hell, they were already donning the shaggy hair and lumberjack shirt fashion, fitting the stereotype perfectly, and if Mike could tone down the insanity, and the band ease up a notch on the metallic tone of the guitars, who knows how popular they would have become? Then again, if they did that they probably would have sucked, and Aggression would have remained their only worthwhile release. Yes, it takes me down memory lane, but I'm not going to dole out bonus marks because it reminds me of when I was a young asswipe. Looking back, if I hadn’t toned down my own ‘aggression’, I wouldn’t be alive today with the means to acquire certain shit I’ve always wished for after establishing a decent career, that is, before family life eventually squandered that brief golden age of my life a few years later. SGM’s lone release is not high caliber shit musically, and yet it retains reasonably worthy merit most specifically through the manic presence of their vocalist. Sometimes though, it's that one unique character that matters, the one that makes an album suddenly reignite in your head out of nowhere, and for that mere factor this album is worth a few more spins decades later.