Blood, Smut and Tears

“…wasn’t room in mommy’s womb, deliverance was his tomb…”

Whether you see a music fanzine on a magazine rack or half-stuffed under a mattress, you’re looking at a project that almost always runs at a deficit. Never about money, indie music rags are all about the scene - any scene - that at the very least gets its editor/writer outta bed in the morning. These rags are often referred to as labors of love, and whoever coined that sympathetically thoughtful description really couldn’t have pegged it better.

While lacking a paycheck, these lovely labors are not complete losses of material gain. When it’s established enough, all kinds of free promotional music will come yer way. You’ll probably get to talk (i.e. interview) with people you’d normally never have a snowball’s chance of getting on the phone or on a stool across from ya. Occasionally you’ll find your name on guest lists for shows you’d usually pay to see. These are all pretty nifty perks; however one will become more of a thrill to you than the others.

I’ve found the first, my personal fave, offers something aside from the obvious that’s more peripheral in nature that I failed to fully consider until after a few years. Simply put, you’re gonna find music in yer mailbox you probably never would’ve bothered paying attention to, and some of it’s gonna be pretty darn good. This twelve-tracker is a convincing example of what I would've missed out on, probably even to this day.

Alas, this longwinded tale of fanzine intrinsics brings us to Blood, Smut and Tears, the ’93 debut from a Minnesota all-female four-piece who’re often branded a punk/hardcore band called Smut. While not exactly mislabeled, lurking within their unexpectedly aggressive, brusque din is something that forbids it from completely adhering to that rather careless branding, and it’s admittedly hard to lay a finger on. I still can’t quite describe it confidently, ‘cos while swathes of thrash aren’t foreign to these twelve tracks, they’ve no chance of sitting comfortably in usual known crossover corners, and while a punk-simple undertow is felt, it’s kept gurgling beneath the surface by a deeper, unapologetic aggression known to share intimacy with more mirthless styles of metal.

There’s really no way around Smut’s sound, gender and origin inviting unending comparisons to Babes in Toyland (whose drummer Lori Barbero’s Spanish Fly label signed these ladies) and secondarily to Sweden's Doughnuts, however here Smut charge with more lethally straightforward hardcore/metal while the Babes’ and Doughnuts' agendas often tend toward more musically discordant punk. Smut’s chunkier guitar tone generates an unusually thick wall of sound, one that stands tall and imposing around frantic “Emotional Suicide”, roaring “Goodness No Grief”, and bludgeoning top tune “No Sacrifice”, and boasts more command than plenty of pure metal releases out there. More importantly, of course, is how guitarist Dawn Miller augments this sound with a strangely urgent brutality (or brutal urgency) that I’m convinced is a style all her own, and that’s saying something.

Main vocalist Germaine Gemberling retains notes as often as she dashes them off, only without classic n’ tired pre-set bi-polar boundaries, and the paradox her calmly-elongated drawling builds within rhythmically-anxious “Alone” and album-opener “Cave” is as interesting as what her remaining sharp, afflictive style brings to “Object of Intentions” and “Emotional Suicide”. Somewhere at the center is a brief conversational monotone that only ambles through the slightly more conservative, yet combative “Take Back the Night”. Backing and alternate vocals are also contributed by drummer Estelle Thielen, meanwhile Miller is unleashed all by her lonesome in “Women”, resulting in the most vehement lung barrage on the disc.

In addition to vocals, Estelle Thielen is an enthusiastic drummer to say the least who never seems to fail in finding homes for a hundred wild fills, countless obscure and off-kilter beats and a dozen tracks worth of original, mind-of-their-own timing signatures, their stories readily told in “Take Back the Night”, “Spirit” and “Baby Jack”.

Blood, Smut and Tears, top to bottom, has proven to me to be an antithesis of boring, an opposite of lackadaisical and an antidote to the vaunted disease of ordinary. It’s perpetually hot-headed, confrontational, and without compassion, and like a noisy, no-frills contraption that’s missed more than its share of safety inspections, always seems on the verge of becoming unhinged and destroying the countryside. I generally regard it as a ‘surprise existence’, meaning that another person’s knowledge of its existence fills me with nothing but surprise, which has happened like twice in the last twenty five years, and one of ‘em didn’t think much of it. That person hasn’t been seen since.

“…we women say fuck-off, we’ve taken your shit far too long, so we’re fighting back…”