Peachy Keen - "Can of Ham Sandwich"

DNRC34 Format: Long Player Released: 2004 Status: DELETED Singlehandedly reviving the 'verboten' black bubblegum genre, best thought of as what would happen if Ronnie Spector fronted Einstuerzende Neubauten, ex-Fashionistas drummer Madeleine 'Peachy' Kane took advantage of a clause in her record contract and put together eleven bleak, catchy, disturbing musical meditations that launched her screaming and shoo-bee-dooing into the public arena. Deftly interweaving up-tempo backing vocals with industrial grindcore backing and varying tempo from flighty to dirge, "Can of Ham Sandwich" presented Kane as an artist unafraid to look deep into the black holes that skirt the rim of the known universe, to risk obliteration by diving into the heart of those black holes, and to come out the other side with a handful of starlight. From the opening track, "Sexier When You Say It" with its uplifting existential middle eight stripped back to a single minimalist Wurlitzer line, to the aural feast of the penultimate "Don't Make Me Repeat Myself" and the apparent wall of chainsaws, coffee-grinders and jackhammers sprinkled over with the bipping of a pedestrian crossing, COHS defies all reason by lodging itself in the memory in that subliminal way that will, even though on first listen you'd swear it was physically impossible, see you actually whistling along to it as it runs through your mind on the tram on the way to work. Hypermelodic and Uberindustrial, Kane's about-face into the world of black bubblegum is the musical equivalent of Dianne Weist in Bullets Over Broadway when she grabs John Cusack's face in one hand, wrenches his head around to stare her in the eyes and says, "Don't speak, don't speak, don't speak."

Bad Liquorice: "You Give Louvre A Bad Meme"

DNRC33 Format: Long Player Released: 2004 Status: DELETED The ridiculous title of this album, together with its fratboy geek-style cover artwork, disguises the incredible toasting talent of Bad Liquorice, the fastest word-salad artists to burst out of the service lane since Compton stopped being an encyclopedia. The three rappers in Bad Liquorice - Tasty Cheese, Mor-Man and Spiflicator - bring a barrel full of money love to the songs on this album, treating listeners to a strawberry sundae, topped with crushed nuts and just the slightest hint of Chipmunk Punk. Songs with titles like interstate flightpaths, samples from the grim psychedelic bringdown of 1983, Nicole Kidman in Days of Thunder, references to baby teeth, interludes on expressways - they're all here, together with a banshee bible undercutting the stereo simplicity of the Fisher-Price backing tracks. Opening cut "Superb Melody Bootlash" (previously only available via Japanese import) slays all in its path, Tasty Cheese bridging the gap between both sides of Chesapeake Bay with some sublime motion sickness. Spiflicator chants throughout like an Enigma Monk on Chipmunk Punk, while Mor-Man holds the tiller, steady as Rock Hudson in the grave. The next three tracks fly past like missed stations on an express train to Hooty, until we come shuddering to a devastating standstill with "Whips", this album's emotional and spiritual terminus. Rap hasn't sounded this fresh since the last time I penetrated a jar of International Roast Coffee with a hot spoon. Final track "Ferry Cross the Medley" is, as the title suggests, a tour de g force, culminating in three minuets of electric buzz saw chops, interspersed throughout with shreds of rhyme like "interstellar salt and pepper shakers/ King Tut toasted sandwich makers/ Boogie board stash replacers / better find me a new stencil tracer / abs/ ". If this website was into ratings or stars of any kind, this album would deserve a constellation. Orion perhaps. The belt at least. As it is, this killer disc, though sadly deleted, serves as a mere warm-up to Bad Liquorice's later sound experiments. Listen and learn, Fashionistas.

Kentucky Barbie: "Spellbind"

DNRC32 Format: Long Player Released: 2004 Status: DELETED On this, the follow-up to 2003's breathtaking Police Woman LP, Kentucky Barbie managed to break the two dozen or so hearts that hadn't been shattered already by her astonishingly evocative and erotic crooning. Eschewing the farmhouse setting of her debut LP, Barbara Ride chose to return to her native Kentucky for the recording of "Spellbind", setting up an impromptu recording studio on a riverbank in the Purchase area. From opening track "Cumberland Plateau" through to album closer "Along the Western Rim", Babs kicks out tha jambs singing the intricate geography of her homeland, interweaving her sad tales of acid and plantations with observations as to the climate and landscape in which she grew up. Narrow valleys and sharp ridges of the mountain region are noted for forests of giant hardwoods and scented pine and for springtime blooms of laurel, magnolia, rhododendron, and dogwood. Taking up where "Police Woman" left off, second track "To The West" heads in the obvious direction, its beautiful blending of mandolin and history lesson merging seamlessly with "Plateau Breaks" in a series of escarpments, bordering a narrow plains region interrupted by many single conical peaks called knobs. Surrounded by the knobs region on the south, west, and east and extending as far west as Louisville is album centrepiece and possibly the song of the new millenium, "Bluegrass Country", its high-pitched squeals the heart and trademark of Kentucky Barbie's unique wall of plainsong. "Northwest Kentucky" is generally rough, featuring rolling terrain, with scattered but important coal deposits. The isolated instrumental track, referred to as "The Purchase", consists of floodplains and rolling uplands, and is among the largest migratory bird flyways in the United States. Rivers are an important feature of Kentucky Barbie's geography. Many rapid creeks in the Cumberland Mountains feed the Kentucky, the Cumberland, and the Licking rivers, which, together with the Tennessee and the Ohio, are the chief rivers of the album. Kentucky's voice on this album is generally mild, with few extremes of heat and cold. Frankfort is her capital, Louisville and Lexington her largest cities. Bonus track "Fort Knox" is the U.S. Depository.

The Toilet Cleaners: "Into the Bleach"

DNRC31 Format: Long Player Released: 2004 Status: DELETED Rumoured to have met in the janitor's room of a New York City apartment block at some time during the frantic haze that was 1979, The Toilet Cleaners (composed of bassist Tinlid, guitarist/vocalist Shozzy and drummer Drun) took seventeen years to put out their first album, entitled "We Are the Toilet Cleaners". It was, in every respect, a prophetic statement of intent. On their "comeback" album "Into The Bleach", these three crazy-dos, whose trailer-igniting antics have earned the respect of culture-jammers the world over, return to the simplicity of those days when they didn't have an album out. In fact this record is brimming with nostalgia for an era when The Toilet Cleaners did not even exist. Kick-starting proceedings with a suitably maudlin "Pony Stories" (an abomination of a song, first made famous by the woefully-talentless Guide Ponies), Shozzy immediately illustrates at least one good reason for DNRC's hesitation in releasing this album: the muppet can't actually sing, and so doesn't, making this an instrumental album, except without instruments. Second, third and fourth tracks (all untitled) pass by without any fanfare; it's not until the industrial silence of majestic mid-album epic "Nose Stone" that any sound is heard at all from either Tinlid or Drun, in a musical statement that takes recording technology back to the Middle Ages, only Mead isn't there to provide his wild Drkstixb solos. The second half of this astonishingly awful album never even manages to get started, and the whole affair is over before you can exclaim "Did someone press pause on the CD player?" To which one should automatically respond: "No, they didn't - you have just heard the new Toilet Cleaners LP." And boy are you glad that upon its release it was flushed, neither sadly nor deletedly, deep into the bowels of a bin marked "Never to be allowed to record another album again".

The Weather: "Between Stations"

DNRC30 Format: Extended Player Released: 2004 Status: DELETED Back when The Weather were just Weather, their "Ragged Isobars" EP was released as a single but due to its length (both it and the b side, "Mechanical Island" clocked in at over ten minutes) was classed by anyone who cared as an overblown (albeit really exciting) EP. Then they released "Between Stations", changed their name to "The Weather" and began experimenting with even more daringly extended releases, making "Ragged Isobars" sound like a blip-vert on the arse-end of Uranus in comparison. This quite batty EP clocks in at roughly eighteen hours in length, making it the most inaccurately named DNRC release ever. Title track and brave-minded opener "Between Stations" was recorded on an express train to Belgrave that, ironically, didn't stop at any stations but, due to several tedious delays involving faulty switches, managed to take three hours to make what would normally have been a fourty minute trip. Unfortunately the second and third tracks featured here, "The Ghan" and "Indian-Pacific" took even longer to record, over several excruciating six hour takes. Closer "Indian Pacific (Slight Reprise)" was mercifully cut short at the five hour mark after it was found that none of the band members actually possessed a valid ticket for their onward journey. Their ejection from the train somewhere on the Nullabor Plains signalled the end of their career. Musically, they had been on the road to oblivion anyway. Peaking somewhere near the 1:23:35 mark of "Indian Pacific", guitarist Noodles' extraordinary guitar licks could carry on no more, and the band was left to fill in some extremely edgy silences therein with tin whistles, toot sweets and a two-hour extended Drkstixb solo. Long consigned to the dustbin marked "Sad and Deleted", this musical oddity is best left gathering dust, where it landed.

The Sea Pigeons: "I Dream of Genius"

CAT #DNRC 29 Format: Long Player Released 2004 Status: DELETED Criminally under-rated in their native Ganmain, The Sea Pigeons burst onto the Western Slopes and Plains music scene with this ferocious album of paint-stripping anthems, then promptly broke up. Like a bomb whose fuse has almost run out, their incredibly violent and incendiary live shows led one reviewer (writing in the Griffith street press) to comment that their audiences would live a safer existence as anti-drugs campaigners in that predominantly grape-growing region. Opening with squalls of suitably industrial feedback, this astonishing album (clocking in at a respectable late-1970s running time of 7 minutes 33 seconds) features twenty eight tracks, each of which has been recorded, drilled and then thrashed to within an inch of its (admittedly short) shelf-life. Highlights include "Again" "Again 2" and "Yeti Again", each of which offers its own take on pseudo-nihilism, with footnotes. Reprising their self-produced debut EP with the quivering mess that is "Nosebleeds", The Sea Pigeons manage to cram so many guitars into the one song that one eventually pops out, forming the coda that is "Scared Tissues". Impeccably produced (again, by the band themselves), the bridging instrumental "Don't Say Anything" offers a moment of sheer relief from the onslaught before kicking back into shape with a trilogy of core-hard mashers, the unspeakably triumphant "Sonical", "Appendix" and "Small Faeces". No band has rammed a sound so hard into their listeners ears, either before or since, and so it should come as no surprise that The Sea Pigeons imploded under the weight of their own collective fury, managing to release only one more single for DNRC, the utterly bad-mouthed "Hair Collapse", the b-side to which was so ferocious it could not be recorded. This album, a must for anyone with a shred of self-respect, pumps so hard it should be arrested, if only it hadn't been deleted, sadly, though fittingly, on ANZAC Day, 2004. We will never see their likes again.

Fuzz Charge: "Bargain Bin"

CAT #DNRC 28 Format: Long Player Released 2004 Status: DELETED Seemingly in spite of the unexpected success of their Ah, The Mighty Fuzz Charge! 7", Fuzz Charge fell into an advanced state of mediocrity not seen since the gradual disintegration of the listening public's respect for musical genius Chris de Burgh. This compilation album is, sadly, the only real document of the band's slow decline, given that the three albums from which the material here is culled were never actually released. Fuzz Charge made the decision to shelve their ambitious trilogy of surftronica, harmonithrash and chantrock long players based on the not-unreasonable assumption that the ideas contained therein were all class A shite. The harmonithrash project in particular has become notorious and indeed synonymous with a kind of suicidal foolishness on the part of DNRC founder and first class idiot Davey Dreamnation, who dreamt up the abominable mashing of harmonicas and three chord thrash one night in his custom-built, koala-shaped jacuzzi. Fuzz Charge, though obviously uneasy about the blending of these genres on the one album, went along with the idea in order to pocket a reported three figure advance, and happily shelved some seventy demos once it became clear that Dreamnation would never release the album. Now that DNRC is in the hands of administrators, some of these remarkable recordings have finally come to light. And so, we come to the "Bargain Bin" LP. Along with three harmonithrash recordings (the somewhat unpleasant "One, Two" melding seamlessly into "Sonic Avenue" and "Three Part Harmonica"), the album also contains one incredibly long chantrock experiment, the unspeakably painful "Chipmunks In Speedos", as well as a handful of pathetic attempts at surftronica, the wheezing "Grommets Down At Shitty's" and "Wipeoff" brightening an otherwise grim track-listing. Valuable now only as a curiosity and as a document of willful stupidity, "Bargain Bin" sold out upon its release and is now, therefore, well and truly deleted.