Labels: Hydra Head
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Ahh, Discordance Axis – or should that be AAAAGHHH DISCORDANCE AXIS!!!! Either will suffice. Absolutely everyone’s favourite grindcore ninja commando team are back.
Those in the know will be salivating over this, the final nail in the DA coffin since the band broke up after guitarist Rob Marton had to quit after experiencing nerve-shredding pain during exposure to the music, which is something I am not at all surprised by. Those not in the know are missing a band that managed to make non-stop blast parts not sound boring after three minutes.
So what do you get for your money?
There’s a 20-minute live show, culled from various camcorders running during the band’s last tour in Japan – specifically the two Tokyo shows. The soundtrack is taken directly from the cameras, and sounds pretty raw as befitting the live setting, but you can still clearly hear the numerous scattered elements to the music, and a healthy amount of crowd participation. The visuals are awesome, combining some live action sequences with juddering freeze-frames and other edited trickery whenever the visuals don’t quite square up. All credit to the mysterious Mr. Schober for piecing this monster together, and making it complement the music perfectly. Jon Chang is a freaking live-wire, jumping about everywhere and screaming his bollocks off, in almost direct opposition to Rob Marton (guitar, up near his chin) and Dave Witte (unbelievable drums), who furiously furrow their respective brows, get their heads down, and bash out the tunes in an even more extreme manner (believe it or not).
There is also a music video for the song “Ikaruga”, which you can find on the excellent 3-way split CD with Corrupted and 324. It’s only about 60 seconds long, but in that short period of time, Jon Chang has managed to cram in over 1000 frames made up of video game stills, Manga movie cels and quickfire captions, all to seriously eyeball-scorching effect. Excellent stuff.
The first promotional video is also present. A deliberately distorted and warped slice of footage of a DA show from earlier on in their careers, this is harder to stomach after the high quality of the previous efforts, but still offers an interesting insight into the band and their art.
You also get some guitar tablature, written out by Marton for Human Remains’ Steve Procopio who was taking over guitar duties at one point. Tricky. There are a bunch of nice photos too, along with a detailed and comprehensive discography of all of DA’s records over their decade-long career.
As if that wasn’t enough, if you stick the DVD in your computer, you have both “Original Sound Version” and “Jouhou” (the harder-to-find DA albums) in mp3 format. Utterly ridiculous value!
This is a bit tricky to track down – I had to mail-order mine from a record shop in San Francisco. I think Hydrahead are planning to re-release it in January 2003, along with the hard-to-find albums at a later stage.
This is worth getting a DVD player for. Go!