. . .
This record gives me a pleasure most sludge doesn’t: the feeling of heavy metal. I like music with a strong back. A lot of music is heavy without being strong. The rhythm sections are weak, and the riffs don’t do much besides expressing down-tuning. I don’t need some Pro Tooled creation – that’s just compensation for weakness – but I like heavy music to have backbone, and I rarely get that from the beards-and-beer set.
But Hail!Hornet has backbone. Much of Disperse the Curse sounds like Obituary as a hardcore band, with Brian Johnson on vocals after losing what little tonality he had left. The drums have crisp heft, breaking into double bass that has oomph because it’s infrequent. Songs march with muscle, avoiding sludge’s usual fuzzy softness. My favorite is “Beast of Bourbon”, which has red-hot harmony leads and the charging feel of Blind-era COC.
Hail!Hornet is an all-star team of sludge. T-Roy Medlin fronts Sourvein (we interviewed him here), “Dixie” Dave Collins plays bass in Weedeater, Vince Burke plays guitar in Beaten Back to Pure, and Erik Larson drums for various bands, including Birds of Prey. But I prefer this side project. It’s a stronger beast. Too bad this record lacks printed lyrics, though the song titles say that the forecast is “miserable”. Thankfully, the music isn’t.
. . .
CD GIVEAWAY
Relapse is giving away two CD’s of this fine album. For a chance to win one, simply leave in the comments below your best story about being stung or bitten by an insect. The two most brutal stories will win. International entrants are welcome. Entries are due by midnight PST a week from today, Tuesday, August 16.
. . .
STREAM & BUY DISPERSE THE CURSE
. . .
wicked… love guitars in this band.. this disk was made awesomely good
My best story is when i was camping up at Golden Ears Mountain with some friends i was really pissed off and decided to kick this log with a bunch of mud wasps under it and they were biting me etc… i did a 180 degree spin off a rock and did multiple back flip summer salts down the side of the mountain and smashed my head on the side of a rock.
My girlfriend in college invited me to fly home with her to Florida to meet her family and hang out for a week. On the flight as a joke, she started warning me about all the various things that live in Florida that can kill you like alligators, brown recluses, and some kind of wild cats…like jaguars or something. I knew she was giving me a hard time but the list was actually pretty long and we had a good laugh about it. Once we landed in Tampa though, I was bitten some kind of flying insect. I thought it was just a mosquito since it itched and I didn’t worry about because we have those in Texas where I’m from too.
However, by the time we got to her home from the airport, the whole side of my face where the bug bit me had swollen up. My eye wouldn’t open!! Luckily, Benadryl cleared everything up over the next 24 hours, but nothing could undo that kind of first impression…
I ended up marrying this woman, too, so I get to hear about it every time we visit the in-laws now!
When I was young I chased a ball into the woods and lied down to pick it up. Unfortunately I lied down on a wasp nest and was chased through the back yard by the whole nest, with my dad watching and laughing, telling me to jump in the ditch. It worked, but shit.
In this story, I’m not the one being stung, but it’s still pretty brutal. This happened when I was about nine years old. My little brother and I were playing on our swing set when out of nowhere this mad-pissed yellow jacket comes out of nowhere. He stung my brother in the eye and then buzzed away. My brother lie on the ground screaming in terrorized agony. I removed the hand clutching his eye and gasped in horror at what I beheld: my brother’s eye had swollen to the size of a plump strawberry (he was allergic, unbeknownst to me).
I cried out to the heavens, “He’s turning into a zombie!” My brother continued to cry on the ground. I decided to run to the house to get the aid of my mom and dad. I burst the the front door screaming, “Mom! Dad!” As I entered the living room, what I saw I shan’t soon forget: my mother and father had the same grotesque eye swelling!
“Oh, no!” My mother cried. “Grab him!” Bellowed my father. The tried to grab me, but I was too quick. I scampered to the front door and saw hordes upon hordes of these swollen-eyed terrors. I saw down and began to cry.
FIN
Apologies for all the ridiculous typos. *facepalm*
I got stung on the hand twice by the same bee, and the welts looked like a pair of boobs. BRUTAL
HHHmmm iv three bad wasp stories one is about me the other two are about my dad and bro. So when i was five my mam and I were doing some painting. A wasp decides to sit on my face between my eyes and being five i smacked the fucker so my eyes swelled up like balloons and went black. My parents looked like they were abusive towards me for at least a week while my eyes healed and they didnt bring me out of the house much that week either :L CAN I PLEASE HAVE A COPY YE GUYS ROCK \m/ lol
The year: 2005. The place: my backyard. What had started as a bunch of friends cooling off in summer with water balloons quickly descended into idiocy. Apparently keeping cool with water baloons was not metal enough. First basketballs were fired at each other in place of balloons, then rocks. Finally, courtesy of a childhood friend, I learned what it feels like to have a still occupied hornets nest smash into your face. The hornets were not pleased. Neither was my face. My brutal, brutal face. Hooray for being 16 and stupid.
I was about 5 years old and I went fishing with my dad one day, I didnt really like to fish so he fished wile I was hitting a plastic bat on the ground and breaking things.. all of a sudden a huge wasp came up and stung me in the side of my neck! My neck was swollen and had a huge ring around the sting, my dad had to pack everything up and drive me home…. he didnt catch any fish.
If you like CRYPTIC SLAUGHTER, check out this blog about the over looked and under appreciated “Stream Of Consciousness” and the demise of Cryptic Slaughter on their 1988 Tour with Angkor Wat. http://www.themetallounge.blogspot.com
Spiderman was bitten by a radioacitive spider…thos giving amazing poweres to do amazing things… thats a pretty kick ass insect bite if u ask me
When I was 9 years old, my family had just moved to Mississippi. As we were moving into our new place, I jumped out of my grandfather’s pickup truck and landed right in a giant yellow jacket nest. Immediately hundreds of them swarmed over my tiny body. I was paralyzed with fear. My mom yelled “RUN!” and oh boy, I ran. My older cousin, who was a football player, was the one to finally catch me about a hundred yards down the road. They were in my hair, shoes, clothes, everywhere. By the time the damn things were beaten and hosed off me, I had over one hundred stings all over my body. I swelled up and had to get a shot in the ass.
The kicker: I asked my mom if then was an appropriate time to curse, and she said yes. For the first time in my life, I let loose with every curse word imaginable in front of an adult, leaving my grandparents wide-eyed and open-mouthed with my formidable vocabulary. She still gets tickled when she tells this story to every girl I’ve ever brought to meet the family.
I am enjoying these stories much more than I should.
My big brother is an asshole. Way back in the early 80s, probably after British Steel was released but before Screaming for Vengeance, my bro and all his friends were digging out a berm for their kick ass BMX track in our side yard. Apparently, there had been some wasp/hornet issues in the past, so there was some discussion about what to do should the shovel hit that wrong pay dirt. I thought I heard mumblings about a “drunk tank” and like “run like fuck,” but in the end I only remember my older brother – the one who told me to eat yellow snow (the golden whore, he called it) and had weggie parties with me as the primary victim – saying, “look, it’ll be fine. If we hit one, just be sure to stand completely still. Don’t move. They’ll fly right by you.”
And when the shovel hit the nest, my asshole brother and all his friends tore off like the devil’s hound had been loosed on them. Not me. Nerves. I stood completely still in that swarm of malice, because, you know, they’ll just fly right by you. Foxy fuck! that’s no solution.
After about 1 minute of getting stung by every damn wasp/hornet in that nest, I ran screaming and crying to the house. My old man stripped me down to my skivvies and was whacking them off me for about ten minutes, repeating over and over, “he who walks behind the rose bros.”
I couldn’t walk for a week, in my concussion, conspiracy begged the answer to life’s riddle: send me that new CD, friend.
I was in first grade. First week of school. The lunchroom had no air conditioning, so they had the doors open. While I’m trying to eat, this fly keeps buzzing around my lunch. I get annoyed, and, like a 1st grade ninja can, smooshed that fly without fear.
And then I felt this sharp pain in my hand, as I opened it and noticed the “fly” was actually a bee that got its sweet vengeance on me.
Immediately my hand swelled like crazy (of course it was my left and I’m left handed). Had to go to the nurse and have them pull out the stinger.
Afterwards, I went back to class and finished the day, though I do think I cried a bit.
I’ve been stung countless times since then, but that is definitely my most brutal/stupid.
Today I was riding my bike up a hill. Soon I was riding down a hill, quickly gaining speed because of gravity and all that. I was like “Im pretty much the shit right now going, like, 20+mph.” So then I feel pain in my hand. It hurt, the pain. I looked down to where the hurting pain was hurting me. It was a fucking average sized motherfucker of a bee, ass deep in my middle finger. “Ow!” I said. I shook my hand in that my-hands-are-wet-I’m-going-to-piss-off-my-cat motion and the bee fell away. I then said “Ow!” again. Then I said “Fuck! Ow!” Looking around for other people, I came to realize I was alone. Seemingly truly alone. I let the single tear roll down my cheek as I awaited my the closure of my favorite throat. This was the day I found out I’m not allergic to bee stings.
Six years ago, I was mowing the lawn. It was hot, I wasn’t paying much attention. So I barely noticed the wheels dip into a hole at the end of our yard.
When I saw some specks flying around my head, I thought they were gnats. But gnats don’t land on you and stick there. They don’t get big either.
I realized that a nest was attacking me right before I felt the pain.
“Fuck! Fuck! FUUUCCCKK!”, I thought, as I turned and ran, pulling the mower behind me. My driveway was the longest in our neighborhood, so I had plenty of time to practice my spazzy one-armed bug defense until I reached the house.
When I got inside, I checked to see how badly I had gotten stung, and found that, inexplicably, the damage was limited to my wrists and shins. I gulped down the maximum dose of Benadryl and fell onto the couch, my hands out at my sides with the palms up to keep the stings on my wrists from touching anything.
When my parents got home, they were surprised to find me sprawled out in a Christ pose, nearly passed out from medication.
“You know”, my Dad said, “you could have just left the mower there”.
I was 12, and living on a farm in rural Alabama. I’d just gone to my second concert, Ted Nugent at the Fox Theater in Atlanta (at which I developed double pneumonia, but that’s another story). I’d purchased a sleeveless tee at the show: white with some tacky-looking Chinese dragon design on it. Shortly after the show (and recovering from the double pneumonia), I went out to feed our dog and was stung by a swarm of bees. Ran inside, tearing my clothes off and screaming.
Now, every year, we’d have to wrap the outside faucets in insulation and duct tape to keep the pipes from freezing (Alabama, I know, but we’d still get sub-freezing temps in Winter). My folks were lazy about removing the insulation, so it came to be Spring or so, and they told me to go out and get rid of it. So I went sauntering out, again wearing the damned Ted Nugent sleeveless tee. I approached one of the bundled-up taps, and yanked it off. Apparently, a nest of bees had set up nest inside the bundle of insulation and attacked. Again. So I went screaming into the house, tearing off my clothes. Again.
I gave up on Ted Nugent after that.
I just moved out of Lawrence, KS where I was bitten by several brown recluse over the years. Praises to Merlin I didn’t have the horrible reaction to them some people do, with the necrotic skin and all. I was just itchy.
I was on my way to junior high (yes, in the 80s) and munching on some candy when a bee landed on my face. I froze. The bee, attracted to the sugary goodness, CRAWLED INTO MY MOUTH. Yikes! The bee, unaware that it had just crawled inside the best loughie launcher I’ve ever encountered (that’s right, I can spit waaayyyy further than anyone I’ve ever met. Metal as fuck!), found itself violently rocketed into the sidewalk. Then quickly dispatched by my foot. I could have appeared on a Manowar cover at that moment because I felt so victorious. Wimps and posers, leave the hall, motherfuckers!!!
I went basic training in South Carolina back in the 80s. They had these nasty red hairy ants. I found out later they were wasps. The drill sergeants would get us out in these fields for PT. You had to hope you weren’t the poor fool that got stuck doing jumping jacks and push ups on top of these big-ass ant holes because your choice was getting mauled by ants or clobbered by drill sergeants for “breaking formation”. Luckily for me I was never in that position be we did have a guy have to take basic over again because he got covered in ant bites. Eight weeks of basic was.. interesting, but this sad sack was four weeks in, another couple in recovery after the ‘ant’ attack then another eight weeks of basic again.
I don’t think I can beat Colin McCarthy, but this is a pretty good one nonetheless.
The date: October 6, 2005. I had just gone to Popeye’s and was back in front of the law school talking to my associates. (We were discussing the scope of federal power under the Commerce Clause, for those nerds who are interested.) I still had my fountain drink, and put it on the ground. I picked up my drink a few seconds later and took a sip, only to find I had sucked in a wasp that had crawled down the straw.
It stung the roof of my mouth before I had a chance to spit it out. (A friend then burned it alive with a lighter as a kind of divine retribution.) Benadryl and Aleve followed, knocking me out, but that burned and throbbed like hell.
Shit, I’ve been stung so many times. Enough times to develop a life-threatening allergy, complete with epi-pen. I cringe in terror when I see a fucking yellow jacket. I have many horrible bee-sting stories including trips to the hospital, eyes swollen shut, being stung repeatedly in the forehead… but none tops this, which might be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
Flashback: Summer, 1996. Being a particular brand of nerd, my friends and I are playing paintball in the woods behind a friend’s house. We’re decked out like little mercenaries: head-to-toe camo and fatigues, facemasks, and gloves. The day was especially hot, in the mid ’90s, which in east coast terms is brutal with the associated humidity. Covered with padded cloth, we’re sweating buckets. The stage was set for the misery to come.
A few hours in, I find myself in a standoff where I’m outnumbered three to one and escape is looking grim. I’m creeping up the backside of a small rise, spying on mine enemies. I hear a faint buzzing sound and see a feeble looking hornet buzzing around my boot. I kick it away, refocusing on the game. A fatal mistake. A couple minutes go by, I creep to the top of the rise and sight the opposition, take aim… and suddenly they’re firing at ME. Thankfully their aim blows and I unleash the pain… but we’re just way too far away, and it’s a sad little spitting match.
And then — out of the blue, SHOOTING PAIN. I fall to my knees, unable to process what felt like a lightning strike. My buddies, assuming they actually hit me, hoot and holler, laughing at my suffering. I’m on the ground, screaming, fighting through pain that shoots to my core — trying to figure out the cause, and how to stop it. As I shudder, the pain suddenly comes into focus as a single, white-hot point of fire, and I realize exactly where it hurts. As realization dawns, the pain hits again — worse this time. Pain becomes a cumulative experience and I feel tears on my cheeks and I can barely hear myself screaming, and finally my friends are starting to realize something is seriously wrong, and I suddenly recall that hornet by my shoe, or was he near my pant leg? And my brain connects pain and perpetrator, but it strikes again and I know I have to make it stop somehow, this thing that’s alive, STILL STINGING ME IN THE FUCKING BALLS, and my only reaction is to bunch wildly where the creature is attacking, and I… start punching myself in the balls.
The stinging attacks subside after a few minutes. The pain is still there, but I can almost stand now. My friends come over and carry me inside. In the bathroom I inspect my wounds. I expected swelling, but I never realized a hornet sting could make you bleed. He must have stung me in the right testicle something like 10 times, and there was a good amount of blood. And then I find this crushed little shitbag of a hornet, in peaceful repose, dead in the folds of my boxers. My mortal enemy, lifeless but haunting, nestled by my precious bits. Since that day I’ve sworn death upon all flying stinging pieces of shit, though I’m still horribly afraid whenever I see one. Such trauma tends to linger.
…er, “bunch wildly” should be punch wildly.
I agree that being repeatedly stung in the balls by a hornet could be the worst thing one could ever experience. YEOWCH.
OK, I thought getting stung on the roof of the mouth was bad.
jesus, I didn’t read your story before I posted. what is it about hornets in massachusetts?
I was stung by a hornet (twice) on the balls when I was 11 or 12. it was in my bath towel which had earlier been drying on the clothesline out back. it hurt a lot.
clearly we should both win!
yeah, massachusetts was a much harsher environment than california has proven to be so far. my dad’s old house would get infested with hornets every summer, and our yard had blue-black wasps, bald-faced hornets (the fucking worst), mud wasps, yellow jackets, honey bees, and bumble bees all over the place. hell, i came down one morning to find a snake on my kitchen floor. my next metal band will be called MASSACHUSETTS.
Your tracks for MASSACHUSETTS s/t debut could be all of the state’s shitty cities: 1. Westfield; 2. Framingham; 3. Worcester; 4. Springfield; 5. West Springfield, etc.
I’d buy that CD.
It would be late-’90s style metalcore, of course. You’d have to thank Overcast and Shadows Fall in the liner notes.
I’m a MSc student, and I work with ants. My field site is in the Amazon jungle in Peru, an area filled with horrible stinging things, including bullet ants. While this story doesn’t involve those bastards (though I had several interactions with them), it was still awful.
I was bushwacking with some other graduate students on an extremely overgrown path looking for a species of ant when we came across a fallen tree. The fallen tree had a Y shape, which meant we had to step over the lower branch, while ducking down to get under the upper branch to make our way through. The first person went through, with me following closely behind, when they cursed loudly. In the fallen tree, but obscured from sight on the side we had approached from, was the largest wasp nest I’ve even seen- easily two and a half feet in diamter. The person in front got stung once, no big deal, and I had been careful enough not to touch the tree (you learn very, very quickly to move carefully through vegetation because of snakes, ants and spines on everything) that I got through without disturbing the nest or being stung. I felt pretty lucky.
However, the trail on the other side of the tree was completely impassable and we had to turn around and go back through the tree to get back to camp. Unfortunately, the wasps were really riled up from all of the activity. The first person went through, very, very carefully and still got stung twice. I was the next person to go through and fucked up- I grazed the lower branch on my way back through the fallen tree, enraging the already disturbed wasps, getting stung all over my head, neck and hands. I ran to a safe distance, ripped off my shirt, getting stung on my shoulders from the wasps that had made it into my clothes. It was awful.
It was made worse when, while miserably eating lunch with my one usable hand, I reached up to scratch at one particularly painful sting and found that in my haste to swat the wasps away, I had managed to rip several of them off of me while leaving the stingers in and poison sacs still attached.
I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa. My village was relatively close to the coast, so my friends and I would often go to the beach on weekends and enjoy a little time away from African village life.
One weekend, we got to the beach and noticed no one was in the water. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that, maybe, there was a reason no one had ventured into the water. So, I took a running start and hit the surf at a pretty good clip. It took me approximately two seconds to realize something was very, very wrong. As soon as I hit the water, my leg felt like someone had taken a blowtorch to it. I looked down and saw a Portuguese Man-O-War wrapped around my leg. After getting stung on my hands, trying to unwrap it, I walked to the beach. By the time I got to the sand, my leg was the size of a tree trunk.
At this, point, my best friend from Peace Corps ran up to me, screaming, “dude, I have to pee on you.” I declined, right before asking someone to drive me to the Peace Corps medical office; which, thankfully, wasn’t far from the beach. I spent the rest of the day with our medical officer attempting to remove the nemocytes with a pair of tweezers, while refusing to give me pain meds, because it was my own fault for running into a giant jellyfish (she did have a point).
A wasp becoming stuck in my football pants before a game, smashing around and stinging me in the thigh three or four times was bad; being stung less than an inch from my butthole a year later was worse. However, nothing beat the brown recluse bite I received three years after that. Twenty-four hours later, the night of Christmas eve in the tiny town of Cheyenne Wells, CO, there was but a lone receptionist at the hospital’s ER. The doctor had to be summoned from his Christmas party, still wearing his Santa outfit. By this time, the swelling had spread from the bite on my thumb down to the elbow. My whole forearm was bright pink, swollen tight, and hot to the touch. Thankfully, an azithromycin regimen did the trick. Had I waited ’til Christmas morning, the doctor claims they would have had to admit me. A spider bite during the month of December in Colorado; thank Khrust for warm country farmhouses.
Until now I haven’t heard this band. Now I’m glad I did. Love that bass sound. Thanks, Cosmo!
When my mother, brother and I first moved into the house where I currently live, a group of hornets made their nest in the decrepit sun room/back porch that we wouldn’t even bother remodeling until nine years after we had settled in. Hornets, in case you need to be reminded, are fiercely territorial; and yet dumbass, twelve-year-old me was blissfully oblivious to this fact of nature. I put the recycling and garbage bins directly underneath their nest, convinced that as long as I didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother me. One day, when I was taking out the trash when the Hornets buzzing around me to scare me away. I should have taken that as hint, but two or three days later the hornets attacked me and stung me three times: twice on the upper lip and one behind my left ear. TD;LR Ending: After the hornets stung me, my grandfather came and torched the nest with a can of WD-40 and a lighter. It was awesome.
I was bit by a black widow spider on my hand while sleeping. I awoke to a balloon like hand that I was unable to move due to the swelling. It looked like a blown up rubber glove. Of course, I had no medical insurance, my hand was throbbing in pain, my joints were beggining to hurt too. So…I figured I’d have to lance the bit myself. I drank a shit load of tequilla, and stabbed myself in the hand. I had to take tweezers and pull all the rotten skin off…I could actually see the bones in my hand. I drank some more tequilla, and self medicated with several other things and poured hydrogen peroxide on my hand. Yup, those were the old punk rock days in Oakland! Fun, Fun, Fun!
So i’m riding my bike down the motorway and i feel something hit my lip. i thought it was a stone or something, but it really hurt so i pulled over to check it out. i look in my mirror and there’s a bee sat on my lip with it’s sting right in. i had to pull the bee off and, of course, the sting was left in. so i carefully pulled the sting out, and by now it’s really hurting. long story short i had to ride on for another 30 minutes to get to town. i had to go into a chemist with a lip the size of a balloon and ask for something, anything, to take the pain away. “i ga’ shtug onna lip bya bee, i’ really hurgs. help!” bad times.
I love Hail! Hornet
My sting story is lame: On the shittiest vacation ever, stung by a wasp while hanging laundry at my parents house, after breaking a tooth on a FUCKING DOUGHNUT the previous day. Shitty one-two punch.