Noise Pollution #24: I Know Where Everyone Lives

Halloween has its very obvious components in most metal fan’s Spotify playlists. Misfits, Danzig, King Diamond, a picture of Peter Steele’s cock from Playgirl etc. And while there’s plenty to be said about all of these things (yes, even the cock) there’s one band that comes to my mind as a staunch champion of the holiday: Integrity. Every year they do some kind of cool package of exclusive treats for Halloween. For fuck’s sake, they have their own Halloween mask!

As the band has existed in many forms since the late 80s it’s to be expected that there have been stylistic shifts and personnel realignment, but there has been a theme of celebrating the macabre strewn throughout that endures through all eras of the band. This in itself is enough to warrant inclusion in your seasonal (of the vvitch) listening but couple it with a dedication to the work of Danzig and a demonic aesthetic and you’ve just started to hit on why I chose Integrity to round out this year’s Halloween pieces.

Of course my introduction to the band had nothing to do with Halloween. It was sometime in 2013 when I was digging deeply into hardcore whilst managing the record store when Bob from (the criminally underrated) Gholas came in and asked me if I’d heard the new Integrity album, Suicide Black Snake. He expressed disbelief when I told him that I hadn’t really ever given them a chance and, after being somewhat chastised, I relented because I knew Bob to be a man of taste. And so Suicide Black Snake was my jump off point.

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Suicide Black Snake is both a traditional Integrity record and an outlier in the catalog. The traditional aspect comes from getting your shit pushed in by a barrage of intense riffs and venomous vocals, which is the sonic theme that binds all eras together as I would learn upon digging into the rest of their discography. But this album is also a fucking strange trip through a very bleak landscape. There is a lot of genre interplay between dark metallic hardcore, noise and jet black Americana. If I had to compare it to any other record I’d pick Danzig’s IV record.

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Suicide Black Snake would turn out to be one of my favorite records of the last (or any) decade and would ignite my obsession with the band. It’s a very special record in my life to be certain.

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Closure is another Integrity record that stands as an outlier in Integrity’s discography. Coming on the heels of the Integ2000 era, which already was a major departure from the first era of the band, Closure has more of a southern Gothic vibe to it, hardcore’s answer to the self titled Danzig record, with some clean sung vocals and synth work to round it out. It’s a very unique record in an already diverse catalog, a record that deserved more attention than it was given.

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Up until last year this record was fucking impossible to find on vinyl, at least for a reasonable price, but Dwid’s Holy Terror Records did a slew of colored pressings, finally doing justice to one of the band’s most underrated records. And, to close the loop with Danzig, this is the origin of the Misfits cover that they perform at nearly every show.

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Eventually I would be introduced to Dwid and he would be one of the catalysts in my musical life. He would release the Krieg split with Leviathan through his Holy Terror imprint as well as doing guest spoken word on “Transient.” The idea of doing a split was kicked around in 2014, finally coming to fruition in 2018 and stands as one of my proudest moments in nearly thirty years of recording and releasing music. Dwid has given me a lot of great advice, especially creatively, and opportunities I probably didn’t deserve but value greatly nonetheless. I should probably email him and thank him but I’m a terrible friend in that regard.

When I started this column, my goal was (and still is) to showcase records and moments that are important to me. The moment I gave Suicide Black Snake helped change the course of my life. I hope that it helps change others.

To finish off in an especially morbid (and seasonally appropriate) manner I present a track from Dwid’s black/noise project Vermapyre. I now have another eleven months to plan out next Halloween’s records which is a proper callback to the first piece in this series where I talked about how fucking boring people who obsess over this season can be. See you in a few.

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