Noise Pollution #7: No More Pain
A bit after I’d “ended” Krieg, I helped form a doom band called March Into the Sea. Don’t worry about Googling it, the project was short-lived and is only important to the story as a peripheral. Sometime in 2006 we’d set up a mini tour: Philly, Boston, and Providence. The Providence promoter did absolutely nothing to promote it and the only people that showed up were a few of the guys from Sin of Angels, who we played in Boston with the night before. I guess we played a venue Motörhead had done a bit before, so that was at least one aspect of my first visit to Rhode Island that was memorable. The other had a far longer lasting impact in my life: the discovery of Armageddon Shop and the purchase of Rudimentary Peni’s Death Church.
Rudimentary Peni bookends the few years Krieg wasn’t a thing. I’m sure you’re at the edge of your seat to read the rest, but all good things come to those who wait.
Some matter of time earlier I’d seen Lino from Hemlock talking somewhere about Peni and how important they were to whatever project he was working on at the time (specifics are spotty, ’05/’06 began the period where I’d float through time colliding with depression and drug use–apologies to anyone who knew me then. Or now.), which held a lot of weight to me because I’d found him, when he wasn’t using a bullwhip on the crowd or throwing chairs at us, to be a gentleman of taste. So I picked up Death Church on a whim, one of those great moments that you can’t replicate when buying shit online.
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You can, but it’s not the same. We’ll get into that sometime.
Rudimentary Peni are a band that, to me, exist in three eras: the EPs/Death Church era and the pre/post-Cacophony era, with the first being the one you see the most shirts and patches from floating around at gigs which, since life is a fucking fashion show, seems to denote their popularity. They’re fine, fine records, otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation, but over the 16 or so years my time and focus generally orbit around Cacophony and later, the same ground that Chelsea Wolfe traveled on her Prayer for the Unborn EP I spoke about in the last piece. Cacophony notwithstanding, I never really see this part of the catalog get the attention of the formative releases, probably because the early stuff gets lumped in with the Crass scene and that’s as deep as some people are willing to go. That’s fine, not all of us are obsessive and poorly adjusted. Good on you if that’s the case. I’ll skip Cacophony for now as my experience with that record could fill an entire column, and I’m sure I’ll need something to talk about around Halloween.
A few years after Cacophony they produced what, until The Chances, what I consider to be their only nearly-unlistenable dud, Pope Adrian 37th Psychristatric, a mess of a record with a fantastic backstory and the potential to have been something special as it was written when Nick Blinko was in a mental home experiencing severe psychosis where he thought he was the titular character, and the phrase Papas Adrianus is repeated over and over through the entirety of the record. Unfortunately, the result is nowhere nearly as interesting as the concept and it’s difficult to find a lot of people who can champion it as anything other than a mild curiosity.
Papal delusions aside, Peni did set themselves up with the format that would define the next few decades of their career with 1997’s Echoes of Anguish, a sub-15-minute slab of stripped down, mostly mid paced anarcho encrusted punk.
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The new starkness of Peni’s approach would work to their advantage as they became masters of crafting simple songs that were entirely their own and held a certain gravity and depth to them. 1997’s The Underclass, 2004’s Archaic, and 2008’s No More Pain all followed this blueprint and gave us some of the band’s most memorable material in around 15 minutes each… and then all grew quiet. This silence would last through the 2010s, and, outside of Blinko’s second book Haunted Head, containing the previously mentioned disappointment The Chances, there didn’t seem like there was much hope of any new music from the trio.
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Both Echoes of Anguish and The Underclass are my recordings of choice from this era. There’s just such a tangible bitterness to their minimalist approach that gives the material more depth than you would expect from a three-piece punk band. I think these records are sadly lost in the shuffle when it comes to the conversation surrounding the band.
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In 2020 there was finally a bit of news where a vinyl release of The Chances, the track previously only released with the (very fucking limited) Haunted Head book, was announced. Was I excited? Yes and no. The song is a fucking slog and generally one of their weakest, but it was a sign of life, albeit a weak pulse. And then, as if it was three days later, Rudimentary Peni emerged from their cave with one of the best records of their history: Great War.
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Recorded over a decade earlier and shelved, Great War has a heft to Blinko’s guitar that hadn’t previously existed and a darkness that, while present in all of their work, was thicker and more omnipresent than ever before. This record would have been worth it alone just for the song “Mental Cases,” which has turned into one of my favorite Peni songs ever. Is this the last statement from Peni? Who’s to say? But if that’s how it turns out, then this is an excellent epitaph for an amazing project that somehow managed to touch all corners of the imagination through an impressive body of work that still inspires today.
In 2009 I had just started doing Krieg shows again, and the idea came about to do a 7-inch of Peni covers. My bassist at the time told me it was a terrible idea, that mixing black metal and punk would go against the “very idea of Krieg,” a band that was over a decade old that he had just joined. A few months later he was a full blown heroin addict who had stolen his roommate’s record collection and sold it. His roommate showed up at his job, walked right into the kitchen, and broke his fucking jaw. I like to think that’s the universe righting itself for him having such a shitty opinion. Peni would continue to be an influence on me musically to this day and we’re still contemplating the 7-inch. Are you curious about any other music I’ve found inspirational that this asshole would deem “incorrect?” You’ll be Cursed to find out in two weeks.
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