This year The Monsters – the band of Reverend Beat Man, Voodoo Rhythm Record boss and his male club – turn 30 years old. To celebrate this nice round anniversary, they re-released their – by now totally unavailable – 1995 10”, originally released by the German Jungle Noise Records on CD and LP, supplemented by 7 more songs.
This was the first Monsters album where they used electronic bass instead of the double bass, and since their guitarist left the band, Beat Man remained alone at that position. So he distorted the hell out of his guitar. In addition the band decided that they will not deal with studios anymore, and record the whole album at home on an AKAI 1224 recorder, and that should be it!
This way, they nicely departed from the psychobilly sound of their first two albums, in a GOOD way, the RIGHT way, that is none other than the TRASH FILTH BRAIN-FUCKING PRIMITIVE ROCK N ROLL!!!
And on the occasion of this anniversary release, let me tell you a personal story.
Exactly 10 years ago in 2006 I found out that The Monsters will play in Graz. I told my – then girlfriend, now beloved wife:
– We are going!
– OK, but we hardly have any money.
– Let’s hitchhike! Budapest-Graz is not that far.
– OK.
To tell you the truth, none of us thought that we would ever hitchhike abroad for a concert; we were no teenagers, not even twenty-somethings, and we were over thirty. We had some pretty good rides though, the last one being an Italian owner of a sweets shop in a suit who was heading exactly to Graz to attend his new shop before its opening. He insisted that we visit his store too. We didn’t really feel like doing so, but said SURE. It was getting dark already by the time we got to the pastry shop, he opened the store, all three of us went in, he was explaining all kinds of things to us while everything was foiled up (there was some renovation going on), and this Italian guy in suit with a mustache. The whole thing was as we were in a gore movie, so I told my girlfriend, let’s get the hell out of here! We left our guy there and stepped outside to the street, and who was walking across the street? The Monsters! Of course we told them right away that we are their fans from Budapest and we are heading to the concert! A magnificent moment, I will never forget: Marta all smiley, hugging Beat Man and padding his shoulder. And him, being a gentleman, offered to take us in to the concert. Danke Schön! This way we could also buy some records.
The concert was extra super, both of us had quite some vodka, and the whole audience was really getting into it, dancing and so on. Everything was just wonderful except for the one manager who discovered us sleeping in behind one of the speakers after the concert, and kicked both of us out. Afterwards things became a bit torturous; going through the trash early morning at the railway station (I found a handful of unopened chocolates – though melted) as while dancing during the show I managed to lose all our sandwiches that were in our pockets. Then we came across an old (Hungarian!) gypsy who advised us to go back through Wien. Then we were on the train from Graz to Budapest in the morning, no tickets of course, trying to hide from the conductor till we are in Hungary, then my good ole trick with the conductors there, and we are already at home. True, it was tiring, but it was worth it! And I am not only saying this after 10 years, but also when we got home back then, and opened up our first beer in the kitchen.
Here are two little videos from this concert:
And now a few words about the album. How would a record be like that starts out with ‘Psych-out with me’? Awesome! Brutal party R n R! Then the song ‘Searching’, hard as Venom; then pot hymn ‘Pot’, then one of my favorite, ‘It’s not my way’, perfect fast pogo punk song!!! And damned be whoever’s legs don’t start moving after listening to ‘The Rock around the tombstone’ – he or she is hopeless! Then a fucking great Rolling Stones cover, ‘Play with fire’, and so on. Oh yeah, and all bonus tracks are also great! It’s worth keeping in mind that this brutal rock n roll record was recorded and put out during 94-95!
Note: Today it is worth to follow Voodoo Rhythm’s own Instagram page, where you can continually discover such treasures like this photo down here:
So a lot of things were trendy during the 90s, but a record sounding like this surely wasn’t! On one side all the Seattle rip-offs were going on, techno and all kinds of electronic dance music was coming in, and everyone was trying to figure out how to force together genres that were completely different from each other. On the other hand only people who really knew and liked the Ramones and Moorhead were wearing their t-shirts, even if they could not pronounce their names correctly (Motorhead or Matorhid were in quite widespread usage, and I for one did not know a single soul that pronounced the Ramones Ramonz vs Ramonez). Of course back then I did not even hear about The Monsters.
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