Tuesday 11 August 2020

Ten Steps to Make Your Life CRUSTIER Starting Today (step 7): Doom "The Greatest Invention" cd, 1993

Doom is to the common crusty what complaining is to a French person: both an essential part of the identity and a relevant lifestyle, without which life on Earth would just not be quite the same. 

Since introducing such a widely known, iconic band could be deemed as patronising and needlessly superfluous - if not actually offensive - I shall take care not to condescend to my proud educated readers and therefore won't write anything about the band's conception, a birth that has been well documented anyway and does not require my customary written gesticulations. Everyone knows Doom, at least superficially, and judging from the vast amount of patches, shirts and painted logos one can detect at any summer crust gathering, d-beat gig or Lady Gaga video, it is quite obvious that Doom is a popular band, respected by their peers for their loyalty to the DIY punk scene ("In it for life" as opposed to "In it for cash" if you know what I mean), for their political stands and for their genre-defining sound that really has not changed that much throughout the years, thus emphasising their unshakeable faith in the validity of Swedish-flavoured cavemen crust punk. Not bad for a band that just wanted to be Discard and Crudity. 

Doom's '88/'89 era (referred to in most self-important punk circles as "the Peaceville era") is often what most people, guided by the suspect belief that a band's "early stuff" is always the best, will know about them - unless you are actual fan of the band of course. In spite of an impressive discography, and depressingly enough, it seems that too many of us remained stuck at the absolute classic Police Bastard Ep, or even just at the song "Police bastard", quite possibly the most covered - and butchered - crust song in history. If you are playing in a crust band and you have never tried to cover "Police bastard" or "Relief" then you should really start to ask yourself the right questions. It goes without saying that a comprehensive knowledge of the Doom catalog in relation with their lineup changes is paramount to the establishment of your crust credibility and any faux pas could have devastating consequences to your reputation and get you banned from respectable masonic crust circles. Do you want to end up hanging out with that shirtless drunk guy at the front constantly shouting "P...po...police...bastaaaaaaard"? Of course you don't, and in order to join the club of Real Doom Fans, beside a symbolical yearly fee, a critical analysis of some of the band's most interesting works is necessary and this is exactly what I want to provide here for your personal enlightenment: my personal views on what is probably Doom's least popular album (in fact, even the band dislike it), The Greatest Invention



Recorded in June, 1992, and released on cd and vinyl on Discipline (a hardcore-oriented sublabel of Vinyl Japan) in 1993, The Greatest Invention was the last recording of the original Doom lineup with Bri, Stick, Pete and Jon. The early 90's were a strange period for the band. In 1989, guitar player Bri had left the band, leaving Doom working as a three-piece until 1990 with Jon singing and playing the guitar. At that time, the band tried to include fresh elements to their cavemen scandicore recipe with the addition of slow-paced, heavy and rocking grungy moments with a bit of a psychedelic vibe. The two songs from the band's fourth demo recorded in those months, "Confusion remains" and "Alienation", were dissimilar to anything Doom had done or would subsequently do. Even though listening to a six minute long Doom song is a rather otherworldly experience, I personally would not say they are bad Doom songs as you still get their typical fast d-beat hardcore moments while the heavy slow moments do confer an oppressive atmosphere. The songs would have required some polishing in terms of songwriting but the idea of blending direct crust with heavy psychedelic rock was anything but poor as bands like Bad Influence, Dazd or Iowaska would eventually demonstrate. What if Doom had kept experimenting with this new formula? Would they have become a proper space crust unit? If you come from a parallel universe where this happened, please feel free to comment below.

In 1992, the band got offered a tour in Japan which prompted the four original members to reform and resurrect Doom for the occasion (the trip was immortalised in the Live in Japan Ep on Ecocentric Records). Considering that Doom have always been a tremendous influence for the Japanese crust scene (from Macrofarge, to Abraham Cross or Reality Crisis), such an endeavour made sense and I am convinced that the tour further strengthened the cult of Doom there, so much so that, almost 30 years later, more than a few Japanese bands still aim poetically and gutturally at sounding like early Doom. Back from their trip, the band recorded the Greatest Invention, a mini Lp which was to be the definitive swan song of the original lineup. The personal (and probably creative) tensions running through the band at that time were important and pervasive and you can just sense that The Greatest Invention was not recorded in a serene context. It is a very dark and edgy album. Of course, Doom's earlier material had a very angry and pissed edge too but, by 1992, they sounded like a desperate band about to self-destruct in an explosion of mean, vicious and hopeless hardcore music. The Greatest Invention is unlike any other Doom records. Not because of the admittedly poor production, but partly because of a substantial change in the songwriting and primarily because it sounds almost nihilistic. 



Although The Greatest Invention has its fair share of classic Doom numbers ("Trash breeds trash" being a genuine hit), it is undeniably the band's most versatile work. Thanks to added effects (like the flanger on the ace "Dig your grave" for instance) and textures on the guitar, the music is openly dissonant and eerie at times, with a lot of feedback and fuzzy distortion altering the mood of the original Doom formula. The more noticeable change lies in the presence of slow-paced, heavy psychedelic crusty rock songs, with the Saw Throat-on-shrooms "Drop out", and especially the nine minute long (!) "My pornography", an oppressive Godflesh-y industrial crust number that sounds about as joyful as the grinding noise of a sinking ship. It is obvious that Doom were not only trying new things musically but also craving to modify the vibe of old, to apply a new varnish to it. You could argue that the nine songs making up The Greatest Invention have a disparate feel to them, that for a Doom album - whose template is officially based on the repetition of gruff scandi-influenced cavecrust numbers with a couple of groovy mid-paced ones thrown in for good measure - it is too diverse and not straight-forward enough. While I agree that the album lacks unity and cohesion (more songs and a proper Lp format instead of a mini would have helped in that regard), the angry tension and raging heaviness permeating the work, whatever the songs' pace, make The Greatest Invention one of my favourite Doom recordings. Just listen to the new version of "Same mind" (only included on the cd version for some reason) and how tormented and pissed it sounds, to the filthy old-school crust vibe of "Dig your grave", to the Cimex nods in the pummeling "Worthless nothing", to the heavy punk cover of the Dead Wretched's anthem "No justice" pointing to Doom's local punk roots beside being one of the band's best covers. In spite of the thin production, all the songs are actually memorable and punishing in their own way and on the whole it remains an incandescent work and an apt farewell for that incarnation of Doom. 



Doom would keep going with a different lineup throughout the 90's but never really experimented as much as on The Greatest Invention, which is also paradoxically their shortest album to date. I tend to see Jon's subsequent band, the magnificent Police Bastard, where he played the guitar and sang, as building on certain ideas touched upon in Doom's 1992 Lp, and, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, the same could be said about Bugeyed, Bri's heavy noise rock project with members of Pleasant Valley Children, so I suppose the desire to write something different had to be expressed anyway. 

The cover is quite striking (but Doom's covers usually are) and decidedly dark with a man being shot in the head and an endless river of weapons (bombs, guns, knives, you name it) flowing out of the bullet hole. Perhaps the name "Doom" (for the first time with the new font they would keep using later on) was never as ominous and apt as on The Greatest Invention. The doom of Doom indeed.   





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