Issue #46: Gummo OST

Released:  June 29th, 1998

Genre:  Various, including metal, extreme metal, industrial, punk, and folk music

Record Label:  Domino / New Line

Duration:  73:44

Producer:  Randall Poster

Track Listing

Why the Gummo OST is One of My Favorites

I hate to admit it, but I’ve yet to actually see Gummo.  It’s from the creator of Kids, which I own, and it’s supposed to be just as disturbing but infinitely more surreal.  Had I lucky enough to have somehow found it as a teenager, I’m sure I would’ve eaten it up.  It’s supposed to be full of shocking imagery, which passed for culture in my teenage years.  I’d still like to see it, but I’m not as interested in shock for shock’s sake.

Being a low-key production, I actually found out about the film because I first stumbled across the soundtrack.  I was in the 9th grade, in an Auto Body class I was taking for who knows why, and I was at the peak of my disdain for society: big jeans, long hair, and enough Marilyn Manson shirts to carry me through the week and some change before having to repeat, not to mention a dozen others from Cradle of Filth to Fear Factory (to which everyone was like, “oh Fear Factor?  I love that show!”) to Coal Chamber (which I eventually traded for another Manson shirt).  Most of the Auto Body crowd shunned me, but there was this creepy kid who completely identified with me (and a 10th grader at that!).  As tends to happen in high school, we had a bomb scare one day and spent a couple of hours standing around in the parking lot across the street.  Having absolutely nothing to do except ponder if it was possible to smoke a cigarette (or perhaps something else if we were brave enough to have it on us) without getting caught, my beady-eyed friend pulled out a beat up CD player, handed me one half of a broken headphone, and the rest was history.

The Gummo Original Soundtrack (OST) is a diverse collection of songs from more extreme ends of the musical spectrum, specifically the ultra-heavy and ultra-fast variants of metal and punk.  It’s a great sampler of these decidedly un-mainstream genres and is partially responsible for encouraging me to explore this “heavier-than-heavy” territory.

Black metal is most heavily featured, an interest that Korine (the film’s director) would continue to pursue via a later project.  Now if one looks at a list of “best black metal” or something equivalent, one will probably see bands like Enslaved, Immortal, Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, and maybe a couple of others from the 2nd wave of black metal fill up the top spots.  The representation isn’t wrong, but it it’s flawed.  Imagine if someone wanted to know the “best punk albums” and they were handed Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Ramones, and Television.  It’s a good start, but what about all the modern stuff that they’re missing?  The genre after it has evolved…  Should they miss out on Blink-182, Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, Dead Kennedys, Operation Ivy, etc.?  In order to understand a genre, it’s important to understand how it grows, not just the handful of “influential” records that spurred the movement.  All too often the words “influential” and “best” are conflated.  By default, “influential” can’t be the best; the “influential” have to actually influence something that can then become the best.  It’s a frustrating paradox when trying to break into a genre, and the more underground the genre is, the harder it is to break through what all the purists latched onto when it was a “new thing” and discover what real people are actually listening to.

In this regard, the Gummo OST has a more modern flavor of black metal to offer.  Bethlemen’s 2 songs absolutely scared the pants off of me the first time I heard them.  The unholy shriek at the beginning of “Schuld Uns’res Knoch’rigen Faltpferd” is damn terrifying.  Absu, Bathory, and Nifelheim also contribute to a current understanding (well, 1998-current I should say) of black metal; the main draw is the reasonable production values behind these tracks, something that black metal purists strongly despise.  Mystifier’s “Give the Human Devil His Due” dances between both black and death metal, another big no-no among purists.  (If you haven’t already, there’s some interesting reading behind how much the Norwegian black metal bands hated the Swedish death metal bands.)  Burzum stands out as a recognizable name from the 2nd wave, but “Rundtgåing…” represents some of his later work where he pursued more of a “dark ambient” style.

Tracks from Brujeria and Mortician bring death metal to the table, though I daresay they’re fairly accessible examples of the style.  Though neither are quite as blistering or pulverizing as most death metal, the subject matter and vocals are spot on.  “Matando Gueros” is a fun listen if you know who Brujeria is made up of, and translates literally into “killing white boys.”

Namanax and Dark Noerd offer up “songs” that fall somewhere in the “noise” department.  And I don’t mean noise in that pleasant sort of musical way like NIN’s The Downward Spiral, or even in that “I don’t quite get it but it sort of makes sense” way like early Skinny Puppy.  No.  “The Medicined Man” is a sample of someone talking/laughing looped over itself over and over again until it turns into nothingness, and “Smokin’ Husks” sounds like 8 or 9 different tracks playing at different speeds.  I guess there’s a time and a place for this kind of stuff, but it’s a little too out there for my tastes.  However, I do appreciate being able to get a taste of it without having to get an entire album.

Sleep’s 2 songs (well, “Dragonaut” moreso than “Some Grass”) offer up a little taste of stoner rock, while The Electric Hellfire Club gives us a dose of industrial metal on “D.W.S.O.B.”, a great example of their semi-unique sound.  Eyehategod delivers their usual brand of sludge metal with “Serving Time in the Middle of Nowhere,” one of my favorites from the soundtrack.  Spazz, one of the forerunners of the powerviolence genre, bring home one of the OST’s heaviest tracks, “Gummo Love Theme.”  With its unpredictable tempo changes and pile-driving guitars, it may be tough to reconcile that these guys are rooted in punk rock and not heavy metal.  It’s an amazing high-energy track and another one of my favorites, even if I can’t understand a word of it.

I’m not aware of any other soundtracks that stray this far from the mainstream, although they may be as unusual to come by as Gummo was for me.  What’s great is that it’s extreme yet also listenable.  It can certainly be unfamiliar to inexperienced ears at first, but there’s enough variety here to keep it interesting.  For me, this compilation was one of my first exposures to just how far musicians could take music; it was one of the first physical CDs that taught me that there are no limits.  Nothing would ever quite be so shocking after hearing those screams from Bethlehem or those lightning fast beats in “Gummo Love Theme.”

Written by The Cubist

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Written by The Cubist

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Find out what these ratings mean and how I rate video games.

I collect as much video gaming paraphernalia as I can get my hands on, especially when it comes to hardware. With over 40 systems including oldies like the ColecoVision and Intellivision, obscurities like the CD-i and 3DO, and the latest and greatest including the Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, 3DS, and PS Vita, I get easily overwhelmed. Most of the time you can find me firmly nestled sometime between 1985 and 1995 when it comes to my games of choice, but I’m also having a great time seeing what the 8th generation has to offer.

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