Album Of The Day: Demonspeed, Kill Kill Kill

Similar to my love of pagan metal, my penchant for swing music is often hard to deal with, because while I enjoy the genre I often hate everyone else who loves it. It’s all so aggressively retro, too often obsessed with the outfits and hair and not the vibe of the music. It’s tied heavily into rockabilly, too, and there are only so many dice I can stand before I’m fed up. But given the right push in the right direction, swing can be fun. It can be manic and sweaty and pretty metal in a Tex Avery sort of way. It just needs to be done right, the way Demonspeed did it.

Demonspeed may be the only great swing metal band (Metallum calls them “Bluesy Thrash”). They’re funkier and meaner than Volbeat, but not as serious and steeped in weirdo eroticism as Danzig. They had a good grasp on the old understanding that swing, like metal, is blasphemous music, designed to make people dance themselves into a state of Dionysian frenzy that usually resulted in pre-marital banging. So they merged metal’s guitar tone and subject matter with swing’s upbeat rhythm and tone, and they hit gold.

Sadly, because the late ’90s swing revival was such a cheesy mess over all (remember Big Bad Voodoo Daddy?), hailing any swing that was made after 1945 immediately labels one a douche. And when Demonspeed came out metal was still a dirty word, associated with either bloated rock has-beens or teenagers with frosted tips and no shirt. It’s a shame, because the band’s 2003 full-length, Kill Kill Kill, is an incredibly record, a Halloweenish merging of swing and thrash to create something deeply satisfying in an unexpected way.

Below is Kill Kill Kill in its entirety. Enjoy, and remember:Cadillacs haul brutally-dismembered corpses too.