Last week, whilst traveling home from work, my iPod conspired to play a song by Life Detecting Coffins, “The Whores of Tel Aviv”. It’s a tune about religious hypocrisy (a subject that’s been on my mind lately, though I’m not quite sure why) that still blows my mind every time I hear it. I am not a fan of metal, and LDC were not a metal band by any stretch of the imagination, but this is a song that makes me think that I might like metal.

Then I hear some actual metal and realize, nope, still hate this stuff. Not so much the music as all the other dumb stuff that goes along with it (album covers of demons and dragons, for one thing). Not to mention the dumb people who tend to like it. Sorry, dumb people.

I got so excited about hearing this song out of nowhere that I fired off, like, 12 tweets about how awesome it was, and how it blew everything else ever recorded out of the water. That prompted several response tweets along the lines of, “fine, I believe you that they rock, just shut up about it!” and “if you love this song so much, why don’t you marry it?” That would be impossible, of course, because I’m already married, and because it’s illegal to marry a song (especially in Maine).

I wrote about LDC a while back, and I don’t have much to add to that appreciation. I’d like to repeat that, even though I knew all the guys in the band well, they are definitely a group I’d have loved regardless of whether I knew them or not. However, in my first LDC post I didn’t include any representative examples, for reasons that escape me. I’d like to correct that error now.

Their (sadly) sole album, Catatonic Begat Napoleonic, has as its core a brutal 1-2 punch of “Whores” and “Wolf Boys,” which melt into each other perfectly, even though they are two very different songs.  I have a particularly strong memory of going over the Pulaski Bridge at sunset as an instrumental demo of this song played through my car stereo (courtesy of a member of the band), and feeling absolutely destroyed by its beauty.

This is a wonderful demonstration of how a good album was put together back in the pre-iPod days, way back yonder, six years ago. I’ve assembled them here, as they were meant to be heard, for your listening pleasure.

And for good measure, here’s another excellent LDC tune, “MIsery Smells Like Hairspray,” a title I loved so much I appropriated it for the title of an as-yet unpublished short story that continues to languish on my hard drive. The guitar solo kills me; some of the best shredding Greg Ginn never did.

If’n you want to download the tunes for your own personal enjoyment:

Life Detecting Coffins, “The Whores of Tel Aviv”

Life Detecting Coffins, “Wolf Boys”

Life Detecting Coffins, “Misery Smells Like Hairspray”