I don't remember at all where I picked up "Club Mondo..." on tape, I just remember that it was $4.00 and I was super excited. Pungent Stench was a band that I heard about from older guys at Cleveland's famous Extreme Musick. As a younger death metal fan, I learned that if the older crew was talking about a band from the 80s or early 90s, chances were you needed to pick up some of that shit or forever be doomed a poser and a fraud. With the internet still in its toddler years, I was forced to actually pick up a Pungent album on a whim and give it a listen without really ever hearing them before. The logo looked legit, the song titles were beyond disgusting and offensive, and the band members were wearing bondage gear. Needless to say I was digging this before I ever put the tape into the deck.
Before the opening track "True Life" was over, I quickly discovered that Pungent Stench was unlike any other death metal band I heard previously. These songs contained a groove, a catchiness that more closely resembled traditional rock than the blasting, ultra technical death metal I had grown accustomed to. Martin Schirenc's guitar playing (and unconventional use of the Fender Telecaster) stood out immediately and the blues-inspired riffage caught my attention instantly. "Family Man," "In Search of the Perfect Torture," and "Treatments of Pain" are well written songs despite their horrendous lyrical content and tongue-in-balls humor. This was one of the first albums I remember listening to all the way through consistently and never wanting to skip tracks not because I couldn't easily, because I didn't want to.
While Entombed's "Wolverine Blues" and Gorefest's "Erase" are often considered pioneering albums in the Death n' Roll subgenre, I cite "Club Mondo..." as an equally important record demonstrating death metal's experimentation with rock in the 1990s. This record would prove very pivotal for me as a music fan and would eventually inspire me to get into sludge metal bands like Eyehategod, Iron Monkey, and Acid Bath. The mixture of blues, hard rock, and death metal is something I still find infectious and precisely why I consider this album an essential tape deck classick.
- Joe