Heavy Metal Bitch Tunes and Rock 'N' Roll Witches

The loudest rockers and heaviest metallers are not always those with a swinging nutsack—although many, if not most of them, should be in the nuthatch. No. No. No.

When I was a boy, the visual imagery proffered by the video of Lita Ford’s song “Kiss Me Deadly,” wherein Ms. Ford writhes spasmodically while, uh, “caressing” herself before doing a slide to the audience and then absolutely shredding on her guitar, was the sort of crystallizing erotic inertia that confirmed for me all of my later mad obsessions. Or some such.

Lita was just shy of The Runaways at that point, and, like fellow hardass beeyotch and bandmate Joan Jett, was embarking on an extraordinary solo career. But as hot as both of those harridans were—and presumably still are—they were not generating the sort of post-apocalyptic thrash-metal destruction proffered by the vintage Mistress of Pain, Katherine Thomas, a.k.a. “The Great Kat.”

Worship Me or Die!

The Great Kat slices and dices and bludgeons and veritably annihilates the audience with screeching renditions of classical music pounded out on a solid-body electrical fuzz-twanger, with “ghastly scales, arpeggios” (to borrow a quote from Salieri) soaring like sparks from a bombed-out ruin into the Satanized air. It’s Bach and Beethoven by way of Kirk Hammett or Yngwie Malmsteen. But on her debut album, Worship Me or Die! (she’s not bluffing, folks), not so much.

Instead, we get what must qualify as one of the most brutal—if one of the most bizarre—heavy-metal thrash albums of the late nineteen-eighties.

Bizarre, because the song structure disappears into a mélange of repetitious chants—“Die, die, die”—and other choruses simply repeated, as if, with all that guitar knowledge at her literal fingertips, Kat had no room left and found herself at a loss… for words.

The lyrics are simple exhortations to kill, suffer, die, and also to do “what Satan says.” All of which, we find, are completely reasonable requests. I won’t quote the lyrics here, not because I am afraid of being sued, but because I think every reasonably sane, decent, living Christian soul should listen to this album on rotation for at least a merciful, gosh-darned week of mental purification. Pain can heal.

The lyrics are the one-liner equivalent of sloganeering or lines of graffiti. In between, we are absolutely annihilated with utterly punishing blasts of thrashiness that seem to be testing the tolerance level of the listener. Kat, whose wild-eyed, blonde, peroxided, leather-adorned exterior suggests the so-polite role of metal dominatrix (playing on the sort of fetishism that would become de rigueur a few years later), intones the lines of her songs (a label we can loosely apply here) as if she were reciting a metal mantra in her throaty, mid-range, hardcore cougar-growl.

At one point the reviewer, listener, what-have-you realizes: “The problem with this album, if it can be said to have one, is that it is too much. It never lets up. It just hammers the listener, without respite, for its thirty minutes or so, and there is never a soft moment (do ya hear me? NEVER!) or really any moment that acts as a peg to hang your hat on.” Glenn Danzig once complained that he found The Misfits’ album Earth A.D./Wolfsblood sounded like “one long song”—that there wasn’t enough variation between tracks to allow the album what ChatGPT would probably refer to as “room to breathe.” None of which is to say that this audio endurance test is bad. No. No. No.

It’s stellar. If you love your old-school thrash, it is essential. You’ll find that those murderous mantras and pummeling thrash parts totally hypnotize you as you go about your humdrum existence, a pathetic, puny castrato, a worm-like male slave in a world where The Great Kat commands you: “Worship me… or DIE!”

The Great Kat - Worship Me or Die! (1987) Original Roadracer Records Full Album

Voluptuous Horror

The other great musical discovery of recent days—one I should have known about decades ago but somehow missed—is The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, an art-rock/punk-rock group around since the nineties, fronted by one Kembra Pfahler, an underground artist and provocateur who blacks out her teeth, Kabuki-style, and wears tremendous fright wigs and tons of heavy eye makeup, combining the visual aspects of transsexualism with a horror aesthetic that tests what we think of as feminine and sexy.

You’d expect, with that aesthetic, that the music might be club-friendly alterna-disco pop or something along those lines—danceable. But no. Voluptuous Horror, on their second album The Anti-Naturalists (released back in the good year 1990), gives us a mid-tempo blast of some of the most infectious punk ’n’ roll you’ve ever heard.

The music is a grungier, saltier version of pop-punk, with an easygoing jog through tracks such as “Water Coffin,” “Gotta Get My Eyes Done,” and “Make It Look Easy,” occasionally flashing little bits of the Pistols and The Dolls and The Clash; X, and The Ramones and something else I can’t quite name (what, am I supposed to be some sort of expert?). I’m still trying to assess the lyrical content by and large (mainly because I often can’t discern anything but the choruses), but Google reveals the song “Alaska” (not on this album) has a fixation with the singer not liking going into homes crawling with roaches. I suppose an understandable sentiment.

Pfahler started her career in the Cinema of Transgression, alongside notables such as Richard Kern, sewing her vagina shut for performances where she’s nude, covered in red paint, and walking on bowling balls—testing societal boundaries at a time when societal boundaries didn’t want so much to be tested (vide the minor tempest caused by the release of Todd Haynes’s queer-cinema classic Poison (1991), or the legal firestorm over Two Live Crew). She sang backup for one Kevin Michael “Jesus Christ” Allin, better known to rock ’n’ roll history as G.G. Allin, on the song “Stab, Knife, Strangle, Beat, and Crucify,” on the Brutality and Bloodshed for All album, released posthumously after the Geegester’s untimely passing in 1993.

The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black - The Anti-Naturalists (1995) [Full Album]

The Anti-Naturalists is good, good, good. You’ll find yourself listening to it on rotation at four in the morning while surfing for tranny porn on XHamster (or, at least, some folks do that sort of thing, and God bless ’em for it, har-har).

Somewhere, as a King Diamond darkness descends, a banshee howl of feminine rage erupts across the churning earth, a screeching Bacchanal shriek as the psycho mistresses of pleasure and pain gather, with their heavy-metal guitar solos echoing in the night, a counterpoint to pathetic male shrieks of agony and imprecations for pity.

“But none shall ye receive, foolish mortal!” shrieks the greatness that is The Great Kat. “Now bow your head and WORSHIP ME… OR DIE!”

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My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.

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