BLUE HERPS: “NODUL”

I get gratification from this post in so many ways. First, the band is called Blue Herps. If you don’t dig that name, then your sphincter may be too tight. I don’t know for sure what it means, but it sounds like a new strain of STD that causes the bits that do all the thinking to turn blue, before they then turn black and fall off like chunks of rotten meat.

Second, the band is obscure by most standards, and one of our long-standing missions at this site is to shine some light on bands who aren’t very well known. Blue Herps, for example, has a grand total of 17 Facebook likes, and I was No. 17. Granted, it looks like they only created a FB page in February, but still.

Third, the cover of their new album, Nodul, is sick. It uses pretty colors and a nice close-up of some teeth badly in need of dental work that by sheer coincidence happen to spell the album’s title. Man, I wonder how long it took Blue Herps to find someone whose bad teeth spelled the name of their album? This band is either really persistent in looking in people’s mouths or they’re very lucky. Also, I find their unreadable band logo strangely appealing. It’s spiky but kind of graceful.

Fourth, they have song names like “Leucoplasie”, “Flow Beat”, “Tumor”, “Hyperdontie”, and “Blurps”. Some of the song titles seem to be the French or German words for disgusting diseases of the mouth and gums.  Nodul actually has 20 song names, because that’s how many songs are on the album. But most of the songs are only about a minute long or less.

So, let’s see . . . I know there’s something else about this post that’s gratifying. It will come to me . . . Oh fuck yeah, the music!

The music . . . it’s a hybrid of brutal death metal and grindcore covered in radioactive slime, with viruses. Lots of viruses. Also, the gurgling sounds of acid reflux. The band vomit out rapid-fire, bottom-end riff fuzz along with great belching spasms of gruesome electronic noise and vocals that roar and croak like a hybrid wolf/frog. The drumming is also off the hook, heavy on the snare pummeling and nearly always over the speed limit.

The riffing is usually faster than a cheetah with a liquid fuel rocket shoved up its ass, sometimes melding into a solid mass of noise without distinguishable notes, sometimes slamming with sledgehammer chords, sometimes spinning off in a dozen freaky directions at once.

It’s all as nasty as amoebic dysentery and it’s also loads of demented fun from start to finish. It won’t take you long to get from the start to the finish, and even though I can’t guarantee you’ll like it as much as I do (or even like it at all), I can guarantee you won’t be bored. Here’s a pulsing video combination of the album’s first two tracks — “Nodul” and “Leukoplasie”:

 

And here’s the whole album to stream:

 

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS, AND MORE MUSIC

Blue Herps is from Switzerland. They have a Bandcamp page HERE, where you can download Nodul for 5 Euro OR get a free download of a “Bacteriological Sampler” that includes 11 of the tracks from Nodul. The band have also provided a link HERE that will immediately download the Bacteriological Sampler.

And THIS is  link to their Facebook page. I think those of us on FB ought to really blow up their likes. You know, get them up to 20 or 25. So go lick them without delay. Just don’t put your tongue in their mouths.

I found out about Blue Herps thanks to a FB link posted by WHOURKR, which makes sense because one of the two guys behind WHOURKR (Mulk) is also in Blue Herp, along with Gino and Cyril from Deadly Sin Orgy and Max from Daigoro. I don’t know those bands. I do know something about WHOURKR. They’re French, and their music is even more fuckin’ weird than Blue Herp’s — and I like it, too.

And I just found out that last week WHOURKR released a new song called “Quadruple Plis de Peau (711 Snare Drums)” from the band’s new album 4247 Snare Drums, which will be released later this spring on the Ad Noiseam label. Here it is: