Butchery (band)
Origin: "Splatter Punks" - Jeff Woodall
Description
Finding information on this band is difficult, as they are not very well known outside of Scandinavia. Their albums were only easily available outside Sweden through the 1980s through independent record stores that custom order them.
The primary member of the band is Lars Gerber. He was always fascinated with the occult and in his travels he has come across occult and Mythos tomes, and subsequently went quite mad, infamously committing suicide in a remote cabin in Sweden while recording material for the band's last album. The other band members, in rare interviews given after the chaotic events in the Scandinavian metal scene through the 1980s and 1990s believed that Gerber’s ravings were 'bunkum', but as they were making some money, they put up with his eccentric ways.
Unlike most musical groups of the era, the members of Butchery never tour or perform live. Little is known about the members other than that they live in an isolated area of Sweden. Their first self-titled 1983 album was typical of early death metal of the 1980’s, filled with horror lyrics, fast guitars and drums. Their second album, The Goblins’ Feast, was released in 1985. These albums are rather obscure. A third release, Hymns to the Unnamable, was due out December 21st, 1986, but was plagued by mysterious delays and disruptions, and was only available on rare bootleg cassettes and samples on other underground albums from the era, until an official special 25th Anniversary release on vinyl set of the band's complete discography was released in 2008, coinciding with an aborted attempt at a band reunion that year, with an attempt to tour in support of an EP of songs produced with leftover "lost recordings" from Gerber's erratic pre-suicide 1986 sessions at Sunlight Studios in Sweden.
Classic Lineup:
- Lars "Gorebutcher" Gerber, vocals and guitar (until 1986)
- Christian "Necromurder" Gerber (AKA "Doktor Hemlok", AKA Christian Nilsen), bass and supporting vocals
- Matti "Evile" Pietrov, drums and keyboards
Contrary to claims made by the band in the 1980s, bassist "Necromurder's" name is actually Christian Nilsen, and he is not actually Lars Gerber's brother.
Albums
- Butchery (1983)
- The Goblins’ Feast (1985)
- Hymns to the Unnamable (1986)
Language: garbled English, Swedish, and artificially-constructed "black speech".
The originally published material was recorded on crudely-produced LP records with elaborately-designed do-it-yourself liner notes, album covers, etc.
Butchery (Self-titled, 1983)
The front is completely black, with the word "butchery" apparently cut from a newspaper headline and pasted in the middle of the original plain black cover layout before photocopying. The back is a minimalist type-written track list, with the record label's catalog and contact information printed unobtrusively near the bottom. This album is identical to the band's self-titled 1983 Demo.
The Goblin's Feast (1985)
The cover of the 1985 full-length Goblin's Feast features a goblin-like face inside an upside down pentagram. The back cover has a photo of the band members standing in front of an old castle. Lyrics to the various songs are inside, as well as various illustrations depicting a ritual. Lars Gerber has written all of the songs except for the 11th, which is credited to Hans Jorgensen. The inside jacket of the album has photographs of the band members in various poses, shows how to perform the ritual, and draw the symbols in order to make the spell successful. The song "Fairy Tale Screaming", the 11th track on the Goblins’ Feast album features a guitar solo and the lead singer chanting. This album is notable for being closely associated with a widely-reported wave of "Satanic panic" and mass hysteria that swept central Ohio in the mid-1980s.
Track List:
- Intro: Goat of a Thousand Young
- Splatterpunks
- Chainsaw Butchery
- Welcome to Hell (Venom Cover)
- Lusting for Deads
- Iconoclasm Sweeps Scandanavia
- Sacrifix
- I Am the Black Priests
- Maniac (Hellhammer Cover)
- The Goblin's Feast
- Fairy Tale Screaming / Outro: Summoning of the Maggots of the Earth
Hymns to the Unnamable (1986/2008)
This album was originally recorded in 1986 and left to linger in "development hell", for years unheard by the public except as an unfinished bootleg recording covered with a photograph of Lars Gerber taken at the scene of his gruesome 1986 death; rumors that the bootleg was distributed throughout the late 1980s and 1990s by the surviving members of the band themselves during a dispute with the record label have never been confirmed; the album was finally released officially in 2008, with the cover replaced by a group photograph of the band posing in front of an altar, taken sometime in 1986 before Gerber's bizarre suicide. The official recording contains completed, polished, remastered tracks, finally completed after being abandoned for over 20 years from the band's disastrous final 1986 sessions, including new "intro" and "outro" recordings, and two never-before-heard tracks that were not included in the bootleg.
Dagon Weeping (1992)
(As "Doktor Hemlok") - a controversial attempt by the surviving members at a more "commercial" hair-metal sound, combined with glam, techno, and folk elements, in an attempt to compete with grunge and hip-hop in an era when the popularity of metal was waning - was a critical and financial disaster. The often-parodied album cover is a photograph of the band posing in revealing proto-gothic costumes with their trousers unzipped, in what has since been voted "the most glaring example of fan-disservice in the history of metal" in Encyclopaedia Metallum's "Ten Worst Metal Albums - EVER" list. One single, "Absinthe and Hobbits-Weed", was released from this album, featuring the title track (an avant-garde "filk" song taken from the Dagon Weeping album) and an acoustic cover of Black Sabbath's "Fairies Wear Boots" as a B-side.
"The fact that the band that produced such underground classics as 'The Goblin's Feast' chose to release this album under a pseudonym speaks volumes, and [the decision to use a pseudonym] is surely the only reason [Butchery] can still be taken seriously as an influential voice in first-wave Swedish Black Metal today. The only thing scarier than "Doktor Hemlok's" pants is the puzzling lack of consistency and talent on display in this abortion of a recording. People weren't really ready for the mixture of glam rock and folk metal... NOBODY is ready for that. The only good thing about "Dagon Weeping" is that it's a reminder of Lars Gerber's mad genius at composition, atmosphere, and lyric-craft - R.I.P., Lars...."
- Van VonWacken, Ablaze in the Northern Skies: the History of Tr00 Metal in Sweden
Phantasmen der Nacht(?) (2008?)
This unreleased album contains tracks reconstructed from leftover "lost recordings" of riffs and spoken word passages performed by Gerber during the band's disastrous final 1986 sessions, along with polished versions of tracks from the band's self-titled debut, with guest musicians from various Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish underground metal bands playing additional music based on directions and notes left by Gerber before his death in 1986. This release has been plagued by difficulties, including an inconsistent band line-up, corrupted digital recordings stemming from an attempt to remove samples from copyrighted 1980s horror movies from the mix, rumors of unspecified difficulties in using recordings made during a seance to contact Gerber during production, and a supposedly "cursed" production resulting in inexplicable injuries and other strange occurrences at the studio, with the release being delayed since 2008, and no sign of the album being completed any time soon.
Mythos Content
The album The Goblin's Feast (1985) is known to contain at least one spell: member Lars Gerber has included enough information in the liner notes and in the 11th song to cast a spell, "Summoning of the Maggots of the Earth" (see scenario "Splatter Punks" for details).
Quotes
- "Where are my dreams of love so gleaming? / Demented things now planning and scheming / Psychotic my world fairytale screaming" - Butchery, "Fairy Tale Screaming", as depicted in "Splatter Punks"
Appearances
- Call of Cthulhu Scenario: "Splatter Punks"
