Something to cry about

During the first half of the Eighties, some American bands like Cryptic Slaughter, Septic Death and Siege began playing an increasingly fast and furious hardcore, essentially sowing the seeds of what would later be called grindcore. Unlike the genre that England's Napalm Death would codify in 1987 with the epoch-making “Scum”, however, the bands mentioned above relied on a sound in which the thrash riff-mania was still clearly audible, which is why the term “thrashcore” was coined — a subgenre broad enough to also encompass Texas's Angkor Wat, even though theirs was a more evolved strain of thrashcore, built on tortuous, jagged song structures.

Angkor Wat hailed from Corpus Christi, a Texan town facing the Gulf of Mexico, 130 miles southeast of San Antonio, the capital of the “Lone Star State”. Until 1986, Corpus Christi had no real punk-hardcore scene to speak of: the few fans around who listened to Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, D.R.I. or Corrosion Of Conformity (just to name a few acts that were popular in the area at the time) were mostly lone wolves who rarely banded together. In town, if you wanted to play a venue, you had to show up either with a band doing rock covers, or with original material — but strictly of the blues variety.

Luckily, during the summer of 1986, an aspiring journalist, Tim Stegall, was contacted by Erik Tunison, at the time the drummer of Die Kreuzen, a band from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had just released their second album on Touch and Go, “October File”, poised between proto-grunge and what some were already calling post-hardcore. Tunison was looking for help setting up a show in the area. At first, Stegall hesitated, since finding a venue in Corpus Christi willing to book a band like that was next to impossible. Still, he didn't give up. So, after rallying about a dozen other fans of that kind of sound, he managed to scrape together enough money to rent the Galvan Ballroom. Amplifiers, lights and everything else were borrowed from the Boyz, a local band working in new wave territory. The Die Kreuzen show proved pivotal, as it allowed local fans and musicians to meet and build an actual punk scene — though by then the term was used to describe not only bands inspired by the anarchic fury of the late Seventies, but also those that diverged from it, to varying degrees, blending their sound with more or less experimental touches or with the pounding energy of thrash-metal.

It was in this very direction that Angkor Wat chose to head — a band born out of a meeting at a Motörhead show in late 1985, between singer David Brinkman and guitarists Adam “Bunnie” Grossman (originally from Austin) and Danny Lohner. At the time, Lohner had only just turned 15, yet he already knew what he was doing, as shown from the very first rehearsals, held in his own bedroom, where the band hammered away mostly at songs by their beloved Cro-Mags, including “We Gotta Know”, which the New York quintet had placed as the opening track of their debut “The Age Of Quarrell”, one of the cornerstones of East Coast hardcore.

One of the first things Brinkman, Grossman and Lohner did was choose, as a moniker for their band, the name of the majestic Khmer temple located in Cambodia (Angkor Wat, precisely). The choice was no accident: the architectural complexity of that temple was meant to mirror both the band's musical complexity (a mix of thrash, hardcore and progressive) and its ideological complexity, as the band intended to use their songs to tackle issues related to politics, religion and society at large.

Having recruited drummer Chris Chapa and bassist Mike Treviño, Angkor Wat made their live debut on August 29, 1986, as part of the "The End of Summer Slam Session" showcase, which also featured thrashers Devastation and Rotting Corpse, the latter hailing from Dallas. That night, the band raised hell, playing a slew of covers, including Discharge's "The Possibilities Of Life's Destruction", Bad Brains' "Right Brigade" and Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" .

The following October, Grossman (who had quickly established himself as one of the most charismatic figures on the Corpus Christi music scene) organized another event at the Southside club, inviting fellow locals Mercenary, Mdc (furious politicized hardcore-ers from Austin) and Los Angeles' Rigormortis to play as well.

With Chapa out of the picture (replaced by fifteen-year-old Dave "Bambi" Nuss, spotted while playing with a band he'd formed with some friends from church youth group!), Angkor Wat put the demo Demonstration Under Duress on one side of a cassette, pulsing with the influences of what were, at the time, their favorite records: the thrash-grind of Accüsed's "The Return Of Martha Splatterhead", Sacrilege's "Beyond The Realms Of Madness" and English Dogs' "Where Legend Began".

Despite their efforts in the studio, the band wasn't satisfied with the result, having failed to capture the firepower they were able to unleash live. But there was more to it, as Grossman recalls: "During the recording, we set the bass tone all wrong, so you can barely hear it on that demo..." Either way, Demonstration Under Duress began circulating within the local scene. "We sent it, along with a bio and some photos, to Metal Blade Records and other labels, including New Renaissance", Nuss recalls. Eventually, thanks to word of mouth among fans (who had taken to trading the tape following the practice of tape-trading, hugely popular among metalheads at the time) and the buzz generated by increasingly electrifying shows, Metal Blade Records stepped forward with a three-album deal through its subsidiary Death Records. "We were thrilled that a band from a small town like Corpus Christi could get such a huge opportunity", Nuss concludes.

Before the band released its debut LP, however, three of its songs ("Emotional Blackmail", "Died Young" and "The Box – Burners Of The Cross") ended up, respectively, on the compilations "Complete Death II" (Death Records, 1987), "Satan's Revenge II" (New Renaissance Records, 1988) and "Thrash Metal Attack III" (New Renaissance, 1988). While the first two would later resurface on their official debut, the third, "The Box – Burners Of The Cross" (which unfurled a punk gallop and a multifaceted thrashcore), would never find another outlet on the record market.

Having replaced Mike Treviño with Mike Titsworth, Angkor Wat moved into Austin Recording Studios where, between September and October 1988, they recorded, "on 2-inch analog tape", When Obscenity Becomes The Norm... Awake! (11 tracks; 38:52), which would see the light of day on April 11, 1989. The cover depicts the face of a Cambodian woman, distraught over the killing of her young son at the hands of the guerrillas of the bloodthirsty dictator Pol Pot. "We took the image off the TV: we altered the colors, hit pause, and Adam pressed the shutter button" (Brinkman).

It was a piercing image, one that well reflected the themes Brinkman himself tackled in his lyrics: "When I was writing, I focused on things that pissed me off. Our songs touched on subjects ranging from child abuse to cruelty toward animals, from religion to freedom of speech, as well as broader themes like hatred and violence. In some cases, they were more introspective, dealing with issues like self-awareness".

At the time, Grossman put it this way instead: "We feel there are a lot of things that are accepted as if they were the norm, when in fact they're obscene. Things like child abuse, hunger and homelessness are all considered normal, when they shouldn't be. These are issues that need to be addressed. When all of this becomes the norm, then it's time for society to wake up!".

From a musical standpoint, When Obscenity Becomes The Norm... Awake! marked a significant step forward from what the band had put out on its earlier recordings. Nuss recalls: "We had changed a lot over those last few months, because we kept practicing non-stop, writing and trying out new songs at every show. At first, our songs were very short and split into a couple of parts. Little by little, though, they became more progressive and longer, as well as structured into many more parts. We worked really hard, and the music ended up proving it unmistakably. 'When Obscenity Becomes The Norm... Awake!' was a snapshot of a band that, while still possessing the wild energy of its live shows, had already entered its most mature and intricate phase".

To record and mix the album, the band spent a total of ten days within the walls of Austin Recording Studios, assisted by co-producer Kerry Crafton, who had been recommended to them by their friends Scratch Acid, who had enlisted him to record their two EPs, the self-titled one from 1984 and "Berserker" from 1987.

Opened by the dramatic, almost thrilling atmosphere of "Innocence '89" (booming thuds, swirling electronics building in crescendo, a child's inconsolable crying and tech-thrash geometries), the album immediately ignites with "Something To Cry About", which turns a likely influence from Metallica's "Battery" into a jazz-grind brawl, where frenzied guitar riffs collide with Brinkman's raw vocal tone, as he spews out all his rage, since there are no answers to pain and evil.

More measured, "Seat Of Power" makes room for dizzying surges, leaving behind bleak, desolate messages about social decay, fueled by hatred, greed and distrust.

Satisfaction for social decay

That’s the trade the trad we’ve made

The Seat of Power is carved of hate

Born of hate, greed & mistrust

Child of my semen & Mother Earth’s dust

Accept this Kingdom Hell I leave to you

Either way your future's decided for you

The Seat of Power

It's a Legacy

If, on one hand, “Prolonged Agony/Ricky” shows how the band’s hardcore roots led them to the very threshold of grindcore – a genre whose “gore” strain loved to revel in the crudest imagery of death and decay, as confirmed here by Brinkman’s own lyrics, centred on the agony of a Satan-worshipping boy whose legless body has by now rotted away with gangrene, so that being “hung up in his cell” is all he has left to offer as sacrifice to the Lord of Darkness – “The Search” instead brings with it Angkor Wat’s tech-thrash side, naturally full of jagged frenzy and charged with pathos, especially in the final minute and a half, when the song takes on an epic dimension.

Lyrically, “The Search” is essentially the Texan band’s spiritual manifesto: if the world around us is what it is, steeped in hatred and pain, and if one has grown tired of the “brainwashing of preaching”, then the only way forward is to begin an inner search, because “the answers you seek are inside you!”, as Brinkman announces right at the start of the song, later urging us to “know the questions/ before finding the answers”, answers that will make a basic truth plain: “I can’t help the world if I don’t first become myself”.

The answers you seek are inside yourself!

Searching for a little sanity

Not too impressed with this world’s humanity

Looking within for my own reality

Can’t help the world with out being whole myself

Got to know the questions

Before you can find the answers

Sick of the preaching brainwashing disease

Not gonna let the pain bring me to my knees

The answers for usare within you & me

The answers you seek

Look where you’d expect the least

Inside youself

Ask yourself the questions you’re afraid to hear

It’s not as bad as you fear

Know self truth

These are teachings whose echo will also be felt in the following “Awake”, launched by a guitar riff that sounds like a call to arms, still rough and fierce as it bleeds unease, yet proud to fight, because “when obscenity becomes the norm... Wake up!”.

At the start of side B, the brazen riff that throws open the doors to the tortured passion of “Under Lock And Key” rings out like a call to all-out struggle, fuelled by the awareness that “minds are kept under lock”, “isolated”, as well as clouded by “ignorance, apathy and hate”. What humanity calls “progress” is, in reality, a path toward utter alienation.

The prodigious thrashcore assault of “Emotional Blackmail” lashes out violently at televangelists, accustomed to bleeding dry – like that Jerry Falwell explicitly named by Brinkman – hordes of gullible followers with their “emotional blackmail”. One must “open their eyes”, because “if there’s a God, like they tell us/ I don’t think he can be bought or sold”. A few years earlier, Falwell had been responsible for a direct attack on Angkor Wat, who were accused – because of the song “Burners Of The Cross” – of being Satanists. Too bad that there wasn’t a trace of homage to the Lord of Evil in that song, only a fierce condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan...

Centred on the figure of Hitler (“a man who rose to power with evil in his eyes”) and on the tragic events of the Warsaw ghetto (between 22 July and 12 September 1942, the Nazis deported or killed almost three hundred thousand Jews), “Warsaw” flanks a digression with cinematic overtones with two more thrashcore shards.

The theme of youth suicide, meanwhile, is the subject of “Died Young”, in which yet another assault poised between hardcore and thrash turns into mathematical obsessiveness right at the point where the lyrics reach their emotional core, urging listeners to find within their own heart an answer to the urge to end it all.

It’s so sad, it happens all the time

So many people walk that line

A suicide every day of the week

Another young mind put to sleep

The answers must be out there somewhere

Take the time and show we care

Where to begin, where to start

The place to start is in our hearts

The most dramatic moment, as well as the album's most elaborate and longest track (just over seven minutes), is however found right at the end, titled "Circus Of Horrors/Civilized", in which Angkor Wat synthesize pretty much all of their stylistic offshoots, moving with great fluidity between technical thrash, hardcore and progressive, and reaching the peak of their passionate charge in a succession of images that set humanity's supposed civilization against the execrable deeds of fur hunters. However, the lyrics make clear that the "defenseless animals" are a symbol for all the innocents of the earth, killed by "Grandi cacciatori bianchi, con le pistole ai fianchi/ Bastardi felici del grilletto (…)", devoted to the "distruzione della vita" only "per soddisfare il proprio orgoglio".

Having completed their masterpiece, Angkor Wat kept playing live, but something in the band's balance was beginning to crack, not just over studio matters, but also because not every member was thrilled about Grossman and Lohner's wish to pursue a sound influenced by the then-nascent industrial-metal, a hybrid already foreshadowed by a few mid-1980s acts (think, for instance, of Celtic Frost's "One In Their Pride", track seven on "Into The Pandemonium", 1987) and which, by the end of that same decade, could already boast a couple of genuinely outstanding works, namely the self-titled EP by Godflesh and "The Land Of Rape And Honey" by Ministry, both released in 1988. Nuss recalls: "We recorded 'Corpus Christi' under very difficult circumstances. I had already left the band to go to college, as had singer Brinkman and bassist Titsworth. Grossman and Lohner, however, kept writing songs and asked me to join them for the album's recording. So I only had a few days off from school to learn these complicated songs, before starting to record over the Christmas period. At the time, Angkor Wat were moving in a more industrial direction, using a drum machine, which didn't interest me at all. Still, the metal songs on that second album are really strong and have held up over time. Since the band had no singer, Grossman decided he would take on vocal duties himself, but at the time he didn't have much experience. As far as I'm concerned, the follow-up to 'When Obscenity Becomes The Norm… Awake!' is a warm-up for the Skrew adventure."

Although in some ways more compact and polished than its predecessor, Corpus Christi (11 tracks; 48:37) – the title of Angkor Wat's second album – failed to match its predecessor's explosive charge and schizophrenic creativity. Lyrically, though, it's certainly a more refined record, whose essentially existentialist themes are tackled with a poetic edge that's often of real interest (Grossman wrote as many as nine of the album's eleven lyrics).

Recorded in December 1989 at Firestation Studios in San Marcos, Texas, and again produced with the help of Kerry Crafton, Corpus Christi opens in pure Ministry style with the mechanical pulses of "Indestructible: Innocence 1990", a track in which the dark atmospheres of their debut are paired with unsettling pleas for affection.

Hate and war and blind despair

Tears and screams and unholy fears

I want you to look at me

We're not indestructible

The title track, on the other hand, returns to crossover territory, and with great impact too, especially considering that the lyrics seem to evoke the less-than-idyllic scenarios of their home turf: “Born into a hazy crossfire/ The end result of innocence and ignorance/ Flesh and blood cure for emotional strife/ Vision obscured by a soft skin curtain/ Torn and ripped youth in a glass case”.

The rock-solid "Turn Of The Screw" conveys the story of a love that's now over but hard to forget (“Hey I saw your mouth on, another’s face/ It told me sweet secrets and reminded me of the taste/ Of your skin upon my lips”), infiorettandola con una serie di immagini poeticamente cruente (“My face and skull burst and bloomed/ We became the nighttime sky/ Flooded with millions of years of starlight”).

Steady and groovey, yet edgy as in the good old days, "Golden" instead evokes the possibility of filling the void of existence through the "cold and raging wind of God".

Emptiness became my house

Black cracked sight my line to life

I dreamt of angels and lightning flash

And cool, cool rain to wash my mind

Innocence seemed so far from home

I’d wish to rest in a bed of flowers

But hot black sands are where I’d lay

Bathed in the black of night

Eyes awash in a sea of starlight

The cold quick winds of God

Blow through my soul

Amid stop-and-go passages fueled by their usual surgical fury and thrash impact, "Anne Marie" (whose lyrics were written by Nuss) questions, instead, the possibility of building a future without managing to come to terms with one's own past ("But will I ever find the future?/ If I can't forget about the past?"), while the more measured "Birdsong (Earth)" carries an ecological message, drawing attention to the innocent freedom of birds, whose song mankind cannot hear because it's blinded by "selfish complications": “Deafened I couldn’t hear that birdsong/ Singing truth simple and strong/ My eyes blinded/ By selfish complications”.

Opened by the crystalline sound of an acoustic guitar and closed by the solitary sound of a piano (played by Don Seay), the intricate "Ordinary Madness" soars on the wings of an evocative "clean solo" that seems to want to reinforce, with even greater force, what Grossman put down on paper: to protect the mind from "ordinary madness," we must not cast a shadow on our soul (which Grossman himself defines, with great poetic sensitivity, as "a hungry multitude"), depriving it of that sun ("the eye of God that watches") which alone is capable of "giving peace."

When we cast no shadow

And the heat’s baked our mind

Into lonely submission

Then is when we realize

Something as thin as the web of a spider

Holds us back from

Ordinary madness

If "Sinking" (yet another example of crossover-thrash carved in stone) is dominated by that "silence of loneliness" that "roars in my ears," "Schizophrenic" returns, as in the days of When Obscenity Becomes The Norm... Awake!, to tackling themes of a social nature, such as the impact that the spread of television has had on people's minds, now turned into creatures capable only of receiving messages and, for this reason, entirely passive: "We've become message receiver mutated creature." In his lyrics, Grossman also cites the name of the Canadian sociologist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan, author in 1964 of the essay "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (published in Italy under the title "Gli strumenti del comunicare"), which the singer-guitarist clearly shows he has read carefully.

After the rock-solid cover of "Barracuda," the hit single released by Heart in 1977, the album closes with "Sour Born (Driving Wheel)," a track that's surprising by the band's standards, thanks to its blend of Killing Joke echoes, psychedelic guitars, and scattered crumbs of noise-rock, all tossed in with icy indifference. Things are further complicated by Nuss's lyrics, rich in layered imagery that's not easy to interpret, although the whole thing seems to be best read in light of the first two lines, which state that "between black and white/ lies a world of greys."

Although it has often been described as an industrial-metal record (in fact, according to what can be read on the band's official Facebook page, that very term seems to have been used for the first time precisely in a review of this album), Corpus Christi is essentially poised between thrashcore and technical-thrash.

Corpus Christi was also the last work released by the historic Angkor Wat lineup, out of whose ashes Grossman and Lohner, after relocating to Austin, founded Skrew, with whom, throughout the Nineties, they helped keep the industrial-metal flag flying high.

After declaring himself a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails, in 1993 Danny Lohner managed to fulfil his dream of playing with Trent Reznor's band, even heading out on the tour for "The Downward Spiral", an album on which Lohner himself had played guitar on the track "Big Man With A Gun." In the years that followed, he would go on to play with, among others, Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, while also continuing to collaborate with his now-friend Reznor. Often going by the alias Renholdër, he would also turn up alongside A Perfect Circle and several other bands.

In June 2018, Angkor Wat returned to the attention of fans thanks to a show at the House of Rock in Corpus Christi, followed by the unveiling of a star dedicated to them on the South Texas Music Walk of Fame. Right after that, the old friends also set off on a short local tour as the support band for Accüsed A.D..

Three years later, Mike Treviño, W.M. Titsworth and Dave Brinkman got back on their feet under the name The Real Angkor Wat, releasing the EP Worst Enemy (5 tracks; 17:09), once again assisted in production by their lifelong friend Kerry Crafton.

Before exploding into granite-hard industrial-thrash, the opening "Pressure Valve" lets itself be captivated by a dark ceremonial atmosphere of hypnotic voices and tolling piano. "Walls" leans on incisive riffing and Brinkman's buried screams. "Barrage" is tough, as are the title track and the closing "Knock Out," but in their "mechanical" march these tracks reveal that the sacred fire of their early days has been tamed by the winds of (treacherous) nostalgia.

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