Last winter, Dangerous Minds told you about Laddio Bolocko, an obscure (but important) art-damaged jazz/rock band of the late ‘90s, which itself was the product of two obscure (but important) midwestern math-metal bands, Craw and Dazzling Killmen. Those bands emerged from what amounts to a non-scene; bands working in the idiom were emerging in isolation from one another in far-flung midwestern cities. All of them clearly had Melvins in their roots, but were so uncompromisingly intense and dramatic in the complexity of their arrangements that none of them—save for Pittsburgh’s marvelous Don Caballero—were able to connect with an audience that could parse what they were doing well enough to actually give a shit about them when they still existed. In a very familiar irony, by the late ‘90s, that sound would be everywhere in “post-hardcore,” but its progenitors would mostly be forgotten.

The story of Craw was told in exhaustive detail earlier this year when rollingstone.com editor Hank Shteamer produced a 6XLP boxed set which included a 200 page book that featured an oral history of the group—nervy move, to so honor a band that registered slightly above zero giveafucks outside its hometown. Dazzling Killmen, having the advantage of being on a much higher-profile label than Craw, fared a little better, but still haven’t properly gotten their due, though the band’s members went on to play in Colossamite, Jim O’Rourke’s Brise-Glace, Japanoise bonecrushers Zeni Geva, and experimental prog godheads The Mars Volta.

The band formed in the St. Louis, MO area, and forged its singular sound with almost no music scene support for such a fringy concept. Their 1994 album, Face of Collapse, was a top-shelf example, maybe even THE best example, of their genre—technically impeccable playing enabling whiplash stop-starts that recalled John Zorn’s Naked City more readily than any rock group one could name, cathartic and discordant guitar stabs, a jaw-dropping rhythm section, arrangements of baroque complexity, and a harrowing, overbearing, inescapable sense of pure dread. But in 1994, the planet was all about Ace of Base, and Face of Collapse landed with a thud. Even in the underground, where Sub Pop and Amphetamine Reptile had primed audiences for extremity, the album got a handful of good reviews (mostly comparing them to Helmet and Jesus Lizard because that was what you compared everything to back then if you were lazy) and that was that. Personal tensions exacerbated by the rigors of touring and poor communication blew the band apart on the eve of a Japanese tour in 1995, and the odds-’n’-sods compilation Recuerda was their gravestone.
 
More after the jump…