RUDIMENTARY PENI - "Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric" - CD - 1995

   I know, I know...I usually talk about totally random tapes and CD-R's that have been stuffed in boxes for eons, but I couldn't resist posting this after borrowing it from my roommate Matt and listening to the whole thing in my room last night. To be fair, this was also stuffed in a box under some shit in Matt's room. I also know that I constantly refer to bands as "one of my favorite bands of all time". I'm telling the truth. I have about 100 favorite bands of all time, but then there's the top ten favorite bands of all time....and RUDIMENTARY PENI is most definitely in the top ten.
   I first heard of RUDIMENTARY PENI in 1995 (the year this album came out) in the van on one of the first real punk tours I ever went on. My bandmate Joey put on "Cacophony" on a long drive and it completely blew my little teenage punk mind forever. I never realized punk could be so weird, fucked up, inspired, damaged, dark, creepy and catchy all at the same time. When we got home from that tour, I started rounding up all of their vinyl that I could find and began to notice all of the fetus tattoos that adorned many of my friends. I would lay on my floor in my tiny apartment alone listening to their records for endless hours, obsessing over Nick Blinko's insanely detailed, hand-drawn record covers. I would notice something new every time I looked at it. I still do.

   One day, when I was over at my friend Harry's house, he asked if I had ever heard the album "Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric". I hadn't and he put it on. The first thing I noticed was the endless loop of a voice saying "Popus Adrianus" that runs throughout the entire album....even while the songs are playing. The songs are way more subdued than their earlier efforts, but perhaps more deranged in many ways. Some songs seem like they just started off with one line and never got any further, so Nick Blinko just repeats them over and over for waaayyy too long. Part of the reason for the album being so incredibly strange is that Blinko wrote the majority of it while being detained in a psychiatric hospital while having delusions that he was "Pope Adrian 37th".  Arguably, it is their weirdest album ever and, to many people, their worst. I actually like it a lot, although "Cacophony" and their first 7" are still my favorites. If you've never heard this band before, I would suggest to start off with almost anything else by them, but if you're feeling adventurous, go for it.

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Fun Facts:

   1. The band started out in the anarcho-punk scene of the early 80's and never really broke up. The last thing they put out was a one song CD single called "The Chances" in 2009, which is only available with Blinko's last book, The Haunted Head. 

  2. My old band with Harry became so enamored by this CD that I recorded a passage from Blinko's book The Primal Screamer while the other two in the band chanted "Popus Adrianus" in the background. We ran the whole thing backwards and put it on the end of our only 7", released in 1997.