3 out of 5

Label: Nipp Guitar

Produced by: Takashi Koike (recorded by, tracks 1 – 8)

A couple of 1992 live sets capture Zeni Geva with Steve Albini in tow on guitar, mostly covering selections from Total Castration.

All Right, You Little Bastards!, for its first half, does something incredibly well: it captures the utter intensity of Zeni Geva, and how effectively their music crossed through hardcore, noise, and psych elements. Depending on the album – and perhaps depending on the production of those albums – those elements can get lost on ZG releases, and the 16-track recorded set here brings it to the fore: this is not a group you can ignore. Null’s vocals are ferocious; Eito Noro pounds and thrashes on the drums; and the combined guitars of Null, Albini, and Mitsuru Tabata provide for a style of overload that balances chugga-chugga intensity with rock and roll riffing. Specific to the prior Albini collab on Nai-ha, we get a version of Autobody that shows how much (to my ears) Steve’s engineering style can compress the power of ZG’s sound: what was kind of flat on Nai-ha is dynamic and terrifying here, all of it quite justifying Null’s black metal lyricism.

The two Superunit tracks (from the Nai-ha rerelease) appear as well, with mixed but interesting results: Kettle Lake had initially sounded very much like a Shellac track, but it gets broadened and made more noisy here. Steve’s vocals inevitably separate it from ZG’s hardcore stylings, but the song itself is brought relatively in line with the preceding set. Painwise feels like a step back, though, with (I’d think) Null taking the vocals reins and growling his way through the song, the music – previously pretty expansive, and psych-leaning – gets streamlined more into chugga-chugga, but not in a way that elevates it to the preceding material. Very subjective, of course, but it’s a push and pull that prevented this part of the set from perfection in my ears.

…And the whole album is further reduced by the muffled, low-end heavy secondary set, which was recorded to DAT. While this only takes up four tracks of the disc, that it sits at the conclusion means it can leave a poor memory of the experience overall. All of the dynamism of the opening is lost, and reduced to, primarily, pounding drums. This works on the closer, I Hate You, as a 7+ drone-like run, but otherwise makes for unremarkable takes on these Castration selections.