Armed and Fairly Well Equipped: A Beginner's Guide to Turbonegro

Hey jügend! Did you know that Turbonegro is one of, like, the greatest rock and roll grüppes of all of times? It's true, buddy. We here at SCB have compiled this handy-dandy buyer's guide to help you out in the heady task of selecting the best Turbonegro record album for your hard-earned dollars. Each record is assigned a rating out of five possible Happy-Toms. (I also listed the first label to release the album in order to give credit where credit is due, although most of these have been reissued through multiple, international generations and a tangled web of reissuing labels. For cover art, I just picked the best version, since the reissue of Never is Forever has a way better cover than the original and I couldn't decide which variation of Hot Cars I liked more.)




Turboloid (1990, Straitjacket Records)


Well here it is, the humble beginnings of the Turbonegro legend. They are pretty humble: this record doesn't sound too far off from the muck being cranked out by contemporary Sub Pop or Amphetamine Reptile bands. If you're into nowadays noise-rock like Pissed Jeans you might find yourself grooving along to the hit single "Cockwork." And "Let's Go To Mars (Richard Burton's Penis)" trundles along on some pretty damn tasty Happy-Tom bass plonk. But in the final analysis, this is a pit stop on the roadway to darkness, and unlike some of the other early Turbo records you won't be losing out too much by skipping this one until later in your Turboducation.




Hot Cars and Spent Contraceptives (1992, Big Ball Records)


"Venom meets Radio Birdman in an institution for sexually abused retards." If that legend-making quote from Swedish DJ Lars Aldman doesn't tell you everything you need to know, maybe you should just stick to listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor or whatever. Turbo's lineup changed pretty significantly in between Turboloid and this one, so a change is to be expected--but what you get here is a full-on transformation from tender boys into rich and flavorful men. Hot Cars is one of those annoying albums that opens with an extended sample--but "Librium Love", the song that follows, sounds much like the scenario Aldman described above, except if all persons involved were equipped with flamethrowers. This is a dark, noisy, demented, brilliant album that more than lives up to the moniker of "death punk"; contemporary listeners may be surprised to find that the band documented here has more in common with Brainbombs or Rusted Shut than they do with later incarnations of themselves. This is the most undiluted of Turbo material; definitive vocalist Hank Von Helvete had not yet joined the band, but Harald Fossberg actually sounds quite similar and the songs here are cobbled together from C4 and cut-up gay porn magazines. "I'm in Love with Destructive Girls" manages to out-Stooge the Stooges with its relentless, brain-nullifying chant of "YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH." Which, subliminally, is informing you that you MUST OWN. The German edition added a cover with a painting of Sirhan Sirhan and bonus track "A Career in Indie Rock", which seems to be a 20+ minute recording of a really nasty gay porn movie. Which is also on the current repress. Rejoice!




Never is Forever (1994, Dog Job Records)

After dumping Hot Cars onto an unsuspecting world punk marketplace, Turbonegro changed their name to Stierkampf ("Bullfight", durr) and released a 10", which I skipped over since almost all of it is re-recorded better here. Turbo here deliver another flawless record which sounds COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from its predecessor. The band billed this album as their tribute to Blue Oyster Cult, and it's definitely a riposte to the "raw, primitive" garage scene then exemplified by labels like Crypt Records and Sympathy for the Record Industry (Long Gone John would ironically release the next Turbo album in the US). Never is Forever is exactly what it sounds like: a "suburban deathpunk opera" of epic scope and vision, like an episode of Law & Order rendered by a Romantic painter and soundtracked by Poison Idea. The songs are also catchier and more digestible than the Claymore blasts on Hot Cars, with jams like the Evel Knievel tribute "I Will Never Die" revealing a melodic tenderness not hinted at on the previous album. But the band that exhorted you to "go with Satan" and "kiss the knife" has not retired: "Time Bomb" is among the darkest and most seething of all Turbo songs, and "Nihil Sleighride" is the unofficial sequel to "Armed and Fairly Well-Equipped." It's an epic journey well worth undertaking--like reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, only with more dicks.




Ass Cobra (1996, Amphetamine Reptile)


Picking a favorite Turbo album is impossible, but Ass Cobra is the definitive one. Ass Cobra is the dialectical synthesis of the ass-ripping death-punk of Hot Cars and the lush, hard rock melodrama of Never is Forever; it's ass-ripping melodrama. Christian A. Calmyer, who also recorded N.I.F., here captures the most perfect buzzsaw guitar tone ever laid to tape, and generally this is the best Turbonegro recording of them all: raw and nasty, but also crystal clear. This stands side-by-side with the Dwarves' Blood, Guts, and Pussy and the New Bomb Turks' Destroy-oh-Boy! as one of the best punk albums of the '90s. The songs here are among their best: "Denim Demon" and "I Got Erection" deserve their classic status, but every song is a gem--and my favorite is actually the bonus for the SFTRI American release, "Screwed and Tattooed", the greatest satanic biker ballad ever written. This album also marks the birth of the denim aesthetic; in Tom's immortal words, "Leather is for empty, little people. Denim is for us big guys! And the kids LOVE it." While the Dicks reveled in being a "commie faggot" band, Turbonegro's denim transformation truly made them into a classic MC5-style rock-and-roll gang, like the Red Army Faction if they were sexy sailors out for vengeance. Whether you're an American punk rock boy or a new wave telephone hooker, you will love Ass Cobra. (Also note that the Denim Demon single features as its B-side "(I Fucked) Betty Page", one of the very best of all Turbo songs and one which should've been on Ass Cobra.)




Apocalypse Dudes (1998, Boomba Records/Virgin in Norway)



Apocalypse Dudes is the consensus favorite, the album that made them stars, and the Turbo record that even non-Turbo fans can love. I still consider it a tiny step down from the previous three albums, but that's basically like saying the Gospel of John is a step down from the other three; they're all essential. And A. Dudes is a diamond-hard, ass-blasting Eurotrash smash that expands on the band's long-running fixation with Feel the Darkness era Poison Idea, The Dictators, and Alice Cooper, adding a heavy dose of sexy glitter magic to create a rich cocktail that tastes like a White Russian with extra semen. The opener "The Age of Pamparius" serves notice: now with Chris Summers (Prince of Drummers) in the mix, this is easily Turbo's most musically varied and dynamic record since Never is Forever. But the biggest change here is the addition of Euroboy, a 25-year-old wunderkind who spends most of the album's run time ejaculating crazed guitar leads in every possible direction. In true punk cliche fashion, I hate guitar solos, and it's testament to Euroboy's abilities that I love his addition to the TRBNGR sound. It might sound like a strange comparison, but he reminds me a lot of Randy Uchida from G.I.S.M. in his ability to deliver wild wank that still somehow fits perfectly into the song. (I think my favorite moment is when he affects a pedal steel in the otherwise blistering "Prince of the Rodeo", with tasteful[!], slow-bent single notes.) And the songs are as poppy and well-crafted as they've ever been, sounding much closer to the grand pomp of Never is Forever than the firebreathing punk of Ass Cobra. Where Ass Cobra depicted a gang of denim-clad urban guerillas on a bloody rampage, Apocalypse Dudes is the "too much too soon" sequel, a portrait of the same gang of deathpunks as jet-setting, world-class superstars: zillion dollar sadists zonked out on hashish, riding a Concorde to a rendezvous with anus. Jello Biafra, uncharacteristically, said it best: "possibly the most important European album ever." Eat shit, Wagner. ("So you think you had an opera? Well, not like this!")


Unfortunately, the sense of excess and wild-ass/ass-wild madness on display in Apocalypse Dudes had some basis in reality, and Turbo broke up soon after, "in the waiting room of a psychiatric emergency ward in Milan, Italy." The last song they played onstage, in their hometown of Oslo, was the immortal Hot Cars classic, "I'm in Love with Destructive Girls." Broken on the wheel of a decadent and cruel music industry, Hank von Helvete returned to his hometown, where he worked as a guide at a whaling museum. But the world would not let our heroes rest, and in 2002 the denim recruits would rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of this golden age of confusion...