Exit 13

Pennsylvania-based grind rock group with environmental concerns formed in 1994 as an offshoot involving Brutal Truth bassist Dan Lilker. The project brought together Relapse Records co-owner Bill Yurkiewicz on vocals and samples, guitarist Steve O’Donnell and ex-Brutal Truth drummer Scott Lewis. Their opening release merged classic doom metal with blues and jazz, an improbable mix that prompted one observer to equate it with Stevie Ray Vaughan and early Napalm Death. On Ethos Musick Yurkiewicz pursued bleak subject matter, the track Societally Provoked Genocidal Contemplation opening with the declaration ‘This whole world is fucking sick’ and closing its first verse with the line ‘Insanity frees my mind to wonder, I gleefully ponder humanity’s murder’. The band further examined humanity’s appetite for self-debasement and brutality alongside the permanent scars left by industrial processes on the planet, creating an arresting tension between 1960s-style idealism and some of the decade’s most ferocious noise. A follow-up recording sustained the ‘hemp-fuelled hedonist’ approach, yet another side-project proved equally compelling: Yurkiewicz, O’Donnell, Lilker, drummer Rich Hoak and Bliss Blood of Pain Teens united under the name Smoking Songs to reinterpret jazz and blues standards from the 1930s and 1940s.