***REISSUED!!! Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric is the third LP by Rudimentary Peni. Recorded in 1992 but not released until 1995, it was the first music the band recorded after their already leftfield Cacophony album. It is an underrated and difficult masterpiece of truly outsider music. Full of harrowing and morbid songs based on repetition, repetition and repetition, pushing the listener into a trance like mood. Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric shows the most experimental side of Rudimentary Peni testing the punk song concept, turning it into a mantra chant at times while sounding like only Rudimentary Peni could. The album opens with lead track "Pogo Pope," which sets the tone, with Nick Blinko repeatedly singing "Pogo Pope" ad nauseam, and the whole of the album has a continual loop of the phrase "Popus Adrianus" running through its entirety. At the time Nick Blinko was experiencing severe delusions and believed that he was Pope Adrian the 37th and was detained in a psychiatric hospital under Section 3 of the 1983 Mental Health Act. The album is unhinged and challenging but 100% pure and idiosyncratic. This official reissue comes on a single sleeve with printed inner and 16-page booklet with Nick Blinko artwork and has been remastered from the original tapes by Arthur Rizk .
LP $38.50
12/06/2024
***REISSUED!!! Originally released in 1988. Cacophony is the second Rudimentary Peni album. Released after the band returned from their first hiatus following a series of personal events that changed the band forever. The thirty-track LP keeps turning heads 34 years after its release. Far from writing another Death Church, the band embarked on a truly bizarre quest—to record an album based on the life and writings of horror's absolute king H.P. Lovecraft. A dense cacophony of total free songwriting. Dark, gothic, intricate, unexpected head-scratching punk. The short bursts of music twist and turn at every corner—the vocals are part classic Blinko and part spoken word, the guitar is full of distorted awkward tones and the very inventive bass and drums are locked together creating a truly unique album. Cacophony is the benchmark of outsider punk and the influence and cult nature of this album grows with every passing year. This reissue stays close to the original version, with Nick Blinko's incredible cover art, including a 11" x 11" eight-page lyric booklet.
LP $38.45
05/05/2023
***A reissue of Rudimentary Peni's Death Church, originally released in 1983. The words legendary, seminal, and classic get thrown around at will these days, but Rudimentary Peni's debut album is all of them. Recorded over two days at Southern Studios by John Loder and originally released in 1983 by Crass off-shoot label Corpus Christi, Death Church showed a band moving away from the urgency of their two early 7"s and into their own realm. Creating a template that bands have been trying to replicate ever since, while ticking all the boxes to become a genre-defining album. Iconic artwork, a unique sound and their own lyrical universe. All merging seamlessly. Sonically the album is full of Nick Blinko 's extraordinary vocals and equally remarkable guitar, Grant Matthews 's big meandering driving basslines and Jon Greville's tight and relentless drum work which together made something intricate and hard hitting, with a sequence that makes the 21 songs on the album flow perfectly. Visually, the album is every outsider art lover's wet dream. A six-panel poster sleeve with every inch covered in Nick Blinko's claustrophobic black-and-white line drawings, while lyrically the songs deal with madness, religion, death, and questioning humankind from a dark poetic place rarely found in any art form. Remastered from the original master tapes by Arthur Rizk and housed in a replica poster sleeve, including the original insert, Death Church is back in print nearly a decade of no official reissues.
LP $35.25
05/13/2022