Techno Destructo

Oderus Urungus. Interplanetary despot. Armoured sleaze merchant. To some, a friend. As the lead vocalizor and oftentime main character of masked apocalypse rock collective Gwar, Urungus presided over pounding riffs, fluidic ‘Gwar Juice’ spurts, blood sacrifices and certain other rites that transfixed thousands across the mapped and understood portions of the planet. During the roughly 30 ‘Earth years’ Urungus led Gwar, it evolved from underground curiosity to subcultural sensation to veteran older gods of the modern scene, occasionally dallying with the mainstream until 2014, when Urungus’ untimely passing led to a brief period of uncertainty – before the collective regrouped, recruited new participants and soldiered onwards.

Does the arc of Gwar track that of Alien Workshop, that once and again limitless-by-design boardgoods concern that also had its leading lights snuffed in 2014, that perilous Year Of The Owlbear? The answer is probably not really, but Sammy Montano’s closing section in the Ohio company’s new video release ‘Normalize’ — only the third skate vid in recorded history to draw upon the fabled Gwar catalogue — kind of makes one think. For just about 10 years now a time-honoured parlour game among spectators of ‘a certain age’ has been to assess each Alien 2.0 (3.0? Shoot, 4.0?) video release on general ‘AWS-ness,’ the benchmark tending to range from ‘Memory Screen’ to ‘Photosynthesis’ or ‘Mind Field,’ depending upon age and geometric bearing. Several eons’ passage may be required to say for sure, but the Globe shoe user’s part in this vid gets up there pretty good, glazing clips like the bench cab flip, the backside lipslide up the roof corner, the noseslide pop out to wallride and that one blaster of a loading dock 360 flip with the requisite imagery, some mixed media stuff and fairly confrontational music supervision courtesy of the Scumdogs of the Universe.

Which is to say, confrontational in a familiar way. At this point the styrofoam shoulder plates and technicoloured bodily fluids splashed upon Gwar’s eager faithful are as knowed a quantity as the Visitor and ROYGBIV triads that keep the DNA decks a-shifting. There is an argument to be made that ‘Memory Screen,’ hard as it was to comprehend and even sit through for people in 1991, built staying power because of how heavily it weighted all the visual fuzz, ephemera and distortion, a lot of times seemingly in rejection of the skateboard video’s accepted purpose, IE, showcasing actual tricks — off the top of your how many dudes’ enders can you name?

The steadily thrumming turnover atop the various timelines and YouToob channels and continued pressurization of hard-goods profit margins probably makes it sensible to not descend too deeply into an edit that may make the skating harder to discern and consume, regardless of which company or industry power may be behind it. Would a still-more abrasive edit, with further layers of analog paper-mache oddments and trick-obscuring effects, propel AWS vids yet to come to more prominent positioning in the all-powerful algorithms, or only frustrate already-tattered attention spans?

Could Andy Licardi’s promising pen hand be put behind a fuller-length AWS vid? The driven Frankie Spears is understood to be holding for a Dickies vid, but might Kevin Liedtke soon return with more from the Muni deconstruction phase? Is Joey O’Brien hopefully stacking for some Chris Mulhern-managed project? How about yung Johnny Purcell’s switch backside lipslide? Forget for a minute all the trick-obscuring visuals and effects, was seeing Shake Junt grip in an Alien video jarring enough? Is it gonna be an EXP summer?

Tags: Alien Workshop, Andy Licardi, Beefcake the Mighty, Cuttlefish of Cthulhu, Dayton, EXP, extraterrestrial despots, Globe, Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh, Joey Obrien, Kevin Liedtke, Memory Screen, Metal Blade, Normalize, Oderus Urungus, roof riders, Sammy Montano, swords, the modern scene, the Pretty Toney Album, Yaje Popson twist and shout