If The Ramones (or Richard Hell) created punk rock on the East Coast in the first half of the Seventies, it's fair to say that Wurm -- not gonna try to do the umlaut-thing, folks -- invented grunge, or something like it, on the West Coast around the same time. Formed in 1973 by bassist Chuck Dukowski, who would later join Black Flag, the band recorded one album that didn't get released until 1985. Now, in honor of Record Store Day, Org Music has dropped a compilation of essentially all of the band's work.
The release, called appropriately-enough Exhumed, hit stores on Friday but I'm here to alert you, in case you didn't know that yet, or didn't know just how very essential this set is. Feast finally came out in 1985 and it makes up the first 9 tracks here on Exhumed. It's sludge-y, as others have pointed out, but endearing, with numbers like "Bad Habits" revealing a debt owed to both Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, even as other numbers like "Should We Be Proud" decidedly closer to the sort of stuff that The Cramps were cranking out. In addition to Feast, Exhumed presents the rest of the prime Wurm material, with singles like "We're Off" positively burning out of the speakers. Elsewhere, there's something really sinister lurking in "Time Has Come", the band's cover of the old Chambers Brothers classic. The cut is, like the rest of the tracks that made up the I'm Dead EP, punishing and brutal and ever bit worthy of re-discovery by anyone who's fascinated in the first steps of West Coast hardcore. Exhumed is rounded off with a batch of demos, of which "Sewer Rock" leaps out as an indication of the band's ability to focus as a tight musical unit.
Chuck Dukowski would help unleash a lot of fury with Black Flag but there's plenty of it here on Exhumed. Wurm were nothing if not remarkably ahead of their time, prefiguring dozens and dozens of Mudhoney and Tad offerings, for example, here in the grooves of the tracks on this essential compilation.
Exhumed is out now via Org Music.
[Photo: XO Publicity]