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Pungent Stench.
 Given that it took Austrian death metal band Pungent Stench almost ten years to return to Australia after their first show here in 1993, it's a very pleasant surprise to find them coming back just over two years after their last visit. So I ask vocalist and guitarist, Martin Schirenc (aka El Cochino)what brings them back this time.
"Actually a lot! The whole country, the people, and also the weather!" he laughs. "It's five to ten below zero where we live right now, so January, February is a very good time to leave Europe and go to Australia! Also, Australia's always treated us really well; there's always a really big audience for us to play to, and it's always great fun being over there."
I gather that the band's last tour here went well. "Yeah, it was excellent actually," he recalls. "We finally found a really good promoter who did a great job, and was reliable - we didn't get fucked over like we did the first time we toured Australia, which is also a very important thing to have. It's just awesome playing over there; that's all I can say."
In addition to coming out here for a visit, the band have also released a new album called 'Ampeauty'. Its title turns out to be a combination of the words "amputee" and "beauty", and is a reference to the rather bizarre attraction that women with amputated limbs hold for a surprising number of men (as a matter of interest, the technical term for this attraction is acrotomophilia). One of the album's tracks, The Amp Hymn, deals with this highly unusual sexual predilection, while another, Apotemnophiliac, deals with the even stranger condition of wanting to be an amputee oneself (the song title being the technical term for somebody with such a desire).
"The whole topic of amputation occurred to us because we met this Austrian guy called Gerhard Aba who did the album cover, as well as all the other artwork and photographs for 'Ampeauty'," explains Schirenc. "He's a big devotee of omen with amputations, and his pictures were really interesting, as well as kind of shocking. It's not easy to shock a death metal audience nowadays, but a lot of people get a kind of weird feeling in the stomach when they look at his pictures because what they portray could happen to any of us; most of the women he photographed were victims of car accidents and things like that. We did research and found out that there are a lot of people all over the world who are very interested in, and turned on by, women with amputations. There are also a few very, very disturbed people who actually want to be amputees themselves; they sometimes even get perfectly healthy body parts amputated."
As Schirenc tries to come up with a word to sum up exactly what apotemnophilia is, I suggest "fetish", but he says that that's not accurate. "It's more like what goes on with transsexuals, not being comfortable with the body you live in. Actually, the guy who did the pictures met a woman who had her legs amputated; she let a surgeon cut off both of her healthy - and, he said, really nice-looking - legs. It's really beyond imagining for so-called normal people like us."
Another subject of delightfully dubious taste that crops up in Pungent Stench's latest work is that of Lynndie England, the American GI notorious for appearing in quite a few of the torture photos that came from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the band composed a "hymn" to her entitled Lynndie (She-Wolf of Abu Ghraib).
"Well, a lot of people were very shocked by the behaviour of those American GIs," he explains. "I suppose everyone thought we should have been the good guys over there. We found it kind of funny in a bizarre way ourselves, though; we thought a song about her would be very much in keeping with the whole concept of our band. That's why we wrote it. It's kind of a critical song, but we decided to cover the subject matter in a typical Pungent way, so in the song, she's kind of a dominatrix: dominating men, engaging in extreme sex games, and whatever. I think we were probably one of the first bands to actually do that; I don't know if anybody else has yet... I mean, every guy's dreamed about being dominated by some military chick, pulled around on a leash and stuff!"
James Brazel
 | Pungent Stench play at the Enigma Bar on Fri 25 Feb with Godnose and Slaughter Thou. 'Ampeauty' is out now on Nuclear Blast. |
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