Live Skull

Inspired by the likes of Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the New York no wave movement, Live Skull delivered the kind of relentlessly bleak, abrasive noise rock that made their better-known contemporaries Lydia Lunch and Swans into underground cult figures during the '80s. The band favored a crushingly loud guitar-based grind, sometimes creeping and sometimes bounding, while they tempered their assault with sophisticated, arty arrangements and thick, hypnotic sheets of pulsating noise. Their subject matter was invariably dark and downcast, though not as deliberately shocking as...