Rock · US · Active since 1977

The Flesh Eaters

Gritty, voodoo-infused punk that feels like a fever dream in a noir film. Aggressive poetry meets swampy blues for a dark, high-energy night.

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Intro

The Flesh Eaters sound like the dark underbelly of Los Angeles caught in a high-speed chase. It is a swampy, frenetic collision of traditional punk aggression and a deep, occult obsession with American roots music. The guitars are jagged and hot-wired, while the rhythm section often swings with a loose, jazz-inflected intensity that sets them apart from the rigid four-on-the-floor of their contemporaries.

What truly distinguishes the band is the 'punk poet' leadership of Chris D. His vocals are a desperate, gravelly bark, delivering lyrics that read like hard-boiled crime novels rewritten by a surrealist. The inclusion of instruments like the saxophone and marimba on their seminal work adds a layer of sophisticated, eerie texture that suggests a 'voodoo blues' aesthetic rather than standard three-chord rock.

Start with 'A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die.' It is the definitive document of their classic supergroup lineup, capturing a moment where the L.A. scene's best players converged to create something far more atmospheric and menacing than simple hardcore punk.

The Flesh Eaters are an American punk rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California, United States, in 1977. They are the most prominent of the bands which have showcased the compositions and singing of their founder, punk poet Chris Desjardins, best known as Chris D. While Desjardins is the group's only continual member, the Flesh Eaters' lineup has drawn from some of the most famous bands of the L.A. punk scene, such as the Plugz, X, the Blasters, and Los Lobos. The band's greatest success was in the early 1980s. Though a part of that era's productive punk rock scene, their music was distinctive for its apocalyptic film noir lyricism and often for its sophisticated arrangements, as heard, for example, on 1981's A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die. Desjardins's poetry has been described as "wonderful bleeding collages of B-movie dementia, street crime, Mexican Catholicism and Dionysian punk spurt poetics". The band reformed with the classic 1981 lineup of Chris Desjardins (Chris D.), Dave Alvin, John Doe, Bill Bateman, Steve Berlin, and D. J. Bonebrake and announced a new album I Used to Be Pretty that was released January 18, 2019 on Yep Roc Records. They played several shows in support of the new record starting in January 2019. Billboard magazine premiered the video for the band's first single from I Used to Be Pretty, a cover of the Sonics "Cinderella" on October 9, 2018.
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Our Catalog9 Albums · 1980 · 2019
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