Last Exit

Although John Zorn’s Painkiller project would later cement the connection between grindcore and free jazz, this skronking supergroup (featuring future Painkiller member Bill Laswell) laid the foundation with “Discharge” a year before Napalm Death’s Scum even introduced the former to the world. Guitar grenadier Sonny Sharrock, saxophone sadist Peter Brötzmann, and demolition drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson create this chaos. The focus isn’t on the interplay between their instruments. It’s on the collision. While the shorter pieces provide frenetic bursts of acceleration, the longer excursions like “Red Light” and “Crackin” document car crashes in slow motion.

Last Exit was an underground supergroup. Two free jazz veterans, guitarist Sonny Sharrock and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, joined forces with European saxophone colossus Peter Brötzmann, and bassist Bill Laswell was the glue holding it all together. Sharrock and Brötzmann are ideal front-line partners, the guitarist’s stinging waves of distortion matched by the saxophonist’s torrents of post-tonal blare. Behind them, Laswell and Sharrock lay down thunderous grooves, the bassist’s punk-metal sound bolstering the drummer’s rolling and tumbling Texas blues and almost thrash-metal avalanche rolls. This is energy music in the purest sense: it’ll get your heart pounding and your head banging, and/but on about the fifth listen, the intricacy of the members’ interactions — how closely they’re paying attention to each other, instead of just sprinting off in their own directions — will dawn on you, too.