Spontaneous Sunday Discharge

Pain Teens - Sacrificial Shack

For the past week or so, we’ve been listening to The Last Podcast on the Left’s three part episode on the horrific tale of Adolfo Constanzo and his serial killer cult.

It’s mortifying and involves a shack on a barren ranch outside Matamoros, Mexico.

In 1989 I was fifteen and a horror movie obsessed, little skate rat. Mark Kilroy was a blonde pre-med student at UT-Austin. And Bliss Blood was a clerk at a record store in Houston and the vocalist in the gloomy, sludgy noise-rock band, Pain Teens.

I had a scene crush on her. I think a lot of people did. She had a presence.

Mark Kilroy was in the news (when I was fifteen, and Bliss Blood was in Pain Teens and working the record store) for tragic reasons because he disappeared down in Mexico during Spring Break; his body was found buried behind that shack, and the truth of his end was so terrible that even as a nasty little horror freak, it was hard for me to comprehend. I was fascinated. Mexican border towns became synonymous with evil tidings, and even almost a decade later I bristled at some friends telling me they were driving to Matamoros for the day to pick up cheap Valium.

I guess I just don’t feel comfortable drawing out the morbid details here, partly out of respect for the families of the dead. But if you’re curious, the story involves black magic, tortures, ritual murder, drug trafficking, and ends with a suicide-pact shootout with federales. Last Podcast lays it all out, but there’s not much else out there and maybe that’s good. I think HBO is producing a series though; maybe enough time has passed to be able to approach it with the right sensitivity.

Maybe it’s the shack itself, which contained the cult’s vessel of power, the nganga cauldron, that gives the story its terrible atmosphere, epitomized here by this buzzing, narcotic, four minute dirge. Even if the listener can only make out the lead few lines, the song reeks of the heavy air of death in the burning sun, which was poor Mark Kilroy’s (and a confirmed twelve others’) sad fortune.

I’d like to think that this song isn’t just morbid exploitation, like Church of Misery’s El Padrino, and that it’s a group of fellow Texans like myself in 1989, trying to work through the allure of something so awful, and that validated all the darkness of urban myths of lawless Mexico. A few months after the story burnt through the news cycle, swept up into the whirlpool of American paranoia known as the Satanic Panic, my friend gave me a sword he’d grabbed at a flea market while visiting family near the border. One side of the blade was engraved with a serene portrait of a herd of goats in a hilly setting. Flip the blade over, and there was an inscription in Spanish that contained several phrases surrounding the word L’antichristo.

Totally coincidental, but still a very strange thing to be given at the time.

Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music.