Party Diktator – Noise for Zeros

Stand Behind Me / Quiet Line 7″
Amphetamine Reptile, 1994

Worldwide LP
Dead Eye Productions, 1992

One of the most overlooked gems of the impressive AmRep catalog is this blazing single from German noise rockers Party Diktator, featuring one of the most hyperactive bassists you’ll ever hear. And by hyperactive, I certainly don’t mean funky goofball slap bass, or the notoriously overdone bass Crime was guity of, but instead, totally raw, pulverizing, full-throttle, crackpipe-smoking bass that gives Party Diktator an extra aggressive snarl. Sounding something like the precision of the Jesus Lizard rhythm section crossed with the textured, noisy, beefy spasms of another AmRep favorite, Hammerhead, this record totally rips and yet somehow never received the attention given to lesser bands of the genre. Perhaps the fact that their other records were harder to find domestically, or that they never toured the U.S. (as far as I know), Party Diktator never ascended to noise rock glory in these here United States.

So after being primed and pumped up about this band, I sort of expected AmRep to release an album proper, as they’d done for many other kickass bands in the mid-1990s, introducing under-the-radar bands like Hammerhead, Guzzard, Today Is The Day, and Chokebore to the relative noiserock masses, but alas I never saw anything else from Party Diktator. Apparently, Roadrunner Records released an album in 1996, called Dive Bomb, but it wasn’t widely distributed in the U.S. as far as I can tell and I’ve never seen a copy. And then one day, after dedicating an afternoon to digging thorugh the massive vinyl stockpile housed at Jerry’s Records, I stumbled across Party Diktator’s 1992 debut album Worldwide. At that point I never knew such a thing existed, so it was quite the find and made digging through an ass-ton of the worst records known to man well worth the trouble. As you may expect, the songs and recording on Worldwide aren’t as strong as the AmRep single, but it is surprisingly good, considering that it was released a 2 years earlier.