I ran into Brandon Zuckarelli over the weekend and he told me about the infectious disease he got that ate its way into his nervous system and rendered his arms and the upper half of his body useless. For most people it’s a rather benign disease but it gets into the nervous system of something like every 1 out of 100,000 people that get it. He’s on the mend and was actually working at Vaudeville when I saw him, but it leaves the status of his current badass band Inoculara in limbo. Back in ‘99 Brandon and current Inoculara singer, Adam played in Umbilical Noose with Brad, Chris Vlasic and my brother Jason. Just before they formed Jason and Brad (along with me and Mike Misovich) were in a band called Pimp Skills that worked the fast-core powerviolence sounds, but with Umbilical Noose they went into full metal overdrive incorporating sludgy doom and black metal influences. The skill and complexity of the music was way beyond anything we did in Pimp Skills. I don’t think a lot of people saw the few live shows they played, which is a shame, and in proper Tucson fashion they recorded this killer three song e.p. and then promptly broke up.
