Cock Sparrer - Forever

We are older for much longer than we're young. Though identity is forged in a roiling mass of hormones and adolescent passions, whiplash snaps of mood and circle, a stumbling procession of twentysomething mistakes, we spend a far longer period of our life letting those hard convictions and iron poses unspool gradually, shifting slowly and corrupting and tarnishing bit by bit with the implacable accretion of years. Which way these convictions bend, which rude form they calcify into is up for grabs, but those early formative thrusts, that first show, first pill, first shuddering wrack of heartbreak, those fights and triumphs continue to loom larger in the imagination and sense of self.

Bands are similar most of time. When we think of the Buzzcocks we remember first the pristine crop of perfect singles that they cranked out in the half-decade of their original incarnation, rather than their reunion which has been going steady for 28 years now. Wire are sixteen albums deep into a forty-odd year exploration of weird sonic places yet their name is perhaps still most likely to conjure the yelping headrush pogo of 12XU.

Cock Sparrer have, like Wire, been rolling along for coming up on half a century now, first formed as a bunch of teenagers in 1972, and they've long been a band that dealt in more than that rush of youth.

Their greatest album Shock Troops, released in 1983, was already moving past the hopeful bloody throb of some early punk being filled with songs that one could, had the term not already been taken, easily define as in attitude and ethos as 'post-punk': the keen political cynicism of Watch Your Back, Take 'Em All chronicling the casual cruelties of a music industry ride experienced and survived, Where Are They Now? calling to account some of 77's champions (Joe Strummer, Julie Burchill, Tony Parson, Jimmy Pursey) for their failure to stick by the ideals they espoused to their wide-eyed audiences hungry for something different (as of 2017 the answer to that question with regards to its subjects is : dead, cunt, cunt, engaged in an ongoing legal (and possibly philosophical) disputes to which of the two currently touring versions of their old band is the 'real' one). Even Shock Troops most confident declarations, We're Coming Back, England Belongs To Me, are songs of return and reaffirmation, in the face of doubt and fears, they're not mindless new bravery.

It's probably no surprise that Cock Sparrer later penned punk's finest old lad song to date, Because You're Young, a song that bolts the emotions of Yusuf Islam's Father and Son (a song of such weaponised paternalistic ruefulness that even its usage in a slick dayglo blockbuster like Guardians of the Galaxy can evoke a tickle of genuine feeling) to the a series of crunching ringing chords and that East End bellow. This is a song that paints the inevitable clashes and missteps of youth with the sharp fondness of distance and time-worn experience. And that was released a full 23 years ago.

And it's now been a decade since their last album, 2007's Here We Stand, similarly full of songs impossible without a long life behind them like Did You Have a Nice Life Without Me?, a long-ago love ruminated upon wryly.

What has a band that's been around that long, been old that long, really got to say anymore? Where are they now?

Well they don't like social media for one thing. And yes that sounds like worst fucking old bloke shit imaginable, but somehow by taking an angle so far ignored by a thousand fuckshit hack thinkpieces, they make it entertaining. Cock Sparrer's take on the issue is that social media is just grassing on yourself, a perspective so far unconsidered and a whole lot more entertaining and plausible than any other I've encountered. The fact that it's also as catchy as anything helps, even if the idea of them referencing Linked In takes a while sink in.

Less explicitly dealing with the internet but still there in its bones, Nothing Like You is the song about the feeling of watching people you grow up with warp and shift rightwards, and in this day and age seems to apply most directly to the feeling of seeing someone you went to school with post an incoherent facebook rant about how great Nigel Farage is. "I  was born in a house like you/On a street like you/In a town like you" it bellows over the driving guitar and the same drumbeat they've been using since John Belushi was alive.

The album is smooth sounding. The riffs are wellworn and comfortable (I've Had Enough particularly recalls tourmates Rancid's Junkie Man), the guitar leads cut through with purpose, the vocals are warmed by decades. Nothing's unpredictable but that's really not the point here. Oi! has long been a cousin of pop-punk and its singalong anthems, leviathan choruses, terrace proud, that undeniable thrill of many voices drawn into one are utilised though in more than just platitudinous statements of unity.

Though of course they can do that if they want, and do it better than almost anyone. The album's bookended by a couple of solidarity anthems, One By One and Us Against the World, that are vague enough to apply to literally anyone but delivered with enough force to bring you along for the ride, get you singing along by halfway through the first chorus. Both recalling We're Coming Back in mode and One By One making explicit reference to their history, echoing Take Em All and namechecking Here We Stand.

Indeed, throughout the album the band's long history trails behind them, but it's used as weight and engine, lending depth and power to the songs that might seem trite in the hands of a band without their standing.

The chunky stomp of Believe displaying that dismissiveness that drove Watch Your Back still in full-force."You gotta try to enjoy life but that's a hard sell/When there's so many bastards in the world." Can't really argue with that. Believe also has a contemporary reference to internet trolls, more evidence of a band living in the present, aware of what's happening around them and not just falling into simple nostalgia.

Their penchant for character pieces like Riot Squad represented in songs like the bitter Family of One, the dismissive Contender which features maybe the best line on the album, "You were a bit of a cunt/But boy did you have some front", possibly the platonic ideal of an Oi! lyric. Even when you're old you still get your back put up by right dickheads.

Gonna Be Alright could be a companion to Because You're Young, here instead of a paternalistic headshaking at some teenage tearaway, it's aimed at the father seeing their daughter move beyond their parental grasp into a life of her own. Like that older song it has a tender sweetness built into it, one that is reinforced by this album's sweeping sincerity. There might be an implication that the person the song is directed at is on their way out and worried about a future they can't control. Punk is so good at screaming itself up in righteous fury at heavy fuckin wounds, massive sweeping blights, like police violence, toxic masculinity, nuclear war, that seeing that anthemic power pinpointed down to one terrifying personal moment of dark truth jars.

Every Step of the Way at first seeming like a similar number to Cockney Rejects' 2012 reactionary banger Your Country Needs You, instead morphing into something more. It's sung from the perspective of some rough-hewn guardian angel, standing beside people at the crucial moments that rise up before them to be fought through, not just war, but prison, cancer. Placing these more quotidian battles in the same lineage as the lionised fresh-faced soldiers of popular history. It's a fair stretch, but the depth of earnestness with which this whole album is delivered dares you to dismiss it as corny. The refusal to wink at itself, despite an obvious self-awareness that this band have long possessed, slowly comes into focus as something that could perhaps be thought of as dignity.

Like on Somebody's Brother, Somebody's Son, eschewing the gangfight bravado for the rawer useless consequence, a haunting breakdown of a life unlived, two families rended by a futile act.

Of course it's not perfect, even more so than Every Step of the Way, I've Had Enough skirts a certain Harry-Brown conservative line though it at least acknowledges the pointlessness of its self-pity. "We thought we were heroes/But it was just another day". Still, it's something of a misstep for a band that's been singing about thing's being kinda shit for 40 years sing about how uniquely bad it is that things are really shit now. I guess we all have days when we're all just fucked off with it.

But it doesn't succumb to such darkness and frustration. The London anthem In My Town finds the band still ready to roll on out and, despite the passage of years, maybe get on a bit of a mad one in a place that made them as "the night has secrets waiting to be found." It's not about a great night that they had many moons ago, it's about the fresh feelings possible, even if the environment that they're in is an intimately familiar one, Which is really what this album is. A certain balm at times but filled with life and loves, pains and pangs. A real life lived in a real tough world, the things that fall by the wayside, the ones that we hold close throughout it all. The things that matter.

Because where are they now? They're right here. How long will they be here? Well, not forever. We know that. But a while yet.

Barcelona - Extremo Nihilismo en Barcelona MLP

10 minutes of rage, Extremo Nihilismo En Barcelona and all that conjures. The whole record reverberates with the heavy sinister throb of a bomb siren, not just in the flickering razortongue keening that opens Bomba in chaos and riot, but a deeper migraine ache, a sicker bonedeep pounding, panicked warning-pulse riffs, a broken half-groove, held slightly too long for a sway, dug in slightly too deep for a swagger, too rapid and swinging for a trudge, returned to again and again, dying off, stabbing forwards, set aside temporarily for chugging rumble on Pasión, laid over with a manic bawling on Bomba, swerving into hard burn on Ansiedad, more conventional hardcore stampede on Seguidores del Orden, but slipped back into again and again, like a returning pain, a familiar monotonous dread curling back up to you, rising up your throat and spine and flooding your skull. That crunch underpins the record, holds it together for its short scabrous life, that and the scorching vocals, laced deep with poison and anguish, enunciating ferociously and biting hard, screaming beyond words on Mi Ciudad. A sirencall of hardcore fury, an ominous wailing or an aftermath scramble, encircling the violence and torment in doubtbells, nagging squalls, painting it maybe as the wild flowers blooming from the rotten mulch of your torture and distress.

Fuck SS - demo CS

Skinner: Only one question remains, gentlemen...what do we call ourselves?
Nigel: How about, "Handsome Homer Simpson Plus Three?"
Barney: I like it!
Apu: Wait, I do not.
Skinner: Er, um, we need a name that's witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it.
Apu: How about, "The Be Sharps?" "Fuck SS?"
(Everyone laughs loud at first, then less, then the laughter tapers off)
Skinner: Perfect!

- Homer's Barbershop Quartet

From edge-pushing flirtation with fascist iconography a la Sid's notorious swastika shirt, to worn in and worn out nastypunk signifier, the SS appellation has proved almost as an enduring part of punk monikers as the Dis-prefix. From Japanese hardcore originators the SS and nearmythic neverwas potentiapunx London SS through Italian teenage lo-fi KBD idiots Hitler SS and Swedish rawpunk legends Crude SS (who maybe did more to popularise it than anyone else) all the way up to the present day and the likes of this band right here. Deployed for ironic juxtaposition (Black SS, Reagan SS, Sunshine SS, Lysol SS, Honnor SS, Stress SS, Stakanov SS, Blank SS, Harper SS, Stepdad SS) or just some shockrock collision of repulsive grotesqueries (White SS, Reagan SS, Attack SS, Heroin SS, Genocide SS) or even painting anything into a fearsome regiment of death (Tampere SS, Kajun SS, Ctakahoø SS, Netjajev SS, Veuve SS, Tempe SS). Commonly cited as Society System, but with those everpresent acrid Schutzstaffel overtones, it's a reminder of punk's eternal inability to sweep clean its vulgar obnoxious corners, guaranteed to get you some off looks, some sly chuckles, some knowing nods, guaranteed to lock you out of any fucking chance of being anything other than a way shitty basement punk band, just the way you'd probably want it.

So here's a list of free topical SS-based bandnames for anyone on the lookout, some of which may or may not get you sued:
Aspiration SS
Austerity SS
Neoliberal SS
Mortgages SS
Osborne SS
Corbyn SS
Obama SS
Skip Bayle SS
Newscorp SS
Trump SS
Walmart SS
Wholefoods SS
Fuckboy SS
Upworthy SS
Tumblr SS
Smartphone SS
Di SS (or maybe Dis SS)
Drake SS
Beyhive SS
Meme SS
Actually SS
T-shirt SS
Prince SS

It's also an interesting insight into the subtle details of associations. Flip that SS to the front of the word (SS Decontrol, SS Kaliert) and it brings to mind a big fucking boat more than a bunch of murderous scum. Or go the other way and drop a stray space somewhere onto carefree innocent band names and the meaning immediately slides into the dark, Crass become Cra SS, Piss become Pi SS, The New Dress become The New Dre SS. La Urss, Rock Goddess, Gess, Juntess, Gay Kiss, Kiss, The Mighty Mighty Bo SS Tones all end up grubbier and shittier and in the same realm as bands like the The Mau Maus, Joy Division, Adolf Hitler Klan, Sieg Heil, Nazi Dust, Marilyn Manson, Boston Strangler, Viet Cong, Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge, Jack & the Rippers, Doctor & the Crippens, Slaves, Massacre 68 and others who have or have not caught varying degrees of shit over their decision to emblazon something as ultimately trite and trivial as a rock and roll band with the moniker associated with the very worst moments and decisions and trends in human history.

SS's staying power probably springs from a particular balance of comic dulling and resonant notoriety, fed and sculpted by the constant pop culture presence of the Nazis, Hitler long more meme than man, running for election in a sleepy Somerset town in Monty Python, smashing through windows in Danger 5, his soldiers the go-to evil monsters for any guilt-free blast-em-all war movie along the lines of Where Eagles Dare, even profound attempts to get to grips with the horrible humanity present somewhere within like Downfall get flattened into safe silliness by endless youtube variations, all these things (and thousands more) putting us at some psychological remove from the disgusting truth of them and their acts. And the notoriety/familiarity coming into play cos there's no point tagging your band LRM and then spending loads of time explaining what the Lord's Resistance Movement is, you want that immediate jolt of shockvalue recognition.

"How many years was it between Charlie Manson being the terror of California and Charlie Manson being an image on joke t-shirts? I have a shirt somewhere with a pic of his face and, underneath it, the words CHARLIE DON'T SURF. Hitler's a cartoon figure now. Eminem dressed up as bin Laden within a couple of years of 9/11. It's interesting to me how we defang our nightmares -- by mocking them, but also by wearing their skins." - Warren Ellis

So here we have a contender for possibly the most spitefully moronic name yet (still waiting on a Cunt SS but I'm sure punk will make that leap some day). This demo comes emblazoned with a crossed out totenkopf, raising yet another interesting linguistic wrinkle, the difference in visions conjured by the name Fuck SS (sex party swinger death squad) and Fuck The SS (righteous antifa headkickers). It's all wretched out screams echoed into incomprehensibility and submerged deep in the filth and squawl of furious poundings and crushing raw guitar rage, from Trend On, bass thrum into crash and chaotic clinking, to the weirdo 1-2 stomp/warble of Social Real Estate, shadows of a sneer somehow present in the bonefeel of the blasted-out screams, descending into utter shitstorm panic. Slow Club's roll feeding into a superspeed thrash that rattles with grindcore relentlessness. Father's Day born out that noise, getting into jump-up punk beat, running itself over with weird scribbleshatters, exploding, fading. It's a compelling mix of modern punk's smoothest touchstones, d-beat fills, käng reminiscences, pogo guts, vocals like the excavated field-recordings of a rebellious tortured ghost, carrying a certain playful snot through hellish howls, like a tape-decayed longlost Comes demo filtered and churned up with Fader War noise.

Bloody dumb name though.

Cianuro - demo CS

Showcasing more of London's current vibrant and heaving punk scene, a tape of stabbing midtempo Spanish-invasion punx featuring members of Frau/No/Retrofuture, a venomous razorwire shimmying, shaking with rage, stomping with life, deepened and coarsened by the brokenglass vocals. The spasmodic scratchings of the guitar, the rumbling sway of the bass, the pop and kick of the drums. Cancion De Amor particularly is a vicious mover, at once a dancefloor filler, a fierce bomb. Scraped together and vindictive, cutthroat and catchy.
 

Steel Chains - Demo 2015 CS

Choppy poppy punk, running along like a pumped-up version of Screaming Sneakers's Violent Days, half-wistful guitar lines cutting across the songs, with a similar melodic bellow to The Gateway District teasing the most out of the lyrics about difficult routes through life strewn with broken ties and solid mistakes, and the stubborn persistence and ultimate reaffirmation that eventually flowers in the wake of these lessons learnt hard. "Things have been tough and/Things have been strange/There have been horrors, and we know by/And we know" as Instincts says.

Soma Coma - Dust 12"

Sickened animalistic hardcore from Australia, frenzied and spewing bestial vitriol among thunderous beats, an unleashed creature of demonic hiccups and burps, inhuman acidspray growls, the guitar holding remnants of melody and stretched out like a pickled skin.

Ayak, Akai taking its name from the secret KKK codes, (Are You a Klansman? A Klansman Am I, bigots can't complicate things too much) a gnashing vision of vile cultic bullshit, hate hidden, secret decadences and rituals lurking behind respectability. "DISGUSTING PAST AND PRESENT OF HIGHLY EVOLVED MANKIND." This record is outraged by the world, its cruelty and coldness, its malicious acts. Area Boys is about the Igbo genocide of the 1960s, evil curling guitar lines, a stumbling into a thrashing panic as it digs into the monstrous specifics of violence as well as drawing broad strokes of frustration and beaten-in pain in songs like Gimme Soma and Never Again, thought and freewill excised slowly by the day.

Working in blunt declarations of anguish ("GOTTA RAM MY HEAD THROUGH THE WALL") and brutal bitter ironies, Imperial Dick's "TEACH ME CIVILISATION! TEACH ME MOTIVATION!", the title track's "SHIELD YOUR EYES/AS PEACE FALLS FROM THE SKY" before that constant fury rips itself apart, slowing and faltering, the ripping precision and consuming screams melting into themselves, warped and unsustainable. "IT TURNS TO DUST..."

Tropical Nightmare - demo CS

Throbbing psychedelic hardcore from Brazil by way of London at their best on tracks like O Prazer De ser Asceta when they strike a dirty vein of punk grooverush, the bass upfront and packed with crustgrit, the vocals dry barks of rage, the guitar cut free dancing flickersharp and wild over the top like a spirit of trickster noise. The whole compelling drive dragged out of the empty ambient wastes that open Prego Na Areia, busy and loaded with fleeting images of pain, moral rebellion, apocalyptic cities, uncomfortable headspaces. Tropical Nightmare move like the snared ghost of the pulsing rhythms of anger rippling out of you.

Blazing Eye - s/t 7"

Killer LA hardcore punk, mutilated and GISM-throated snarlings, darkpunk undertones, noise an insistent presence but held at bay, dragged behind by the reckless pounding, the violent chopping riffs, the rash fraying solos. Reaping that brutish Japanese hardcore rush of the likes of Zouo's The Final Agony, LSD's Jast Last and The Execute, who might've caught hardcore more perfectly in two words than anyone else before or since with their Blunt Sleazy EP. Blunt. Sleazy. "I WILL KILL YOU" blasts Kill You and you believe.

Dawn of Humans - Slurping at the Cosmos Spine LP

Another NY-beat monster squirming its way out of the Nuke York depths, long possessed of a transcendent liveshow, Dawn of Humans, transfer that energy to their first full length. Scuzzy guitar dragged over pogothump rhythms runs Slurping at the Cosmos Spine, strapped up equally ready for an imbecilic slamdance or fresh aperture gouged into your third-eye. The vocals are the most divergent instrument here, snapping lizardbrain warbling and strained whinnies, inane whirling ditties with the cadence of playground taunts, deep dogbitten threats, panicked jolts and spasms. There's the tapewhine and flickering spitshake of Possibility Box, the rattling of Secretion, the fleshy vellication of Painful Mountain, the restless clamor of Dug Hole, the pumpfake slobbering dronedrawl of Horseblind, slipping down into dark. All the way through to the pressing freakstamp of Foundation, Dawn of Humans snatch songs from fragments and shards.

Gnomic visions of a world in flux, half-glimpsed through a mucal veil. Oblique gerunds trailing off, "As we stand on firm ground, we sink in, callousing" on Horseblind, Fixation's repetitive sneer of "Always bending", Dug Hole "Creeping, seeping, crawling", Possibility Box "Knowing, not knowing". Dawn of Humans trick out the scribbly essence of thought, coalescing and tearing, tumbling off into the ether. It's a world of traps and terrors, fears lurking beyond or within, their clammy tendrils brushing against up against you as you surge bodily and stumblemosh in the gloom. Jump-up music for aborted seances, busted headcult punks in primordial movement, dancemoves and directions sucked greedily straight from the collective unconsciousness of the puerile choir immaterial.

Rixe - Coups Et Blessures 7"

A release that's seemingly been greeted with as much surprise as it has acclaim, Oi! having painted itself into a particularly narrow corner of punk rock's sprawling family tree, the prospect of a modern Oi! record that appeals to those beyond the sort of people who would willingly listen to the Gonads (the worst band of all time? probably, yes, the worst band of all time) doesn't come along that often. More recently New York's Vanity and London's Crown Court have been some of the few bands that eschew the parochial oldbloke mutterings and mouthings, to escape the especially harsh Sturgeoning tendencies of bands formed by people hanging on a bit too tight to Shock Troops or Voice of a Generation.

Add to them this crunching French stomper that similarly avoids the smoothed-and-sanded banality that characterises a lot of modern tilts at that subgenre. Inevitably invoking comparisons to the classics of French Oi!, the more straight-down-the-line Camera Silens songs, the whirring bite of L'Infanterie Sauvage demos, it's also got more than a touch of Nabat's roughed-up Skins E Punks attitude in its commanding drive, but its tone is all its own, a thick, muddied and fuzzed depth that powers its stocky collection of shoutalongs. Four grubrock fightstarters with choruses to get stuck into even if your schooldays French is a wispy disjointed memory of random nouns and half-declensed verbs floating grammarless in the more motheaten corners of your head, no matter how much (or how little) hair it may sport.

Big Zit - Electric Zit Vol. 1

Batty Midwestern mania, yipping and yowling its way through five tracks of mispelt and misshapen kidpunk, darting guitar lines squiggle their way scribble-sharp across your brainpain, riffs flip and kick against each other, the vocals another childish tantrum, strained and rubbed raw, the whole thing giving the odd feeling sometimes of an old shitty scratched-up heartlandrock 45" played at 78. In and out in five tracks under five minutes, from Suhbuhb'n Varmun's manic bass runs to Skoolyahd's runaway train drums, a real frantic squawky frenzy.

The Lowest Form - Negative Ecstasy LP

Knockdown dragout noiserock/hardcore, built of thump and growl. Crashing out of skinitch blackmetal warbles, rolling into thick gritty thuds. There's the off-face downward spirals of Droppin' Bad Boys and Comin' Down Ruff, two sides of a seething desire for complete escapism, "ALL I WANNA DO IS GET OUT OF MY HEAD" vs "I'VE DONE A BAD BOMB/I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS." There's the hovering heated panics of Some Horrible Bug "I START TO ITCH/I'M BURNING UP" and Wrong Decision, the bloodily-excised suicidal ideation of Telepathy or Exhaustion "NO TIME TO BREATHE/KILL ME NOW/NO CHOICE IN LIFE/KILL ME NOW". The Lowest Form operate in interior badlands, a mind to break and the devil to pay. Negative Ecstasy rolls it all up with a long terror, churning and wriggling, excoriating vocals, coiling guitar scritches, chugging bass, unrelenting pogo-punch drums, one more crimped nervous breakdown, one more bad bomb, one more horrible bug.  The Lowest Form can stick a rumbling groove, a swinging moshy rip-and-roll, or smash apart with a sudden shattering blow. Negative Ecstasy is a chainsaw surgery, replete with harsh buzz and flailing screams, a private world on the edge and exposed, real and deadly.

No Form - s/t 12"

Capturing a liveshow as barbed and intense as No Form's regular stage-destructions is an almost futile task. I missed their first London show as they were playing on a Monday night and I was knackered from a real heavy weekend, only to wake up to a barrage of tweets and statuses from all my mates proclaiming them the best live band in the UK. Luckily I didn't have to wait long to catch them and see that the hype was real. I've seen them several times since then and they have always utterly owned the space, filling any room with tortured noise, confrontational theatrics, performance art precision and hardcore fire.

Their first vinyl release, a 12" on Muscle Horse Records, inevitably falls short of those ferocious and captivating sets, but that's no criticism. A band always should be better live than recorded, should always thrive more readily in the whirr and spirit of stagework and affray. For anyone who has not had the luck to see No Form in the flesh, this is a more than adequate primer. Five tracks of acute bitterness, flayed hardcore noise, a grisly clatter pitched somewhere in the barren abrasion/power hinterlands between Harry Pussy and Mecht Mensch, but wholly its own, screeching and keening, pulsing and slamming, writhing and roaring. Freakout upon freakout, scarifying glares and feedback flues. Goddess of Fire, Barrier and Meander are all wild ones, utterly unhinged, paroxysms of buzz and blood, screaming with pain, pounding with ravaged zeal. "Plasmatic ooze penetrates the brain/The liquid becomes the acrid rain" tears Barrier. "Abyss of skin and muscle covered shit. I may be inhibited by a cretinous cancer but at least it means there is something inside" rages Meander.

The Untitled track on side A and the long jam that eats up the whole of side B are dangerous throbs, building out of bassline in the manner of less-spiritual, more-fucked-off Les Rallizes Denudes, hanging the flaying chaos around a simple axial point. Whereas I've always found the rhythm-rooted noiseswirls of Les Rallizes Denudes enormously calming, something that brings me down from heights of anxiety, letting you focus on something central and uncomplicated as the sheaves of guitardiscord slip off and you emerge more focused, less frazzled. No Form allow no such dive into the noise-serene, living more like a wartrudge, beset by demons and lithe scuttling terrors, a monotonous process of bloodied bruised determination, a caustic drag through a mephitic bog. No release, no escape, no compromise, No Form. See them live.

Detergents - No Salvation 7"

UK15 punk with dark angry hearts and quickshuffle dancing feet, three tunes of Crisis-sharp bouncing basslines, chunky cutting riffs, singalong Court Martial streetpunk choruses. Gouging back through all the years of punk's constant mutations, noise-tributaries, pop-offshoots, the stylistic accretions and sub-subgenre codifications that have splintered out in the last 25-odd years, to some pure '77 simplicity, stripped-down rough-hewn pissed-off bangers. No Salvation's apocalypse ditty "It's nuclear at attack!/Your eyes will burn/Your skin will crack!", Turn Off Your TV's media-maddened call-to-arms, Dark Days rocking with the frustration of watching this shithole country been pushed gleefully further into the morass of profit and fear. As depressingly apt in 2015 as it was in 1980.

On Quality Control HQ.

Gas Rag - On the Beach 7"

The final and posthumous Gas Rag 7 inch rushes them out the door with the same screwed-tight hardcore fury that blazed them through their previous releases. The same speedpunk Fix fix, stamping runners of unbreakable cycles, vicious circles, snarling with cynical karma on On The Beach "Don't we all deserve to crawl?", confronting the inevitability of fucked destinies on Human Bomb "His path was clear he had no choice/Now he's a human bomb", the social prisons of Short Leash, the real prisons of Neglect, a series of jails spun out of complacencies and worn paths followed, built and maintained from structures unchallenged and flourishing, conventions obeyed. Burning and bright, Gas Rag made hardcore confined and screaming.

Hank Wood & the Hammerheads - Stay Home LP

"It looked like a city. Ghostly, wavering buildings appeared through a drizzle of midnight rain. Of course, no two minds were alike..." - Terry Pratchett, Thud

Stay Home, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads second album of Mummies-beat New York squalorsquawk, Quintron-by-way-of-Queens, following on from 2012's Go Home, possibly my favourite release from that year. It's more panicky though, Go Home having its fair share of tuff cunt strut in songs like It's Hard On The Street and Don't Walk Away From Me, Stay Home rippling with more uncomfortable grooves, restless itchings, claustrophobic mutterings, skittering percussion like the ricochets of paranoia and angst of the inside of your skull. Go Home had a more conflicted attitude towards its city environs, stumbling between pissed-off rantings and face-up fuck-offs, Stay Home has burnt itself out, wrapped itself too deep in the toxic understandings and fetid cracklings of the city and it wants out.

It's an album living in a maze of traps, internal (Neurosis's agonised "THE DOCTOR SAID TO GO FUCK MYSELF/BUT I'M IN MAD PAIN/I KNOW IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD/BUT I CAN'T CHANGE", The Ghost's frantic "IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/THE MIND/THE MIND IS THE PROBLEM") and external (In Bookings' jailhouse lugging "THROWN INTO A CAGE UNDERGROUND/TRAPPED BEHIND BARS WITH A MILK DRINKING CLOWN/TAKE MY WILL/TAKE MY PRINTS/TAKE MY LACE", Shook & Hungry's propulsive roll of "I'M LIVING IN A DEEP DARK PIT/CONCRETE WALLS TALL AND THICK") and then times where these two merge in a psychogeographic wounding, ripping up city and head, pavement and frontal lobe shocked and splitting simultaneously as on Nervous City's repetitive rankle "BROKEN BRICKS/ANXIOUS CITY", These Chains's blunt instrument jabbing "THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE IN A CITY THAT DEPRAVES ME/CYCLE CYCLE PRISON CYCLE".


But whenever there are traps and prisons, dreams of escape snarl up, like This World Is Beat and In Space imagine a way out from these insomniac wanderings beset by chaotic urban chatter. Searching for silence and isolation, an escape from this noir of perpetual rain, this pulpy shitsmear of an Ed McBain potboiler, interminable degradation in familiar patterns, they imagine the free-floating void, "DRIFTING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS/PEACE AND QUIET/WHAT IS THIS" but these remain a fantastical vision, a utopian oblivion tickling inside the dank confines of a old city mentality, built-up tight and built-down deep, cramped, no sprawl.

Rollicking along, Stay Home bounces with gunk and gusto, keys jabbering, guitars gurgling and squeaking like cyclical thought patterns spinning off the axle, infectious skeleton-rattle rhythms like snatches of blackened calypsos, breathy oohs and aahs and huhs like James Brown interjections or stress-induced ticks, like little snorts of pressure released ("THE PRESSURE/THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING/AND I'M SUFFOCATING" on Shook & Hungry). Shaking with a cokesick shiver throughout, ratty gnawings at the worn burlap of your brainfilm, the fraying diaphanous membrane of your psychological wellbeing the relapses of What's So Bad About a Bad Idea, the ugly realisations of I Thought I was a Good Man, tuning into the repetitive rhythms of anxiety and anguish, depressive diggings. A city's bricked-up sickness let loose, the scratching inside the walls amplified and shaken out.

"He turned down a winding lane where pain had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people's feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air." - Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole

Sheer Mag - II 7"

The second 7" of this Philadelphia punk band. Sheer Mag lay a patina of dirt over classic rock riffs, like Thin Lizzy as a region rock band. Free bent outta shape, Bent Outta Shape dragged through with hooks. Echoes of bits of powerpop like The Frenchmen's No Surprise and its melancholic pomp, something like Hanson Brothers's Right Back Where We Started From cover but jumping back to Maxine Nightingale's original vocals.

It opens with Fan the Flames's shimmy swagger, rueful bad neighbourhood blues, singing of old houses and decrepit fixings, reverberating with that Double Duce charm, the chaos of a home that is shabby and barely held-together both inside ("Getting hard to stay in tune/The boys are getting me down/I'll be staying in my room") and out ("In the dark and the bitter cold/They're freezing us out/It's as good as gold"), but still shakes and lives with the feeling of a home in spite of the spectre of gentrification lurking in the background.


Travelin' On's jangle and sway cataloging the whispering lure of the roads, the rough shackles of wanderlust, living drifter mythic, burnt bridges and patched soles and leaving town as you watch yourself leave town, moving like a snowball down a hill, silently gathering yourself for an impact. "When all the smoke was clearing out/Oh yeah I was on my own/I ain't coming home to you/I was born to roam the streets yeah."

Button Up a fuck-you self-affirmation, that precarious place where telling others you're not to be fucked with and at the same time convincing yourself of that fact, of telling yourself you can deal with some shit, of screaming at the world that you're through with their shit. "I'm taking time whatever I do/I'm working hard whatever I do/With You"

Whose Side Are You On?, echoing the old union tune, but grounding it less in accusatory polemic than in the bonds of friendship and understanding stretched in the face of too much real shit, as slipperily unsteady as it it forceful and joyous. "The factory wheels'll keep spinnin along/It ain't cut and dried/And it never will/But the fightin' baby that's half of the thrill"

The diminutives and asides that pepper the lyrics adding to the sharp familiarity they carry, 2nd and 1st person, conversationally poetic, a distillation of times when you somehow managed to say the right thing. They assume you're conversant with certain knowledges, certain struggles. And these are often worn topics, the road, home, friendship, the fight, your fight, but they're worn like scarred fists, discoloured deformed couches, rusty cars with silly nicknames. They're worn with real living process and the battering winds of experience.

That's part of what gets this songs stuck so deep into you, like the way the Hold Steady could root around in a riffed up charger and pull out of it a smaller closer story, but with greater personal kick here, a more tender gutpunch, a brighter spark. Mixing those punk-fractured intimacies and dilemmas with a wayward scrappy version the kind of music that reminds you of your dad getting really drunk and ranting about how he wants this song, this song playing right now, blasted at his funeral good and loud.

I've had this EP on my phone for a couple months now and back in May after a show it had me half-cut and footloosin' it up around an empty coach station at 2am, work seven hours and 220 miles of megabus away, but I was skipping around free in myself in a way I rarely feel until I got too hype and attempted to leap gracefully onto a bench coming very close to a dramatic faceplant. These songs swallow you up in their world, they tell you to fuck off and hold you tight with the roughness of a true friend, they get you movin, whether it's out into the world or just onto to the dancefloor. There are always steps that you need to take, there are some steps that you need to be reminded to take. By a friend or by a song.

Inmates - s/t LP

Inmates first LP in 12 years is everything you could expect from the band that typified a time and a place that's come to be spoken of in shitpunk circles with the kind of semi-apprehensive reverence reserved for the edge-riding scenes of crazed hardcore violence, responsible for some of the best fucking records and the most dangerous shows of the 90s and early 2000s. The oh-shit heady riot-madness and hardnut aura that's super cool when viewed through the intoxicating lens of old teenage wildness and the distancing prism of grainy youtube videos, but the more adult person inside you kind of knows would probably leave you real real fucked up in actual fact.

This is a consummately put together violent ugly record. It knows when to drive, when to snap, to stop, to stomp, to grab you with the rough thickness of the sound like you're hearing the reverberations of rusted steel cables rather than guitar strings, when to squeal clean in the solos, the vocals a perfect blend of menace and method, wrapped up in mutant snarl and growl. Got its Japanese/American hardcore roots balanced and locked in. It's music well-versed in that cathartic power of capturing that semi-inchoate anger that inevitably swirls out of you as a potent amalgam of sublimated depression, unshakeable frustration and gut-stuck futility. The only problem is that its also everything you could expect from a band that hasn't released an LP in 12 years.

Sushi; 39.6 lyrically brings to mind nothing so much as Separation of Church and Skate, NOFX song from 2003 that got immediately put-on blast by Propagandhi for its tired-ass olds-gonna-old premise way back then, Joe Dolce is literally a Joe Dolce cover, whose 70s cod-Italian novelty hit is repurposed as a hardcore anthem, and there's a a storming cover of a Cleveland hardcore banger from 1984, The Guns' Rotting Away. Crust Dust is a song about how crusties are stupid, a punk song about how crusties are stupid is possibly the only thing more played out than a crust song about how nuclear war sucks. It's all a bit like Eminem's Rap God, formally sick genre-savvy constructions, but essentially reruns of stuff that played well 15 years ago, Em dropping six minute tracks of dense hyperspeed multi-syllabic rhymes and still making tired gay jokes and Monica Lewinsky references. Inmates writing a slammin song about annoying oogles.

The panic and pain of Into Crypts of Smith is a tough hit though, touching a deeper darker emotion than most of the other songs, the generalised threats about running someone out of town, envisioning beating the shit out of some fucking prick, that classic subtweet hardcore, on Little Bitch or Form a Mob, still kill, still get into that primal righteous stomping part of you, cos it's a perfectly hardcore record, but too perfect to be a perfect hardcore record. Or to phrase it in a even glibber fashion, it's hard but there's not much at its core.

Disguise - Signs of the Future

Dublin, like New York or London, is a city whose punk in 2015 matches its vibrancy with its refusal to be defined by one sound. Multiple bands, all with wildly divergent takes on 2015 punk, all unified in their DIY ethic and refusal to compromise. The first 12" from searing rawpunx Disguise continues where their System Shock 7" left off, slamming together the lithe turmoil of Gloom, the monstrous purpose of Bastard, the ugly burn of Crude SS into a violent driving gunk, like Florida's Mauser or Australia's Kromosom, taking that Scandi-Japanese rawpunk axis and stretching it out to their own corner of the globe.

Built on a relentless sinister thrum, a taut propulsive clatter, Disguise explode with scalding fury in the screaming guitars and tortured barks and roars echoing out of the radioactive slurry. From Constant Victim pure vitriol rolling into Signs of the Future's noisestomp groove, to Depleted Uranium heady crash and Breed Bastards broken fade, this is ferocious hardcore punk, worked til its end.

VCR - Greatest Hits 7"

Buggy-eyed, bloody-lipped eejit squabbling from Toronto, springing from an overcaffeinated and understimulated mind, all e-numbers and teengang spit: "WE'RE VCR! FREAK PUNKS AND TOTAL FUCKING HUNKS!". Fluorescent synth squawks goofily jabbing through the dirtied up gitpunk like bubblegum blisters, careening through the splintered remnants of Swankys burble with jellylegs rhythms and sneering, screams, whoops and barks that snap out like involuntary tics. Playground taunts like the drawl of "I THINK YOUR LIFE IS PISS COS YOU CAN'T DANCE AND YOU'RE A PRICK" on Fake Freaks Fuck Off, Danzig/Shakira style non sequitur couplets like One Trick Dog's "AIN'T A PHONY/MACARONI/RIGATONI". Truly dumb and way too great.