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.

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

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.

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.

Vanity - Vain in Life LP

Oi! influences have been sliding their way into hardcore for a hot minute now and Vanity just drop all the pretenses. A straight-up Oi! album from a bunch of people from hardcore bands like Creem and The Rival Mob that draws from a bunch of early streetpunk/late pubrock, though probably most prominently and noticably, All Skrewed Up-era Skrewdriver.

The Skrewdriver question is, like stagediving, one of punk's spiralling athanastic debates, the sort of thing where you could drop out of punk for 15 years and walk right back in to find people reiterating the same points. All Skrewed Up is an album of catchy nihilistic punk rock that, probably more than any other album of the time, hews closer to the more distant R'n'B origins of the genre, exhibiting a greater truth in the cliche of punk as supercharged rock and roll, which obviously lends a dreadful irony the swerve they took into vile haterock. It also inevitably probably owes a chunk of its popularity for its place as a straight down-the-line punk album made by one of the most notorious  bands of all time, a safe way of flirting with the titillation of the taboo, the same proximity to the macabre that gives the hint of the forbidden to Death in June or NSBM, a similar impulse to ghoulish adolescent fascinations with serial killers, Faces of Death videos and the yawning horrors of history. So with that Rocket 88 shake and and 14/88 morbidity, All Skrewed Up occupies its own special acrid little spot in the punk pantheon. Personally, having heard all the hype, I opted to forego listening to it for years, only to find myself at a party where someone put on a super-catchy punk song and I had a conversation that went something like "This is pretty sick. Who is it?" "Skrewdriver." "Ah."

Though since Rock Against Communism and its fellows bloomed out of the insecure turbulence of troglodytic white rage of the late 70s/early 80s, plenty of bands have tilted at ripping Oi! back from its nationalistic posturing, to wipe it clean of its heinous racist taint, the circular inanities of politicised apolitics like Discharger, a phalanx of SHARPies and commie skinheads (bizarrely but somewhat predictably claiming the name 'redskins') like Malaysia's A.C.A.B., Catalonia's Inadaptats, the UK's Blaggers ITA and countless others armed with similar shoutalong anthems and about 8 million songs called R.A.S.H. or Good Night White Pride, just as dozens of bands like Iskra, Iprit, Torture Garden, PunaTerrori etc have sought to lace blackmetal with hardleft and anarcho perspectives.

Those proceeding paragraphs right there are the kind of de rigeur exegesis that springs forth anytime every time the name Skrewdriver pops up. Vanity drive with that swaggering streetrock chomp, that rollicking rhythm and vocals that switch between a bloody rasp and more soulful half-croon, not R.A.S.H. types, but moving with a counterfactual vigour from a world where Ian Stuart's fatal car crash happened 12 years earlier than it really did.

On the louche bluster and shunt of Can't Be Bothered, the rattling gusto of Ya Don't Know? and The King Drinks, the bludgeon brassy fuck-right-off of Fuck Right Off, the slick midtempo fightmusic of Might Trumps Thought they succeed, crafting anthems as catchy as anything, cock-of-the-walk pubrock, pugilistic and powerful, packed with lines that read like a litany of unwise bar confrontations, adrenaline rising and eyes whiskey-wild, "You ain't got no fuckin bite, no" on No Bite, "Glass in hand and cowardice don't mix" on The King Drinks, less convincing are moments like the glammed up twang of Bal Des Ardents, the slow run into closer New York City, I do find myself flagging in the back half of the album, but there are a couple of tracks when it does live that dream of forging carefree cutthroat singalong rippers, guiltfree gutpunches and silly stompers, the "This is pretty sick" without the "Ah.", punk songs that may be kinda dumb-as-fuck, but certainly don't require two rambling explanatory paragraphs when you put them on, just two movin feet and a voice to burn.

Rotten UK - Bat Shit Crazy 7"

Stuff that comes from far away is better than stuff that comes from near you. Everyone knows that. Celebrities looking for the latest eastern religion to latch onto, foodies searching out the latest imported food fad, bibliophiles admiring the intensity of feeling in a magic realist novel from across a couple of oceans, and punks excitedly chattering about some old hardcore record that got a pressing of like a hundred 30 years ago and 10000 miles away.

If you know a lot of christians, it might be harder to see the divine in the book that they follow when you're keenly aware that they're just as full of shit as anyone else, but if that wisdom comes from a far-off place, then it might just be sweeter, less messy. With distance it's easy to romanticise, to see things as purer, unencumbered by all the tawdry human trappings that make bands from round the corner seem so pedestrian, to imagine that these punks on this wax from that country in that year are the realest motherfuckers possible, no day jobs, no scene squabbles, no bad shows, just pure 100% uncut sewersnake attitude. Even if you know that's gonna be bollocks, it's just easier to pretend. Nicer sometimes.

Unfortunately in that desire for that illusion clarity of thought, of action, what is actually happening over there gets flattened, warped into something other than human, when it's often the human drive behind it all that's the most interesting part, the art, the religion, the food, the literature. These things, and all their attendant mess, get stereotyped into things they're not, bite-sized nuggets of digestible misconceived culture to lend a faded sense of exoticism to your interests. Imagine if you were a follower of a religion whose most well-known proponent for most of the world was Richard Gere. It'd be a bit shit.

Rotten UK are not from the UK. They are from Rochester, New York, not Rochester, Kent. They offer a brand of punk ripped from UK82's moronic beat, using the UK as just a lazy cultural signifier, a snotty punk trope akin to d-beat 'dis's or garage-punk 'thee's. They take this whole pulsing nation of 60 million people and reduce it to naught but a mangled Exploited song.



And that's shit. Really really shit. And that's great.

Fuck this country. Fuck this shit rain-drenched feudal outcrop, this shithead isle, choking on its own thankfully dying relevance. Take it all and bash it into a cackling Disorder rip-off. Fuck Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, the Snapping Bogseats are as close as the UK ever got to a voice of the nation, aggressively ignorant, simplistic snaps of shite.

A seven inch in which at least two of the songs are bloodily rearranged nursery rhymes, a thick-as-shit Macc Lads nursery rhyme like Mary Had a Little Goat and the violent fantasy of Burnt Church. That's all we've got, the inane mouthings of babes thrashed into a scrapheap bang of Chaos UK like aggro football chants constructed out of vulgarised pop songs, thousands of voices calling you a cunt in unison. The chugging cut of Slipping Into Darkness. The sneer of Broken Coffins. Death and decline. The end can't come soon enough, and when it does it's gonna sound like Rotten UK. Burn everything down. Smash it up. Weigh the country down with the concrete boots of tradition and sink it in the north sea. Support your local punk scene, vote Tory.

"God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire" - William S. Burroughs, Place of the Dead Roads

Gaucho - Demo CS

Hispanophone dirt-beat hardcore from Toronto, members of S.H.I.T., rudimentary poundings, thick scratching as same scab that Mexico's Maquina Muerta, primitive, raw, laden-deep with anger and worldgrief. Brutalidad Policial shaking with drums to flatten buildings, scritchings in the murk, Maldita Sociedad hanging on a taut embryonic solo, snuffed out quickly in its squeakings, Sistema de Mierda circling a muddy drain, El Dia Final a monotonous thump through that viscous guitar burn, snagged on its rasping broken recitations: "MUERTE! MUERTE! MUERTE! MUERTE!" Cerebro Podrido similarly repetitive, the pain ground out through another elemental stomp. Five tracks on hardcore stripped down to its shivering skeletons, its gravelly bastard instincts, five tracks of shovel-blunt punk to stand with.

Frau - Punk is My Boyfriend 7"

Following on from their killer demo turned 12", a devastating 7" from one of the UK's very best, bustedmachine feminist punk, cogs and pistons moving in different directions, skittering to a stop, spitting off bolts and washers. Goofier than the first release somewhat, but still packed with that same frenetic jerky energy, bristling with stabbing power. Punk is my Boyfriend a defiant punk tantrum, moving from a tightly coiled bassline to a staccato thrash to a driving drumbeat as the vocals take over: "PUNK IS MY BOYFRIEND! PUNK! I DON'T NEED NO MORE FRIENDS!" Snakeskin and Orca winding with animal rules, Snakeskin that of consumption and rebirth, Orca of imprisonment, freedom, self-affirmation. Snakeskin rumbling and stomping, Orca leading with a sinewy guitar line skidding it's way razor-keen across a wavery danceable rhythm, the song building with frustration, repetitions devolving in clarity, rising in fury and feeling: "I DON'T BELONG IN THIS POOL/I BELONG WITH MY PACK/CAPTIVITY'S FOR TEACHING/AND I'M BITING BACK." it screams. "I BELONG IN THE DEEP/I BELONG IN THE DEEP/I BELONG IN THE DEEP". An unstoppable live force, their annihilating fire is here on full display.

Arms Race - Gotta Get Out EP

Meanmugging rough London hardcore bursting with hoarse fury and Oi!-toughened conviction. 6 tracks of storming anger, packed with righteous violence, simplistic solutions for pederast politicians and corrupt cops. Hang the Scum, Kill the Bill, no words minced, just fury in scything guitars, stomps and leers, aggression unbound. Bastard a tear of online alienation, dropping into a muddy half-singsong trudge. Gotta Get Out thumping in like a terrace chant, ripping apart a life with fucked-off spit "HATE MY JOB/HATE MY LIFE", aware of it's own futility but also cognizant of the fact that that doesn't really mean shit when you're living in a blank hole of depression and drudgery, like a half-asphyxiated mutant digging out of the old Animals song. "SAME OLD STORIES YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD/IT'S TIRED, IT'S RECYCLED BUT IT'S FUCKING TRUE." On My Face showing up rage as a wild unhinged form of vulnerability, cos that level of guttural rage comes from a deep dark place, one usually sublimated in the day-to-day mechanics of survival, it gathers together the angers, personal and political and bites them off one by one. "IT'S ONE LAW FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US/AND THERE AIN'T A CUNT ON THE STREETS THAT I CAN TRUST/GIMME A PEOPLE THAT CAN FUCKING FEEL/SHOW A CITY THAT'S FUCKING REAL."

What really pulls the songs here together though is the final track, Mongrel Crew, and its flailing leviathan of a fucking singalong, one of those huge gang-lore screamers that gets right down into your bones with its hooligan bundling, laying waste to the stress and shite drawn on the other songs just through the sheer obliterating power of that punk/hardcore communal violence, packed with self-mythologising, the city geography so loathed on On My Face marked as territory, a couple punk nods to past and present (Conflict's The Ungovernable Force, the band's own label Quality Control). A chorus that makes the personal anguish of Gotta Get Out and On My Face slip away, the societal wrongs-rightings of Hang the Scum and Kill the Bill be just a swing of a fist away, a tangible arm-in-arm possibility. "OI! OI! MONGREL CREW/WE'RE MONGREL ARMY AND WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!" While most of the songs here make you wanna break the world, rearrange it with kicks and glassings, 45 seconds into Mongrel Crew and you fucking can.

 

Replica - Beast EP

Another EP of faithful-to-the-line boot-tough fiery hardcore from these Bay Area's finest. Terrifying pace, dropping with unfuckwithable precision into rugged stomps and pulling out again, retaining a focused fury throughout. Trust a rage of betrayal, turning back in on itself, intoning the title with a sickened growl. Imagine Sisyphus burning with a stubbornness, turning over with just small requests in the face of a futile day-to-day, little nuggets of meaning grasped at "I ASK TO BE A FUCKING PERSON IN THIS WORLD. I ASK TO HAVE A NAME." Night Life struggles with obliteration, Beast with violence, chugging mean and dirty, racing with mach one desire, trudging to a stop. Six stone bullets of hardcore, dealing brutal visions of a painful world, through rugged vocals, all deep snarl and long-cultivated disdain, whirling along with the threshing speed.

Good Throb - Fuck Off LP

"SCORN. It is the opposite of the get-along, go-along, Jimmy Fallon kumbaya team comics gang. “Be more positive!” they say. “Nah son,” you say as you smile back, canines showing from ear-to-ear.

Let scorn into your heart. Sometimes you look at something and the most it’ll get out of you is a half-hearted smh. Sometimes the physical aspect of the thing is more useful than whatever pleasure you could glean from it. Sometimes you see something and the only thing you want to do is kick a hole in it for even existing in your reality." - David Brothers, in response to the question 'What is an emotion you think is undeservedly discarded? '

A band at the centre of London's sick punk scene, all the members taking part in other bands that combine to make the capital of this rain-drenched shit fascist island home one of the killingest punk scenes on the planet right now, No, Frau, Snob, Dregs, Semi, Personnel, all taking differing approaches to punk and hardcore and all tearing it up. And Good Throb, a teased and bent punk, as danceable as it is dangerous, tottering insistent basslines winding through springy scampering rhythms, vituperous guitar that shines with its teeth-bared, vocals spitting and scarring, tearing through contemporary life (inside and out) with swingeing wrath.

Piercing annoyances abound, shit blokes, mormons, morons, cut into snapshots and fleeting visions, caught in a strobe light, like Acid House's litany of nasty/ridiculous modern collocations. "CAT SHIT/WHITE GLOVES/FOLK PUNK/CHEAP DRUGS" the incremental pile-up of cultural and social debris, unraveling the stark viciousness of London living in cutthroat asyndetons, crashing out one after another in fierce clarity. The wobbly blur of nightclubs brought out on the shiver and snarl of Psycho Disco, "PSYCHO DISCO/BUNCH OF CUNTS/TRYING TO LAUGH/AT YOUR SHTITY STUNTS" broken down, the clinging heat of the tube on the stumbling Central Line "PUSH AND SHOVE/GOT TO COMPETE/AVOID EYE CONTACT/GET A SEAT". The broken stop-start rhythm of these accretions of tediously quotidian shit help the record reverberate with a nervy anxious energy, always on guard for another complication to rise and rip you from whatever brief moment of peace you were reaching for, no single outrage, just one more needle in the eye, one more tiresome chunk of angst on the stinking scrapheap of your day. This energy lives also in the way the music nags and clips at you, rickety catchy with that panicky post-punk shuffle, rawly wrought, jagged in its soldering, edges gleaming.

And these vexatious moments and situations eat at you, leaving you crawling with monstrous emotions to wrestle with, confronted and dissected here with smashgrab disbelief, Jealousy breaking apart into retching, Mummy I'm Ugly's manic self-loathing, Crab Walk's drunken embarrassment, No Taste's bile-drenched embrace of pariahdom, alternating puerile and splenetic, digging into the shit, the bare punk life, fucking the tone-police, getting into the ugly parts, the uncomfortable, the gauche and garish realness, Double White Denim's no-fucks-given cutloose triumph, You're Shit's unbridled anger, "STUPID FACE/ANNOYING TWAT/VACANT SMILE/JAUNTY HAT", Dog Food Dick's eviscerating rage, "PIECE OF SHIT MAN/SEES WOMEN AS FUCKS".

Sharing with Hank Wood and the Hammerheads' Go Home not only a two word imperative for a title, but a deep familiarity the pains and pangs of urban existence, the clatter and clash of too many lives shoved into an unknowable sprawl of concrete and commerce, Hank Wood bloodying up New York with blunt repetition, Good Throb doing a number on a London constantly under-construction with its own tear-it-up toughness, Fuck Off is the words under your breath as you navigate office politics, late night public transport, shit jobs, shitter parties, bad mornings, terrible empty nights, vocalised harshly and stuck into a reconfigured ricochet-snap sourpunk, it's the tension unleashed, the frustration exploding into a blur of fearless emotional shrapnel, skirring about the room, goin hard with phlegm to spare.

DiE - Vexed EP

"Because what did it mean to say that something represented a cross between primitive insensitivity and chillingly inane emptiness in a bottomless pit of unbridled dark?!" - Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango

Concrete cunt UK hardcore following up one of last years best seven inches. Eight tracks of grimworld negativity, enacted in tenebrous churning punk perfection, drawing on hardcore's many curdled corners. Monotony thrumming with Discharge fire, Exterminate wailing Pig Champion surly, throughout there are deep veins of Chaos UK bluntness, SSD waste-laying. A seemless melding of hardcore's hate-heavy highlights, its darkest distillations, all utilised to construct a EP of heady desolation, almost rejuvenating in its relentless punch, its unmitigated bleakness, a holistic disgust. Pressure all expiring gasps and claustrophobic panic, BTK searing with serial killer malevolence, Exterminate bitter and murderous, a brief existence of where "DEAD-EYED DEMONS PREY UPON THE WEAK" in Dark, "MIND IS MANACLED/BRAIN IS CHAINED" on Life Sentence, "NO LIFE'S WORTH LIVING WHERE MONOTONY REIGNS" on Monotony, just your purest nihilistic affectations made flesh, indulgent hate, all laid out together, the temporary joys of life blotted out by Life Sentence's knife-edge guitar flails, Pressure's hostile thump, your brow furrows, your lip curls into a sneer, your voice drops into a threatchoked deadness, your movements restricted into brutal simplistic bluster and temporarily become one with the gloom, living long minutes in that mean tough shell, ready to bite heads off, Ready to Rot.

That kind of unremitting dejection is unsustainable, but it's a place that a lot of us have lived in at times, have got drunk and dirty on in the worst moments, the panic attacks, the depressive episodes, the enduring anxiety and pummeling hopeless funks, and the tools used to deal with the shit, that abjection of self, that self-transformation into a self-named bastard, that concomitant desire to just listen to 80s hardcore bands singing about dead soldiers and suicidal ideation, killer cops and cop killers and heroin overdoses, to obsessively play that music from waking up at noon to sleeping at four, those tools call out to you, lie unused and rusting when you do finally move on, find a better place for your head to be at. DiE are built from that energy, they're crafting and carving with those exact tools, and for a ten minutes you can slip freely into that bastard mindset, into that hard cunt animus, roiling in malice and despair in a cathartic engagement with the worst of the world, for that ten minutes you breath the gagging smog, taste the blood on your teeth, scratch with the spite, devolve, swing and turn with the vigor of the falling, the luster of the damned, before you come up for air again, you can abandon that hard-earned hope like a dog-end tossed casually into the gutter, for that Vexed ten minutes you can feel the fucking hate.

L.O.T.I.O.N. - Second Audio Document 2014 CS

Brutal cyberpunk smearings, inept industrial thumpings, noisepunk static swirlings, voices like bugs in the machine given angry life. A broken fifth-generation corrupted rendering of Butthole Surfers digital growls, a lowdown lump of sub-basement Atari Teenage Riot electronic mess burbling and choking. "CELEBRATING THE NEWEST FLAVOR OF DIET COLA KNOWN TO GIVE RATS CANCER." The final track a long warnoise instrumental, drill screamings and oppressive helicopter throb.

No Sir I Won't - The Whole Fucking World is Shit 12"

Goddamn No Sir I Won't are kind of a bollockache. After getting monstrously excited by their demo & first single their first 12" sent me into a tizzy where I got all worked up over the idea of the paradox of worship bands as resistance music before chilling myself out reconciling to the idea of repeated music for repeated struggles. Now their new 12" EP The Whole Fucking World Is Shit features some of their tightest stuff, really fulfilling that literate catchiness, that taut and sharpened rage that they hinted at with More Politicians and then it's got Radio Shit, Radio Shit, as tight a song as they've made, a real Subhumans sort of banger, clicking with sing-song rhythms, but lyrically dumb as dirt.

And okay, stupidity is fucking great in punk rock a bunch of the time, the puerile inanity of noisepunk, the pogo brain damage, the slackjawed monotony of a million generic d-beat crews and garage-punk knuckleheads, but a wordy anarcho band is hinged as much on making salient points about the power-structures it's kicking at as it is on successfully replicating the Bullshit Detector aural aesthetic.

Basically, there are certain modes of stupidity, certain types of idiocy that play and certain types that don't. A lot of punk (a lot of music? a lot of art?) is maybe trying to capture certain epiphanies and feelings that read as teenage. The pure warmth of feeling like there's a song/a band/a genre that is grabbing at your very soul, the coming up into realisation of how fucked the world is along with the conviction that you can make a tangible difference, but this growing up is an spikey uneven process. When I was 17 and reading Noam Chomsky, convinced I was some fucking real radical, I was still churning inside with unacknowledged internalised bigotries, born of a systemic indoctrination that I felt I was finally smart enough to see, but in reality I obviously was nowhere near smart or perceptive enough to grasp its true pervasiveness of and just how much it was still living inside of me.

Referring to anyone who makes pop music as 'scabs and turncoats', as Radio Shit does, referring to anyone who listens to it as 'fallen masses' in the savior-complex pompous condescension of a 17 year old who many doesn't have many real friends but knows an awful lot about death metal or jazz-fusion (or punk, obviously) to make up for it. That's fucking rockism at its height. There are certain modes of that teenage expression that ring true, the enthusiasm, the anger, but there's a lot of ugly shit, a pervading isolation that leads to the conviction that you're somehow different, which splits into two simultaneous feelings, one of self-loathing and alienation, and also of smug superiority and a million self-congratulatory "Still listening to this in 2014" and "You say Nicki Minaj/I say Led Zeppelin" YouTube comments.

You wanna capture that rawness, that feeling, maybe here trying to articulate and bring another life to the spit and fire that popped in your head the moment you first stumbled across Crass, overheard at a cooler punk friend's house, tucked away on the back half of some mixtape, in a youtube link thrown your way offhandedly and then replayed 18 fucking times straight. But you don't have to simultaneously roll with the snorting contempt for 'normals' or, the cackhanded dismissal or disbelief that anyone could have a genuinely transformative emotional experience with art that does not speak to you, that people who are blasting Beyoncé or Taylor Swift can't be invested in the struggle, you're not radical there, you're Liam Gallagher farting on about Jay-Z at Glastonbury, you're a shit old man complaining that bands don't sound like The Beatles anymore. "Radio was once the voice of the people." claims The Third Step, Radio Shit's clattering chaotic intro. The fuck it was. That sounds a fucking Gaslight Anthem lyric, and you wanna be swerving as far away from that conservative tapioca-Sorkin vision of the past as you really can. Punk is very fucking susceptible to believing its own revolutionary hype, to playing into that media-narrative of itself as the TRUE REVOLUTIONARY MUSIC, punkism as a ugly offshoot of lazy rockism, and if you're making revolutionary punk, you should be about kicking that fucking myth to pieces.

It's a fucking shame, cos the songs on this EP really are killer. And a firm recreation first mindblowing epiphany of real punk attack is handily realised a lot of the time. Sharp barbs of anarcho-punk, like Radio Shit really closer to the Subhumans' compact bombs than the Crassic sprawl of songs like When You Gonna Realize? on The Door, these songs are stripped to their gleaming edges with no goth shiver that accompanies much of the modern day takes on the subgenre, just pure clear rage, throbbing and marching, herky jerky riffs bouncing like demented puppets, catchy basslines and itchy panicked guitar scrape, falling into and rising out of apocalyptic sound collages rippling with threat and chaos and doom. The vocals snapping with venom, slithering with demented hope, punching with power, asking real questions, playing characters, caricatures, carrying like crowd chants over police lines. Songs like Broadcast Tower with its 1-2 stomp, Bring the Boys Back Home with its peppy yelps, The Third World with its gentle guitar trickles filtering through the fury and indignance, are small masterpieces of restless punk shiftings, skipping from crash to shuffle, blunt messages of resistance delivered with real conviction, "MAYBE THE BOSSES DON'T GIVE A FUCK", creeping dawns of solidarity spotted somewhere off in the dark, making you keep fighting, dancing. And keeping fighting is important, just as keeping dancing is. Just don't be real fucking 100% oi-mate-i'm-punk punk dickheads about it, you know. Nicki Minaj fucking rules, mate.

Brain F≠ - Empty Set LP

Brain F≠'s 2nd LP of shabbily-hewn punk rock, catchy and crunching, poppy but not pop punk, gruff but not gruff punk. Flatly sweet, demonstratively sharp, Nick Goode and Elise Anderson's vocals cutting across each other, erasing and supporting each other, in dry knowing drawls and spiteful snaps. Dangerhouse dirt, a thickened and filled-out Avengers, a dented and kicked-in Thermals. Evocative visions of human mess spiralling and zagging through, faded scenes, wasted wishes. "We used the city like a fulcrum/Were we dumb?/We used our arms we used our hands to communicate and bent and bent and bending we make it work it until our backs break" on Fulcrum. "You want everybody on the balcony, mais/Secret's wrapped in money in the bathroom doorway/Gotta throw some pocket change to play/We lie like kings, lay all day" on Dirty Realism. 10 punk cuts with the shine rubbed off, the bruises still visible.

 

Teledrome - s/t LP

Super-catchy synthpunk moving with the same clackety robotic precision as the Spits, but not kicking sparks, warbling with the futuro-nostalgia of Buggles, a wistful tune to hum as your spaceship spins into the infinite airless yonder. Robot silly, android hearts crackling with rust, learning, growing, jealousy/abandonment/lust just bugs in the program, unrequited alarm beeps, heartbreak does not compute but it still hurts. The drums flat and stark, the synths as high cutting prows slicing through, as tickling electric burbles running under, as skittering chirps or wide-open vistas for you to get sucked into as the whispers get to you on Boyfriend, the confusion roots you to the spot in Spirals, the life slips out on Blood Drips, those synth melodies whooping and warping through you with goofy cybersadness. Laserprecision bummerpunk for broken machines.

Absolut - Punk Survival LP

Crunching hardcore in the international mode, matching that Scandi-bombblast to the squeal and wail of Japanese legends like The Sexual or Deathside, thick gory riffs, vocals echoing back into the raw thunder and hail like deathhowls blown futile away in the night. Your Fraud chugs with motorpunk purpose, it's guitars bend gracefully above the storm before faltering and collapsing back into the roiling sea. Neo Fuckers gouges out thick rents in the pavement, its solo a slipping and squirming beast, the drums relentless, the vocals one more animalistic tear. Loveless Noise building out of one manic squealing into another, one chaos slips into a deeper one. 9 songs of full and bloodwarm hardcore punk, burning and bludgeoning, no rest, no quarter given, Punk Survival.

Snob - s/t 7"

Muddied up hardcore punk out of the pulsating current London scene. It's Crazy Spirit/Disorder trashthrash, early-Rudimentary Peni clatter and sputter, a thick guttural bass roll, a skinning guitar skid grouting over the gaps, occasionally slipping up and crashing into weird broken shards. Matter-of-fact vocals laying down tracks that build in spite. Harassed, like Hysterics Leave Me Alone, displays a burning anger stoked and compounded every day, rising from fear "CAN'T COUNT THE TIME/I'VE FELT TERRIFIED" to righteous destruction "RIP THEIR EYES FROM SOCKETS/RIP THEIR TONGUES FROM THEIR MOUTHS." Mother a terrifically dismissive snap sneering at the fuckwitted fedoraed ranks (actually, it's about ethics in games journalism). Piss a panicked primitive shout, the classic hardcore punk trick of sticking a puerile song about bodily fluids in with five furious attacks on shit that matters, like Send in the Mayor, wavering and whispering and darting forward, hanging out to dry every pub bore's favourite post-satirical bumbler. Buzzing with energy, trapped down in its shitty punk hole, kicking dirt into everyone's faces.