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.

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.

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.

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.

G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society's Shit) - Demo

I've been slumping lately. I've been not feeling too good. Spent more time in the last month watching TV shows about superheros with really great abs than writing. There's plenty of 2014 music I loved or liked that I didn't get round to exegesising but every time I come to sit down to write I feel wasted, worn out. Whenever I get into ruts like that writing feels something unknowable, impossible. I look at pieces of written without the slightest idea of how I wrote them.

Yesterday was the third Monday in January, the most-depressing day of the year according to the sort of meaningless pseudo-scientific studies that newspapers and/or advertisers like to latch on in their unending conveyor belt of half-arsed content and it didn't feel great, but then it didn't feel too different to a lot of other days the last four or five months. Shit's just been stale.

But this G.L.O.S.S. demo dropped a couple days ago and it burst like a bomb, immediately it was burning a bushfire across every internet platform, frantic reblogs and retweets, the name on everyone's lips, the message reverberating: "This is the one. This is the one. This. Is. The. One." This G.L.O.S.S. demo dropped a couple days ago and from the first screams of G.L.O.S.S. (We're from the Future) through the mosh of Outcast Stomp to the tear of Targets of Men, it ripped me apart, swept out some of that staleness.

Fierce as storms and tough as bike leathers, G.L.O.S.S. play hardcore punk that makes you feel it like the first time, it's got that struggle-born uncomfortable realness, like Anomaly's demo last year, that deep agony, that fearless kick and scathing punk swagger that transmutes pain into power, rage into revolution. Cos this shit is about way more than my dumb little problems and my shitty little blog, I can only imagine the fear and stress of living while trans, while queer, while female, but Girls Living Outside Society Shit do that every day, and they take all that and mold it into the hardest fucking shit, a carapace of  constantly-reinforced bitterness, a repeated retch of frustration, a punk packed with true heretic sputum, flicking acid into eyes. Full of the sort of lines that are gonna be scratched into desks and daubed on jackets, spraypainted on punkhouse walls, written in blood and sweat and stamped deep as wards onto souls so scarily renegade that the world just wants to crush them to dust: "THIS MAKEUP IS FOR MY EYES/THESE FISHNETS ARE FOR MY THIGHS/THIS WALK IS HOW I GOT THROUGH LIFE/YOU WANT THE PEPPER SPRAY FIRST OR THE POCKET KNIFE?!" goes Targets of Men. The singer Sadie was (is?) also in the amazing Peeple Watchin', a band just as lyrically tight but there working an aching yearning softer vibe, here just taking that keenness of feeling and blowing doors down with it. "THIS IS FOR THE OUTCASTS/REJECTS/GIRLS AND THE QUEERS/FOR THE DOWNTRODDEN WOMEN WHO HAVE SHED THEIR LAST TEARS/FOR THE FIGHTERS/PSCYHOS/FREAKS AND THE FEMMES/FOR ALL THE TRANSGENDER LADIES IN CONSTANT TRANSITION" cries Outcast Stomp.



As thrilling as it was personally for something this damn good to drop, to see the excitement it immediately stoked in friends and others, imagining a phalanx of tired-ass punx across the world breaking into grins at the fury and promise of G.L.O.S.S. (We're from the Future), kicking out chairs and bedroom slamming to Outcast Stomp, that's really nothing compared to its realest purpose, its highest potential. As cool as that is, it's secondary to the true power that I know music like this contains, dragging the world into the future, into 2015 and beyond, burning down the bullshit of the past, living adamantine hard, switchblade sharp shining and slicing in the process and progress. Killer punk at its world-warping best. For people still struggling under the weighty pressures of the shite that G.L.O.S.S. take deadly aim at, this message from the future, from the ones who've made a bright burning life outside society's shit in these five songs, might just not be another way-cool demo among the cool demos, the rambling stream of punk releases, the hype and the backlash, the peaks and troughs in the tapes and the records trickling out of punk minds globally. For the ones who haven't found a place yet where they can feel tough and hard and unbeatable, or who have maybe just forgotten that that place exists, this could be so much more. This feels like the sort of thing that could save a fucking life.