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..."

Gutter Gods - Innersense LP

Pulsing negative futurepunx, mechanistic hardcore chomping broken up with cyberparts, building a swirling surreality of samples, feedback sparks and guitar crunch, all encased with this kind of scummy hum. Virtual Reality squealing manically, barking rabidly as the song grumbles into life. Mind Corruption rolling slowly with the harmonica squawk of alarm blares reaching you through the din, then the feverish screech, then exploding, slowing, cracking onwards with its psychotic shifts."A SICKNESS TAKES HOLD ALL TOO OFTEN/ACCELERATING THOUGHTS/MIND CORRUPTION"

Constantly brutalised and confused, Gutter Gods attack with such relentless cynicism and antagonistic fervor as to spray its hostility on all it contacts, including itself. Hang Out burns with a rancor for all social scene shit, but as that kind of dismissive scream often is, it's matched to a stabbing self-loathing (which explodes on Rut) rather than an arrogance. And Street Walker might seem like a bleak scathing portrait of a prostitute, but it switches up between third and first person so quickly, marries itself to its target and then jumps away from that, snaps between the specific and the general, that all you're left with is just an overwhelming sense of unease and gathering despair, all thrust into your head by the thump of the hardcore.

Even the hearty Oi!-shot crew-stomper of Chosen Few oscillates between being the prototypical celebratory fist-in-face fucker-upper, and a snide, self-lacerating satirical take on that brainless violent mentality "BUNCH OF APES THROWING SHIT/WE DON'T TIRE WE DON'T QUIT/RUIN THE NIGHT FOR YOU/WHAT THE FUCK YOU GONNA DO?" Even at one point breaking down into peppy goofy handclaps, heightening the ridiculousness of that thugpunk shield-wall unity. "SPILLIN' GEAR CAUSIN' FEAR/SPILL A PUNK ROCKER'S BEER/SLAP OF REALITY ACROSS YOUR FACE/CLEAR THE POSERS OUT THE PLACE" Cos maybe even a brawl is a level of interaction that can't sit right with the forceful isolation of Community: "HUMAN NATURE/SUCK IT DRY/NO COMMUNITY/JUST ALIVE"

Allan where this all disintegrates, the purposeful noise losing that momentum, breaking apart with the strain of pessimistic totality, the energy previously corralled let loose, the constituent parts wild, damaging, unformed. Background turmoil and a rant of paranoia and nihilism, the coiled and wriggling thoughts that fester and live with mental quarantine, but this break is shouted again with such ferocity as to cut and bloody, just digging deeper as it's dragged out uncomfortably long.

As well as the uncompromising desire to push this negativity to hard blank endpoints, what makes Innersense really live is the way the album matches malevolent fury to the space-smooth sterling guitar whispertone, rocketship fuselage sheen over mucky snarls, Innersense chugs and cuts with Gutter Gods' perverse anti-faith, anti-human swivel. Hate articulated and thrown in all directions, animosity towards self and others and torn up with thunderous hardcore stomp and drive, but the psychshiver guitar that bookends Streetwalker, stabs out of Community, whips and swoops through Mind Corruption, and that constant wheedling squeal that lives to itch out of the quieter moments, take this venom into way weirder, darker, creepier places yet than simple fuck-you with a riff strapped-on.

Prag demo

Razorback hardcore squealing and gibbering its way out of Australia, concerned with flesh and the precarious civility of modern society. In the six songs, there's a sense of a darker world threatening to consume, or already nibbling and scratching at, the places we live in. "Smiles and niceties/Until unstable exonomies/And religious extremophiles/Drag you down onto your knees" Moss Piglet rages, thrashing with the futility of small gestures of compassion lost in the face of war and more, "Winter we hungry" is the bare truth that humanity is reduced to. Soaring Ecco Homo wobbles off into space with it's mocking blast of "Master race?/Hahahahaha". Prag's is a world characterised by animal physicality and aggression, animal vengeance and animal vigilance: "The dogs will bare their teeth" in the brief thrash of Pillage Victim, "Subhuman/Not human/A pig to be fucked" in the repetitive run of Prag, "Bleaching probing mandibles" in the push/pull punk rumbler of Concentrated Visuals, where the clean bass dances, jabbing like a boxer, under the smudged guitar, holding it down amongst the drum flurries, until the guitar slides into a dragged out solo, which pinches and slithers along before degrading giving way to a breezy whistle solo, a carefree shuffle in the face of ugly problems rising towards us, or the haunting sound of the blithe evil of oppression?

Kromosom - Nuclear Reich

Australian rawpunx. They've got a split with Isterismo and a 12" called 8 Tracks, and instead of the next logical step, an 8 track called Twelve Inches, they've got this thing called Nuclear Reich. Some of this band have a really great true meathead music sideproject Bloody Hammer playing a crustied take street punk/Oi! and that Criminal Damage bent has bled back into Kromosom, infecting their Mauser/Giftgasattack/Kriegshög bluntness with a little bit of melody and communal spirit. Media Control has an intro that plays like a sharpened bonesplinter take on Cockney Rejects' I Am Not a Fool or maybe even Rancid's Avenue's and Alleyways and the fistpump of Culture Degeneration (CUL! TURE! DEGENERATION!) hits as one of those inept and inane irresistible shoutalongs like Lower Class Brats' Psycho. Elsewhere though they stick to the rawpunx and they do it fine but it's not quite as great as those moments where the Oi! degenerates into gross chaos roar, or the noise lifts up in brief melody.



Draw the Line and Answer are punx scene songs, tearing at the place of punk within the world, attacking those who would exploit it from outside (Answer: "CUT OUT THE LEECH THAT FEEDS ON PUNK BLOOD.") and corrupt it mindlessly from inside (Draw the Line: "BRING BONEHEAD DESTRUCTION"), Draw the Line almost cuts itself to pieces with an anguished stumbling, but Answer is just straight tear. Nuclear Reich and Radiation are classic odes to the bomb in that pained Discharge style, the titular opening leading in with a bit of dirty postapocalyptic creep, Radiation being another real down-the-line up and out one. Culture Degeneration, Virtual Inmate and Media Control all take shots at the psychological destruction brought about by technology and media in their fallout-swathed guitar rush. Human Shell is all GISM in its makings though, creepy inhuman burps and swirling/squealing guitar solos that sit in weird contrast to the burn of the rest of the sound.

The lyrics often break into disjointed declarative shouts, like that of a migrained brain inable to construct syntax in the pain and lightning fury and just blurting out the basics of its point leaving you to put things back together,  Media Control: "ARMY OF DRONES! MEDIA CONTROL! IDENTITY! MEDIA CONTROL!", Human Shell: "STERILE! CASTRATED! DOCILE!", Culture Degeration: "PROGRESSION! REGRESSION!", Radiation: "NUCLEAR LEAKAGE! NATURE RAVAGED!". Broken pieces of a broken world, stitched together by a breaking sound. Fullblast atomic stomppunx.

Vaginors - Total Nonsense

There's a shit-ton of great bands coming out of Australia at the moment. Bits of Shit, Total Control and these guys are probably my favourite, mixing the unhinged nature of Japanese noise-punk with the irreverent spite of stripped down American rock and roll. Following on from last years amazing Nuclear Papsmear LP, this seven-inch is more of the same from Vaginors: drums and bass that bounce happily along in the puddles of hiss and Wrangler Brutes/Crucifucks muppet-squawk vocals that could strip paint off a jacket. Vaginors play ugly silly impudent arsepop, they're like what Ke$ha would sound like if she really sounded the way that the tediously misogynist middle-aged beige-solemn dadrock IanMcEwan wankers imagine she sounds like in the harrumphing cavernous voids of their intellectually barren self-important Newsweek skulls. This is utter sonic idiocy, cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-dad, irritant punk fucken rock, pushed and taunted forward by the poke, pop and rumble of the rhythm section, as that Toy-Dolls-from-a-hell-dimension birdcall yaps about in agitant demonic freedom, screeching and sneering, devolving into manic animal noises and psychotic laughter. Total nonsense, revelling in absurd eejit innocence, stupid and marvelous nonsense.

Bits of Shit - Cut Sleeves

Stooges swagger and gut and snot, rumbling basslines and the nasal bite of the vocals while the guitars flail and thrash about them. They've got the feel of the more bluesy New Bomb Turks numbers, and more than a hint of Eric Davidson's scathing wit to them as well. Wedding Song takes apart the facade of an unhappy marriage, constructing one of those great break-up songs where it's less about some specific fault but the unsteady foundation that this was built on, sneering "Two kids playing an adult game You can't fix your identity by changing your name".

Rock Sing excoriates the tedious old punk fucks who run through the same tutting bullshit they rebel against and have totally boomer'd up in their narcissistic accidental conflation of their own narrow tepid cultural narrative with the entire span of fucking human culture, whining "Their rock’n’roll IS noise pollution" about the teenage music of today. Red Blade snarls with mid-tempo slasher menace. Patrol begins with a sort of outraged-warning call-and-response that is filtered vocally through a Joey Vindictive pastiche of a reproaching mother and goes on to construct a short war song that never really comes down one side or the other in its condemnation but, like the whole albums, is bathed in an air of baleful contempt for fucking everything. This is mean, minatory rock and roll. On Homeless Records.