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.

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.

S.H.I.T. - Generation S.H.I.T. 7"

The second 7" from Toronto's S.H.I.T., nailing down their place as one of 2014 hardcore's brightest burning fires. Four tracks of death and alienation, vacant scrapings gathered, soldered, shone up into a whirring fury of modern existence, with shivers of Gauze, Inmates, Gudon and the like. The war whip of Eraser II, the blankness of distanced violence ("HUMAN TERROR/COLD TECHNOLOGY/GOD'S OWN POWER/AT TERMINAL VELOCITY") brought home, close and smoldering. Fuck All a frustrated bite, the vocals a deep bloodied sneer, "OBLIVIOUS INCOMPETENT BELIEF/FESTER IN THE PRIDE OF THE NAIVE". Mockery 1-2 beat and shivering guitar butting into a simplistic jabbing punk fragment. Generation Shit's guitar scribble, constant clatter and smeared out thrum comprising a scuttering anthem of blossoming anger. "THEY ARE THE NEW WASTE/THE DISPOSABLE YOUTH/A GENERATION OF SHIT/NO FUTURE FOR YOU" it rips in a dragged apart bawl. Angry beyond measure, scoured and shaped into a fierce nihilistic violence. "NAPALM THE KIDS"

S.H.I.T. - Collective Unconsciousness EP

Rushing reaping hardcore punk from Toronto's S.H.I.T., ready to rearrange face and brains, fit for blowing up rooms. Vocals dragged roughly out of throats and echoing away with the dynamo pace, retching over the collision of body and society, mind and matters, writhing and snatching clumsily in flat bursts of alienation, sex negative. Pressing onwards, crashing forwards. S.H.I.T. lay down four punk rippers, exigent, rowdy. Collective Unconsciousness wails on the blankness "SEDATED SOCIETY/APATHETIC INSANITY/SEDATED SOCIETY/CATATONIC REALITY", Masochism is power structures of bedrooms splayed out in the social sprawl, the political game, gimps and kinksters all, whips and taxes and corruption in every corner, and we take it. "POWER IS THEIR PLEASURE AND PAIN IS DIVINE/YOU CARRY THE WHIP AS IT EATS YOUR HIDE". Nobody Knows Anybody slams at the barriers between and on The Stimulator, S.H.I.T. get physical, crawling with desire, stamping out a minute of lust in the guitar churn "I NEED SENATION/I NEED A CHEMICAL REACTION/INFECTIOUS CRAVING STIMULATION" disgusted with both its wants and its inability to channel, process, said wants. There's a lot of creeping grief in the world, a lot of uncomfortably empty spaces and formless evil shit waiting to fill in the gaps, S.H.I.T. see that. S.H.I.T. show it off. S.H.I.T. body it.

Proxy - Police Car

"First there's beer then there's shots then theres cops then next of kin
Then violins
First there's violence then there's silence then there's sirens." - Lifter Puller, La Quereria

Here's a 100% guaranteed test to find out if your punk band is a good punk band. Does your punk band have a punk song about the police and/or police cars where at some point there is a siren sound effect or the guitars sound like a siren? If so, well done, you are in a super sweet punk band.

The Boys, Chaos Death Squad, The Nails, Cock Sparrer, Tom and Boot Boys, Black Flag, Ramones, Oblivians, Cockney Rejects, Hard Skin,  The Rip Offs, Anti Todor, The Toy Dolls, Blanks 77, The Clash, Lärm, truly some of the greats. And now Proxy, whose song Police Car I have listened to a ridiculous number of times in the past couple weeks. Originally on their fuckin tight 2012 demo as Police Car (Goin' Home). This rerecording does not fall into the trap that too too many demo rerecordings do smoothing over the chaos, it retains the renegade criminal dance and expands it, hardens it into its perfect cop-baitin' form.

On the one hand Police Car is a song about stealing a police car. On the other hand it is a song about the utmost joys of human existence. Or maybe not, that's just what I get from it whenever I sing it. Imbued with the spirit of the catchiest GBH songs, a classic streetpunk chug with the momentum so locked in that those slippery bass runs can squirm up and down, struggling for release like a dog on a chain.


Police cars! Roving the streets. Who among us hasn't felt that familiar bite of panic when the blue lights wail past, when the jam-sandwich brigade pulls up behind you at the lights and your girlfriend freezes up next to you and almost involuntarily whispers "Be cool. Be coooool." Stealing a police car just seems like the wildest thing in world, all the freedom of that line in Dead Milkmen's Punk Rock Girl ("We got into a car/Away we started rollin'/I said "How much you pay for this?"/She said "Nothing man, it's stolen") but with added radical bite, just dug in again and again and again, drawn out and built into a perfect punk shout, voices pouring in like a waterfall.

It's not got the incredulous outrage of Who Killed Spikey Jacket's cry of POLICE TRUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!? or The Clash's breathy panicked gasp of "I've keep running. Police on my back.", nor has it gonna the sarcasm and blue malevolence of DK's Police Truck, what it has is fucking joyous singalong, of a moment of true giddy liberty, a stolen car, a brief one-in-the-eye for the system and its protectors. The cop trudging home embarrassed, you careerin through empty streets, sirens on your side for once, a car full of morons free until the morning.

How fucking great is the line "GONNA GET BEAT LIKE A DRUG ADDICTION!"? It's the line in the song that shows the consequences, the knowledge that this soaring glee is gonna get swiped out from under you and you're gonna feel the sting of a nightstick, which frames the whole song differently, it's not just dumb vandalism, careless and delusional, there's enough knowledge here to see what's gonna happen, but enough forward drive and enough momentary transcendence to giggle at the prospect of the comedow, just for a little while. Also just as a simile it's something special, the idea that drug addictions are just something you beat, clear and easy enough to slot into this figurative hole, rather than something you struggle painfully with. Here they're something that you kick to death, not something you succumb to. And that's just tossed off casually, this total faith in its onwards thrust, shrugging off true killing void shit like an iron-arse coolguy motherfucker. And then getting your head put in by cops, then probably going out and doing it again. Singing this song as you do it, building from drums to guitar to chorus, your dumb friends with you, kissing those faded ACAB knuckle tats and knowing that they were the best decision you ever made drunk.
The other two songs are pretty great too, Parasites is a triumphant take on crust punk squalor, half-parodying/half-celebrating the scabied scratching filth of punx life, a song of sympathy for the bed bugs that eat you while you sleep, framing them as just as a part of a rebel chain of stolen sustenance, "PARASITES WITH REFINED TASTES WE SHARE A DESTINY/ALWAYS BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS/TIL IT'S OUR TURN TO BLEED" A Marxist Joe's Apartment street punk singalong. It's another anthem constructed over those sort of up and down roving basslines reminiscent of Stiff Little Fingers' Here We Are Nowhere, with a fantastic mellow guitar solo that slips into dissonance and squealing towards the end.
Fountains of Youth, a beerpunk Blitz blitz. Strung out with punk tautness, it's singing drinking songs, but in the face of the doctor looking disapprovingly at your bloodwork. A blowout in the same vein as Oblivians' I'll Be Gone, where the drunken steps are one you know well and you head once more into the bar, dead friends. Like Police Car it's a celebratory song imbued with the rueful knowledge of what all this self-destruction springs from, and what it leads to. "A FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH! AN OCEAN OF BEER!/A REMEDY TO OVERCOME AN OVERWHELMING FEAR" is what's called for. The songs a kind of push and pull, that sort of interior bargaining between bad shit you know's coming and good shit you need to make you forget, even when the good shit drags you closer to bad. A cirrhosised barroom belter. Those next few pints might fill you again full of vim and teenage shirtiness, but your body don't bounce up from the hangovers the way it used to. The bruises stick around longer. "WE'VE ALL BEEN THROUGH THIS BEFOOORE/BUT THIS TIME THIS TIME THIS TIME I DON'T KNOW!" But fuck it.

This band is punxvest good.

Everyone song here is a fullfight anthem, Varukers vicious, pouring out from abused and battered chests, built from crappy frayed souls. The sort of songs that make you read invincible, make you move with purpose and Thug Murder steel, fists clenched, and a songsturdy step. A moment of freedom is what you're looking for, a time when all but this drops away, Proxy here conjure up these moments, of ridiculous giggling fits and arm-in-arm drunken stumblings, shithead community and tearaway joy, frangible and gleaming and ready to get slammed down and erased by the omnipresent spikes and speedbumps of reality, but when you can get those times, in the choruses and in the pit, and when you can get those moments when you're old enough and got enough broken bits to know just how fleeting they always are, but still live in them when you crash into one, then that's something of live lived maybe the way you ought to live it. Or maybe just the way I wanna live it.

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" - Kurt Vonnegut, probably not talking about jacking cherrytops, but hey, different strokes.

Kremlin - Drunk in the Gulag

"remember when John Waters and David Lynch co-hosted the Oscars? no, because life is shit & this is a dead planet coated with defeated apes." - @DrTeens247

Gritty hardcore downerpunk from Canada. Relentlessly negative, "YOU SIMPLY CANNOT WIN" on Steel Case, "LIVE FOR THEM/RUIN YOUR BONES" on Old Man, "CAN'T GET SLEEP TILL I CAN'T WAKE UP" on Why Should I, these songs speak to a world of traps, of inescapable situations, lives following Catch 22 rat races and struggling at the edges of their limits, kicking at the cellophane walls of their timesuck dead-end jobs, Scalextric lives hoping to go fast enough to fly off the tracks.

Buried frames the weight of work as a coffin. "BURIED! PANICKED!/GETTING HOTTER! CAN'T BE HEARD!" placing blame on the few who sit at the top crushing down "NO THOUGHT TO YOUR LIFE! JUST THE BOTTOM LINE!/PUT THE POOR TO WORK! LIVES WORTH LESS THAN DIRT!" No future and barely any present, as you hear the vocals yelping, as they do throughout the album, with a mixture of resentment and resignation, half-buried in the mix, trapped behind the dingy thrum, sucked away on the wind.

Fanatics has got torrents of drums and radio crackles as it appropriates the SAS slogan WHO DARES WINS in "WHO DARES KILL/WHO KILLS WIN", placing all killers, for creed, for country on the same bankrupt level. No Hope For You has got bass driven momentum, repeating it's scream of "TOMORROW'S GOT NO HOPE FOR YOU!" as the chickenwire guitar squeals up and down.


Doomed Youth grabs its title from Wilfred Owen, but Owen said 'The poetry is in the pity' and Kremlin don't have much pity in them, here it's more like the pointed rage of Owen's compatriot Siegfried Sassoon and his poems like The General or Base Details, kicking at the incompetent leadership who "speed glum heroes up the line to death", though turning its wrath in on itself at the end "WE WANT A FUTURE/THERE IS NO FUTURE/AND WE STAND FOR IT" as it fades into a sad slow backalley drone, the groaning residuum of lives extinguished sharply. It takes the Sex Pistols accusatory sneer and stabs itself in the leg with it.

Similarly, Duped, while sharply screaming at the failings of the educational systems, almost seems to come just as much at itself in anger at its own naivety, "GLUED TO CHAIRS IN LIFELONG COMAS" it bloodies with its first shot, in ugly hardcore punk, but by the end when it shouts "DON'T KNOW HOW TO FUCKING CARE/DUPED AGAIN" it seems as frustrated with its own inability to kick its way out as it is with what it's kicking against, which is a familiar emotion to anyone. You get sucked into systems, levelled with an atlas stone of debt, prodded and pushed into jobs you hate and then you sit there at your desk, stand there behind your till, thinking "I am such a fucking dumb piece of shit", not "This is a world of monsters and conmen and we are the dirt scraped their shoes and that should not be". You hate yourself before you hate the ones that make you hate yourself, they worked it that way, and they are good workers.

The music here is reflective of the lyrical concerns, the riffs dirty and ground out, as if scraped manually from the earth, and going round in these tight little circles like zoo animals, occasionally bursting with escape attempts, angrily pushing at boundaries like the stabbing guitar midway through Why Should I that shoots starwards and then collapses. These bursts flare out and fall back to the hard ground and reverberating with sadness like Doomed Youth's closing section or the little warble at the end of Buried. Like the way that that righteous outwards fury at an unjust world quickly snaps back, elasticated, into a cankerworm shitting in your head.

Maybe the closest it gets to bringing all these nihilistic punches together into something that really soars or reaffirms oneself (in the manner of the Dead Milkmen's transcendent Life Is Shit) is on Why Should I raging "DON'T LIVE RIGHT/WHY SHOULD I!?", it's not much, but the just the idea of an unsanswered question, directed out not in, is enough to raise it above the depressive filth of the rest of this album. Just the knowledge that they don't have answers just as you don't. But then that rolls into the anguished pleading of Leave Nothing Alone, pulled down again into the smothering fog, it doesn't last long.

The final song, Kremlin, takes those leaders who've been denounced and puts them in a bigger trap, the same cage, just with nicer furnishings, "SIT IN THE KREMLIN READY TO DIE! SITTING IN WASHINGTON READY TO DIE!" it cackles. "SIT IN MUMBAI READY TO DIE! SITTING IN KARACHI READY TO DIE!". There's a little joy here, the tiniest sliver, at realising that the shitheads that make your life miserable are probably as miserable as you are, that's some dark shit, but again one it's easy to swing with, suffer like us, you motherfuckers. There's no escape, just the onwards plod. Just the grit and grind and the day after day. The gulag is inside you, like faithful Ruslan. Those drunken questions thrown at the night are the closest you're getting to freedom.

"We reach another gate which is unlocked by a famously gloomy warder, continue to a steel door, swhich is slightly ajar, and while prison is about innocence and guilt and crime and punishment it is also about gates and doors and bars and endless locks and keys. It is a stop-start system that drives everyone mad, including the guards, wage slaves ground down by the monotony and oppressive atmosphere." - John King, The Prison House