Scumraid - Out of Order

Korean terrornoise, raw D-Clone burn, on D-takt & Råpunk, distilled from their 2012 demo, clearer, but no less furious, the murk wiped away to show the sharpness of the sound, accidental noise replaced with purposeful noise. Scorched earth howls of injustice, dread, panic and TOTAL IGNORANT PARASITE BASTARDS. "CLIMAX OF HUMAN ERROR/REASONLESS LIFE TERROR/THAT ENDLESS FEAR OF DEATH FROM THE ONE GENERATION" rages Tsar-Bomba, splaying out this deep cocktail of interior emotions, depression, anxiety, sickness, and how those struggles intertwine, and are compounded by, the outside struggles, wondering how to deal with that fear, how to heal (Scar: "WE ARE BREATHING DEAD AIR/NOT FOR HEAL SCAR") under the prospects of annihilation, disenfranchisement, state-sponsored violence. Often featuring a deep afterburner blare as backdrop as it mirrors that rocket roar with it's fierce guitar churn. Out of Order leveling down out of the turbulent crashercrust tide into a harsh midtempo lumbering spiked and skewered with cacklescreams and noiseglut before it works itself up again into that terrible tear. Painful sounds for a painful world.

Voco Protesta - Neniam Konfidu al la Stato

"I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability of an universal language; but I do not believe it will be brought about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language. Such a course of action, or rather of slavish inaction, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for mastery between the languages of the greater powers.

On the other hand, a large number of small communities, speaking different tongues, are more likely to agree upon a common language as a common means of communication than a small number of great empires, each jealous of its own power and seeking its own supremacy." James Connolly, 1908

Raw punk from Japan screamed bitterly in Esperanto, a melding of form and content, a language built to erase borders, unify humanity in one tongue, one language. The use of Esperanto harkens back to movements of the early 20th century, futurists as optimists, the wide open possibilities of revolutionary camaraderie spanning the world, before futurism played its hand as fascistic ugly machineworship, Esperanto is new rules as new loves, new grammars as new communities. It's an old-fashioned idea, because the imposition of new languages is now synonymous with the erasure of old ways, those "smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language" that James Connolly wrote of, the native kids taught English or Spanish or French and punished for using the words that connect them to their heritage, it's been a severing, controlling tool, a cleaver, so that the more revolutionary act is one of reclaiming lost tongues, preserving languages sitting on the brink, crafting literature and poetry and song in a voice that speaks to your family but not the majority, that you hold tighter, make those who wish to see and understand you have to work at it actively engage with your voice, the intimacy holding back the malicious hegemony that globalisation carries with it. Charu Nivedita's Zero Degree written in Tamil not Malayalam or English, Der Nister's The Family Mashber in Yiddish not Russian. Punk bands across the world letting loose enraged rants in every language under the sun. Esperanto is seen as an odd utopian relic.

Voco Protesta embrace this revolutionary tradition of the language fully, although it is a far from utopian perspective expressed in this album, a raw graze of violence and struggle, pain and burning, capitalism, bureacracy, police violence, profits and nuclear fallout, a litany of illnesses poisoning the planet. The unifying force of Esperanto here is the unity of struggle and the promise of anarchism, the reaching grasp of hunger and unhappiness, in this we find a makeshift communion with people across the globe, and languages so steeped in blood as English or Japanese, though they are capable of great beauty and truth as all language, are unfit for purpose to lay this struggle bare. Reach back into the past to find this half-forgotten thing to blast apart bureaucratic nightmares and nuclear traps.

The brutality here, as in the works of Pichismo, an Esperanto punk band hailing from Ukraine, is fully alive in the music, blistering and violent, underpinned by a radiation hum, exploding out of tension on Kontrauatako, setting up moments of respite from the thrashbuzz, sweet woundings on Divido Kaj Konflikto, jaunty marching on Vivas Morte, only to kick them in with unnatural forces of distortion. Only to crash onwards.

Eight years after he penned the words at the top of this review, James Connolly was standing before a British firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising. In word and deed, commitment to a better world is what we all aspire to, and almost always fall short of, battered by the blows of an unjust world, tugged down by the human compromise, but we can find moments and small places where these revolutions live, in protests, in voices, in the shape of the language we use or refuse to use, in art and in song. And for some of us, in the warm savagery of noise.

On La Vida Es Un Mus.

Zyanose - Why There Grieve?

I am way into into when bands insist on coining their own subgenres to describe their music, that act of marking out your sound as something different something not quite containable is an act of meaningless artistic bravado that always makes me smile, the Taxpayers with goofpunk for example, on Why There Grieve? Zyanose have dubbed their twin-bass fury DITCH CRUST NOISE CORE, at once a descriptor for their sound and a herald of their attack. Zyanose make punishing stuff, deep, burbling, biting noise that crashes with the force of buildings falling.

While their last 12" Insane Noise Raid focused on sin, Why There Grieve? moves slightly outside these classical interior failings to deal with more modern pressures. Keep Yourself is a punx on punx song, namechecking Gloom, Confuse, the forerunners of Zyanose's ugly sound. "I beleave in punk" it screams. Maybe the one thing that Zyanose do believe in, the rest of the album torn through with looming nuclear spectres and smaller quieter forms of oblivion, drudgery of work, the venal machinations of politicians, apathy creeping like frostbite, irritation, anger, all drawn in chaotic blasts, as the noise swirls in panic on Silent or F.O.A.D., rumbles then bursts on Snapped Pappet, clangors in incomprehensible conflict on the Die is Cast (while the liner notes give lyrics in both Japanese and English, the long string of kanji that is The Die Is Cast is translated into English as Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhrrrr!!!!).

Nihilistic squealings. Pulse is a 13 second wordless, well, pulse, that ends off the first side of the record. The sound of a countdown, or a time marker, an underwater bloop, like a baby version of the rest of the records explosions, a short snap of the worldbeat that Zyanose feel down in the corroded bones of the world, that they explicate on in the militaristically underpinned Camouflage or the anguished vocalisations of Options for the Fool.

Before the album runs out to a stop with the drums on Keep Yourself, Zyanose construct an awful world of awful noise, few releases from its pain, just the slightly longer bite and rumble of that final track and its strength in punk, strength in the noise that's ripped out of the earth in order to mirror the noise that's pressed down on you. F.O.A.D. Fuck off and die. Fuck off and dance.

Isterismo - Follia Verso L'inferno

Hailing from Japan, singing in Italian (the title is translates as something like Folly Inwards or Interior Madness), Isterismo play that crasher crust that the cool kids love! It doesn't quite have the relentlessness of D-Clone though it approaches that level of uncompromising viciousness on tracks like Distruttivo Rabbia. It feels like there's slightly more texture to the noise though, the crackle of tape-degradation run up into brain, the rocketnoise pulled apart and stretched a little, the chatter of engine turnover swilled around withunderwater iceberg reverbations. The mid-tempo opener Nuova Mundo rolls about in that bombination, the bass swelling ominously underneath, Giustizia Assurdita builds in the clatter and throws ripping guitar solos out through the noise to emerge battered and scratched but still squealing as it wails about war-profiteering, Trascendere Istinto (Instinct to Transcend) screams in agony through the vocals and the music, begging for positive progress against a nihilistic inevitability, Perdita opens with a dramatic burp and then just tears. An album of dirtily constructed chaos prowess screaming about despair and rage and cosmic loss in a cacophony fit for those aching endless pains and the insane world which they live and fester in.

Scumraid - Demo

Wild fuckin' crazynoise from South Korean rawpunx. K-punx crasher crust brutalising Disclose runarounds, guitar flails lost in the blasting power, songs that seem to start the twisting screaming wind-up almost as soon as they've started and burn themselves out in 70 seconds of shitty hunger and squealing nuclear death. A relentless 8 minutes of disgusting aural defilements.

Zyanose - Insane Noise Raid

14 minutes of meticulous clattering noise. Not quite as harsh as D-Clone, but harsher than almost everything else. Drawing from Confuse's heaviest moments, or a less rigidly structured Contrast Attitude, three-piece Zyanose (drums, bass and noise-bass) construct a clanky crunching rumble of crasher-crust noise-punk vice blast. Framed mainly around songs devoted to the seven deadly sins, this album apparently took three years to record and was rerecorded several times. Albums like this, music devoted in its aesthetic to ripping apart all conventional musical pursuits in its tumble and grunt, so often gets dismissed on the basis that anyone can make a fucking racket, and it's true, anyone can, and that's part of the glory of punk and noise and all those simple genres beholden more to attitude than to virtuosity, but information like that, about the construction of the music, shows the artistry behind a piece of raging crust dissonance. They wanted it like this. EXACTLY like this. From the thick bassline that dominates Gluttony, holding fast against the noise and screams, to the way Envy swirls with ghost-feedback before thrashing into a blast of demented anger and then fading back down into that murk, to the end of the album when all this cacophony runs itself down into a soft simple buzz-bass-riff that drifts awaylike a beast into the night with the noise still chirruping about it, this album could not be done any other way. The red and white messy chaotic liner notes, bustling with about five differnt logos and a load of skulls, give the lyrics, seven of the nine tracks focusing on a particular sin, laying it down to its bare bones in each crashing blast. Greed: Debriseaaghrr!!!!/End of polution by side of you/Parasite! Wrath: Government control/Keep myself/Answer in chaos. Those are those songs in their entirety, and that's all you need to rip the human mess to shreds, with the noise of the noise-bass, the blaring of the... INSANE! INSANE NOISE RAID!

D-Clone - Creation and Destroy

A short metallic snap of a drum gives about half a second of warning and then this album hits high gear pretty fucking immediately. Blown the fuck out d-beat noise-core, like Disclose were really pussy-footing around the issue or something, jeez. The band named as a quick-smiling nod to the uniformity of lineage from which they spring, in which they rot and fucking howl, but they grab this raw-punk snake by its tail and shake it harder, push it further, kick it nastier, hold a heavier load of fuzz and co to that damn thrumhead Discharge rubble-quick skin-trash. Clones they are, but mutant unsteady creations, with the DNA corrupted. They're fifth, sixth, seventeenth iterations, scummier and filthier copies and further sunk into the nuclear scream, edges battle-blurred and then borders broken, songs adumbrated in the scuttle-murk cacophony, hate-system incomprehension, bled and blasted harsh and high, humming with the nihilism of coming bombs, signal barely there.


This is scary uncompromising wargutter noise, all wired through this big-distortion connectors, lit-up and sprawling like power-station control boards. This fear is not an isolated spark, the symbols and stages of this thing were set time ago, and have been echoed and reset, rerun and static loaded. Noise is not a distraction here, it's the raw aching bloodied point, destroying with creation, flattening you, making you feel mutable and turned-about, open to great internal changes, chaos in the core, rats in your mouse guts, this fear that the bodied burst of hardcore-attack has altered us too much from our basic construction. Here is will, here is living in chaos, here is hatred, and here, in the way this rages, there is, as the band screams, something approaching a shining, bright point, as visions of world's ending, retro-apocalypses and workhouse god slaughters fall about, here is a single cracked entity constructed from three parts, a loudness, a stupidity and a hope, with a violence to all three, here is making punk future, Creation and Destroy. Noise not music. Punk rock fuck you.