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.

Disguise - System Shock

From members of Crowd Control, Strong Boys: gritty nasty Irish raw punk, d-beats and reverbed screams in the deep murk. The burn and thump of degenerate disfuckers, Japanese hardcore influences, Gudon messy, Bastard heavy. No Release strikes, churns, tension built to breaking. Institution thrashes hard. No Chaos digs in familiar disgusting patterns, the trembling guitar creeping out of the noxious dust that chokes and swallows the songs. System Shock in particular feels in moments like a sweeter, more palatable punk burner buried under a weight of crushing slag, the screams searing through. A pure slab of anguished hardcore punk.

GAZE - demo CS

Noisy Irish d-beat hardcore fux. The dragged away vocals battling through the fuzz, employed more as another piercing noisemechanic than anything conveying specific meaning, the eponymous track laying down a mid-tempo march for before it breaks rapidly into a sheer riot. Shit With Your Eyes thunders onwards, Won't Move is a panic attack, the vocals desperate as the fall off into the deathly chaos, What Are We Living For crashes and clatters against itself in drum flurries, the bass scraping on, a thick layer of feedback, fizzburn and shitnoise pulling it all down, the tempo shifting from drive to fight, from warring rumble to petulant stomp. There is a song called Fuck You, Fuck Off. Yeah. That is what you need to know.

Aspects of War - The Presence of Death

Many shitty punk bands as they go on become more competent, almost by accident, improving musically through force of habit and locking into genre grooves. It seemed that's what Aspects of War were doing, moving from the lo-fi Total Disfuckers demo which buried the vocals almost totally to the equally killer, if slightly more competently put together, In Order To Satisfy Their Mania For Conquest Punks Are Squandered demo and then last year's 4-way LP with Disable, Truncheons and Total War: 全滅 - Annihilation: Konton Crasher Omnibus. They were perfecting their Kawakami-born attack, relentless onwards momentum, noise and volume.

Cos that happens, bands hit the style they want and run with it, using their improved musical abilities to crank out raw rockin taut assimilations of the noise that spoke to them first, using a deep knowledge of dis to lift from the best bits of -close and -charge and -fear and -konto and -honorable Discharge, not deciding to burst out of the genre in a throw of manic misguided self-destruction (people learnt their lessons from Grave New World). Aspects of War had found their place, and yeah it was pretty fucking awesome, one of the tightest rawest bunch of self-identified disfuckers doing it at the moment. Each release would tighten that formula, screw in deeper, ready to take the place of the knowingly named D-Clone as bearers of the true Dis-crown and then they release this, The Presence of Death, on Brain Solvent Propaganda‎, where they come out sounding like a band of teenagers who had d-beat roughly described to them and decided that it sounded really cool and wanted to play it without ever actually hearing it. And as such, it fucking slaughters.

What Aspects of War do here is to take all that proficiently molded dis fuckery and thump it to piss-sodden pieces, manage to sound noticeably shittier, more inept, more unhinged, cracking apart the genre into a rough approximation of itself, each identifier in place, but the feedback hiss viler, seething and eating the sound, the drums thudding clear but on This Is Hell working a weird off-kilter mid-tempo groove, nails to the forehead, the thick bass attack from before gone, halfdrowned in the ghastly mix. "This is hell/Hell is here". Here the solos whinier, more scatterbrained, sudden noiseburps and coughs of indeterminate origin come forth, the vocals desperate and burnt, everything fucked-up, destroyed, ugly past ugliness, into strange territory, loose and wild and incompetent. Presence of Death opens jangling practically like fucking sleigh bells. Sounding less sweeping and apocalyptic, more sawdust and stumblings. A pervasive sense of distaste with it all (NO SYSTEM WORKS!). Getting back to unlistenable fuck-off of dirty-handed youth. Regression as progression.

Anomaly - demo

Scorched-earth queer feminist d-beat from Chicago. Channeling pain into sonic murder, twisting and turning on the tipping point when the aggregative weight of constant frustration and oppression snaps into violence. They are incredibly, monumentally tired of your bullshit, and sometimes that manifests as a pure rager, Chronicles of an Apologist or TLC No Scums, which run with the unstoppable abandon of violence long-suppressed, other times that turns into a dry dismissiveness, tossing the shitty, the unthinking, the self-righteous poser fuckheads carelessly aside, as on the untitled second track, sourly intoning "I know you are well read, I read your zine on inclusibity and how you don't eat honey but I'm still not impressed." over an ugly noise track, disgust as ambience, peeling feedback. No quarter given, brutal realities, jock arseholes, worlds of unacceptable shit, cathartically burnt in the lyrics, fantasies of violence enacted in the music, bats to knees, revenge kills, street justice, blood worn as triumph and trophy, all that dirt that you swallow daily vomited back up here in a hatesick purge, in stomping thick noise-punk crunches, in searing crashercrust flurries, in perfectly vicious shifts of tempo and kicks of squealing discord, muddyboot bass tones. PS I Love You is the one that pulls this violence into positive force, affirmation, and even then the music kicks itself apart and then gets dragged back out of the chaosmurk and disorder by the hardhearted drive of the drums. "You are real and you are not a burden/Your anger is valid/Her feelings of inmasculinity/His insecurities and our queer identities//Nobody knows your body more than you do/and nobody has the right to control you." Powerful shit in every way.
 

Koszmar - Jeniec Wojenny

World-ripping d-beat from Canada, screamed in Polish, on Rust and Machine records.. Chopping, charging. Onwards motion, full of surges and blood, sparks of solos dying fast amongst the drum crashes, the vocals painful and spitedrenched. The shrill feedback wails squeezed and shaped into purposeful discordant weapons on Anioł Miłosierdzia, the carceral bite of Zdrazony's push/pull riffs. The eight minute torrent of Atomowa Groza, half-inches a riff from Fleetwood Mac's The Chain and tortures it with noise and thunder, settling into one of those rippling rhythms to close the album in a way similar to Disclose's nine minute relentless Wardead topping off Yesterday's Fairytale, Tomorrow's Nightmare. When you pull and prod a genre so used to self-destructive one/two-minute assaults, it no longer becomes a fresh gust of radioactivity air cutting your head up new ways, it stops being a winding gutpunch of fury, you fall in lockstep with its gets and gives, it becomes more a journeyed anger that sustains you, the once dissonant discomfort enshrouds you, sticks in the bone and warms the fingers, tight and close like a hood, which makes Atomowa Groza's slide into this ghoulcall wasteland echoes all the more jarring, and the straight bomber fury with which it bursts out of this all the sharper.

Nomad - 自殺

Raw punk from New York with it's spirit from Japan, learning from bands like Confuse and Contrast Attitude. Featuring members of Sad Boys, Perdition and Cervix, all the song titles are in Japanese, I think the vocals are too, the vocals are in punk rock language, where even if they were in English I'd have a hard time making out anything but the fury carried by the raging sandpaper shouts. Scorching through 10 tracks in 11 minutes, d-beat rushes that fight onwards only to be engulfed by noise-punk squalls. It's no gradual degradation either, the noise hits like a damn burst, sudden and total, flailing, the scream of a creature unleashed, each time a drowning shower. Unforgiving stuff, built from the sour squeaks of feedback, the searing force of distortion, and the flat relentless drum drive. On Toxic State records.

Perfume River - No Wind flexi

Wrestling the title of most ill-fitting bandname away from previous champions God Equals Genocide, who play pop-punk not epic crustcore like what you would think, Perfume River play unrelenting d-beat, not acoustic pop songs about feeling and other things that suck. Unrelenting apart from the fact that every song lasts 45 seconds or less. Released on CS in 2012, I think, getting the vinyl treatment from Symphony Of Destruction this year on a gorgeous clear flexi with silver detailing. Harsh world screams. "REPULSION!" roars Ammoniated & Lifeless. "THOSE WHO LIVE/LIVE OFF THE DEAD" A Continuation bellows through the brutish noise, repetitions, repetitions.  A repellent two minutes of human hate that turns over like a bomber engine. The wardeath noisefuck with the energy of airraid panic.

Displague - Displague

It's a band called Displague. I do like the way 'dis' bands have begun to exhaust that prefix in terms of actually badass sounding fuck-you punk words and now just clank it onto any appropriately violent apocalyptic morpheme they can find, DISPLAGUE! DISHAMMER! DISGOD! DISFUSE! Displague come from Spain offer a classic big-ass neocrust barrage following on from the likes of similar soaring Spanish rippers Derrota and Ekkaia. Bass like tree trunks, d-beat flurries, this sears and crushes like a motherfucker on straight hang-on-tight-don't-look-down sky-stormers like Mort and Marionetas, but then also has the doomierneocrust breaks on the likes of Complejo de Inferioridad and La Obediencia al Consumo where it drops down into the murk and sewer stagger to really revel in the hateful gloomy atmosphere before it screams back into that armageddon thrash, pouring vasts acres of burn and tempest into the huge sour punk rumble of crust band in full fucking throttle, bass to open tombs, guitars that eat bricks and laugh, drumbeats that tear like steroid hearts.