Murderer - Let My People Go cassette

Murderer. Another band from the fertile sewergardens of the current New York Ground Zero hardcore scene, on Toxic State records, featuring members of Hank Wood, Crazy Spirit, Dawn of Humans etc. Another crepuscular creep, in terms of its lineage it's not got that reckless whine and wheedle of some of these bands but it does have a bit of the Crazy Spirit gallop and a bunch of Hank Wood's urban ugliness, dilemmas restated again and again without growth or comprehension, in caveman shout, brainworn repetitive. "I try to be good at everything I do/But everything I do is dirty and bad/I'm a bad boy, baby." Lowdown and lowfi, shrugged acceptance and despair. Music for guileless hoods of a rundown Personal and Pizzas persuasion, all punches and failure, struggling with the limits of their perceptions of the world. A band with the rhythm and futility of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta laying into the jail wall in Raging Bull. Murderer. In his essay The Simple Art of Murder Raymond Chandler railed against the elegantly contrived mysteries of the likes of Agatha Christie and wrote that Dashiell Hammett "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." and this is the kind of crime that Murderer provide the soundtrack for, purposeful and unclean, Abuli-Bernet Torpedo cold. "Death, it comes for every man" warns the band's theme song. It comes with the slap of the drums and the music's grubby punk burble. It comes mucky and reeking and it won't let up, it's stuck in this pattern, this broken asphalt rut. Recidivist hardcore.

Get it here.

Frau - Demo

All-woman hardcore punk band featuring members of Good Throb and Woolf, less prone to flensed-Pixies rise-and-fall of Good Throb, or the art-garage weirdthreat of Woolf, Frau are just as uncompromising in their hardcore punch, but more streamlined for the attack. Like those bands though, it's got that clattering energy where the different instruments are clearly distinguishable and seem to rip around chaotically knocking chips out of each other as they bounce forward.

Hostile lays it out, a song that contains one of those perfect FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! punk summations in the line "WHAT I LACK IN SUBSTANCE AND STYLE/I MAKE UP FOR BEING HOSTILE" . The songs built of a catchy bassline and some stabbing guitar, all backed up by an undercurrent of keening feedback getting right in your brain and making you feel real weird. I really like the feedback on this tape, it's not enough to be oppressive and ugly in a Merciless Game kinda way, but it's present enough to be unsettling, a thin sharp edge on this noise.


Safety Instructions is a terrific song, over another great repetitive bass/guitar interplay it lays out a nervy anxious love story written like a twitching uncomfortable fuck-off to the doomed twattish romanticism of something like There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. In The Smiths's number "to die by your side well the pain and the privilege is mine" and yeah, it's a sweet line but it's easy, too easy. Life and love is a more complicated dangerous proposition. Fuck a deathwish. The choice to live, the desire to make someone safe in an always unsafe world is a scarier thing than fatalism and suicide pacts. Safety Instructions gets that Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy, not a template, and is full of the jagged present fear of caring about someone more than you care about yourself, its vows of protection are more daring for how unsteady and unconvincing they are. Those sorts of promises are always an effort to convince yourself as much to anyone else.


It's that sort of rawness that pervades Frau's stuff from the sarcastic punk crack of High Heels ("HAIRCUT! HAIRCUT! AM I ON TREND!?") to the stop-start pained/directed rage of Accused and more declarations of renegade spirit on Trouble, it's a punk tape sparking furiously against itself. Rickety in its construction, curt, barely holding together the basic materials of its scathing tone, snappy drums, guitars set to aggravate, clean earworm basslines and the vocals that can pierce and rage on Paris, run along with the bluster of Sherman's Gone and smear themselves into noise on Trouble before the whole thing terrifically blares itself to pieces in cut-crash blastpunk on Nada.



Available here.

Meth Sores - 2013 demo

Two tracks, Destroy Life and Clever, released at the start of this year. Clever is a good song. Unsteady thick bass stumblings leading into noisepunk caterwaul, blender spin sonics, smatterings of recognisable guitar parts, the hellspawn vocals snapping sharp but battling with the shot-to-shit guitar whip, ugly punx shit. Destroy Life is a fucking great song. That same thick bass tone that underpins the chaos whip of Clever, but here steady, rolling forward like an earth mover seen through heavy rain, distorted so that each bass shudder feels like the horizon bounce an advancing army. It builds, it approaches, it noises up, then it drops back down into these little repetitive guitar slivers. It faces up and leers at you, backs off to gather itself, this shit is a masterwork of noise dynamics, every listen an ugly journey, a perfectly constructed path through broken glass, sometimes the guitar feeling like it's being tugged down by the lethal factory buzz, hiding, sleeping ready to crash out in wild destruction, sometimes feeling like a self-mutilating rotating structure of noise, sometimes just feeling punk as fuck. Sludgey then raging, onwards rolling. Good fucking shit.