Hank Wood & the Hammerheads - Stay Home LP

"It looked like a city. Ghostly, wavering buildings appeared through a drizzle of midnight rain. Of course, no two minds were alike..." - Terry Pratchett, Thud

Stay Home, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads second album of Mummies-beat New York squalorsquawk, Quintron-by-way-of-Queens, following on from 2012's Go Home, possibly my favourite release from that year. It's more panicky though, Go Home having its fair share of tuff cunt strut in songs like It's Hard On The Street and Don't Walk Away From Me, Stay Home rippling with more uncomfortable grooves, restless itchings, claustrophobic mutterings, skittering percussion like the ricochets of paranoia and angst of the inside of your skull. Go Home had a more conflicted attitude towards its city environs, stumbling between pissed-off rantings and face-up fuck-offs, Stay Home has burnt itself out, wrapped itself too deep in the toxic understandings and fetid cracklings of the city and it wants out.

It's an album living in a maze of traps, internal (Neurosis's agonised "THE DOCTOR SAID TO GO FUCK MYSELF/BUT I'M IN MAD PAIN/I KNOW IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD/BUT I CAN'T CHANGE", The Ghost's frantic "IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/THE MIND/THE MIND IS THE PROBLEM") and external (In Bookings' jailhouse lugging "THROWN INTO A CAGE UNDERGROUND/TRAPPED BEHIND BARS WITH A MILK DRINKING CLOWN/TAKE MY WILL/TAKE MY PRINTS/TAKE MY LACE", Shook & Hungry's propulsive roll of "I'M LIVING IN A DEEP DARK PIT/CONCRETE WALLS TALL AND THICK") and then times where these two merge in a psychogeographic wounding, ripping up city and head, pavement and frontal lobe shocked and splitting simultaneously as on Nervous City's repetitive rankle "BROKEN BRICKS/ANXIOUS CITY", These Chains's blunt instrument jabbing "THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE IN A CITY THAT DEPRAVES ME/CYCLE CYCLE PRISON CYCLE".


But whenever there are traps and prisons, dreams of escape snarl up, like This World Is Beat and In Space imagine a way out from these insomniac wanderings beset by chaotic urban chatter. Searching for silence and isolation, an escape from this noir of perpetual rain, this pulpy shitsmear of an Ed McBain potboiler, interminable degradation in familiar patterns, they imagine the free-floating void, "DRIFTING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS/PEACE AND QUIET/WHAT IS THIS" but these remain a fantastical vision, a utopian oblivion tickling inside the dank confines of a old city mentality, built-up tight and built-down deep, cramped, no sprawl.

Rollicking along, Stay Home bounces with gunk and gusto, keys jabbering, guitars gurgling and squeaking like cyclical thought patterns spinning off the axle, infectious skeleton-rattle rhythms like snatches of blackened calypsos, breathy oohs and aahs and huhs like James Brown interjections or stress-induced ticks, like little snorts of pressure released ("THE PRESSURE/THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING/AND I'M SUFFOCATING" on Shook & Hungry). Shaking with a cokesick shiver throughout, ratty gnawings at the worn burlap of your brainfilm, the fraying diaphanous membrane of your psychological wellbeing the relapses of What's So Bad About a Bad Idea, the ugly realisations of I Thought I was a Good Man, tuning into the repetitive rhythms of anxiety and anguish, depressive diggings. A city's bricked-up sickness let loose, the scratching inside the walls amplified and shaken out.

"He turned down a winding lane where pain had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people's feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air." - Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole

V/A - Ground Zero NYC 2013

"No other city is so spitefully incoherent." - James Baldwin, on New York

In 1977, The Randoms wrote the classic Dangerhouse clatter Let's Get Rid of New York, a west coast anthem calling for the destruction of the east coast behemoth, for a wiping of away of it's cultural and social taint, four years later, Fear, led by the country's number three Bill O'Reilly-impersonator Lee Ving, did a similar dance on the sneering New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones. New York was the enemy, its Ramones and CBGBs, Reagan Youth, No Wave, a suffocating presence that stole national attention away from the huge sprawl of punk rock across the culture, but by the time I got into punk rock, like twenty something years later, New York wasn't shit. CBGBs was on its way out, most of the Ramones were dead or about to die, Reagan Youth had dissolved in the most eyeshittingly awful way imaginable, No Wave bands had imploded or attained respectability. New York hardcore was shorthand for the dumbest most macho kind of hardcore, big bro-y meathead shit, breakdowns on top of breakdowns, songs about how tight you are with your friends and how they'd never betray you and songs about how all your friends betrayed you. The Randoms wish had been belatedly granted, and not by some cleansing wave or by a mass round of heroin overdoses, but by a bunch of bands that sounded like Madball. Sick of It All? Boy, were we ever. SKARHEAD WAS AN INSIDE JOB.

"Our way, our life, our scene. The definition!" gurned NYHC totem Roger Miret on 2004 sub-mediocre crossover thrash album Another Voice's song Hardcore! (The Definition), which is a song as subtle as the title would suggest. He probably wasn't wrong though, that is what punk and hardcore is about, about making these spaces for yourself and for likeminded others to express themselves through channeling noise, but these spaces don't have to be about stompy gangvox iterations of inane self-help books blathering on about, Pride, Faith, Respect, Blood, Honour, Truth, other intensely tedious palpably abstract concepts. So if, after all this time, you've got a scene on the rise in New York city, playing hardcore and punk rock, and you can't call it New York Hardcore, because of all the aforementioned Pride, Faith, Respect, Blood, Honour, Truth etc. associations then what do you call it?

Ground Zero hardcore, claiming to spring from the city's most obvious wound. Hank Wood and the Hammerheads' 2011 LP came with a poster of depicting the destruction of the twin towers with the phrase I AM BIGGER plastered across it. Agnostic Front's LP Dead Yuppies was released in September 2001 and had to come with a sticker expressing their sorrow and anger at the WTC attacks. Now here 12 years later, you've got a bunch of gleefully nihilistic punk chumps, treating that event like some sort of cultural eschaton, responding not with the panicked jingoism of Frank Miller, or the glib postcard humanism of Richard Curtis's Love, Actually, but with this explosion of punx invention, this attempt to revel once more in a city's dangerous bits, in its unsanitised dirty corners, to imprint new paths on old maps. "Raze this city deserving of death/Burn in agony, conflagration" as Perdition rage on their song Conflagration. That sort of desire, even in the warworld melodrama of d-beat, maybe couldn't have sat in place then. Now it nestles nicely between Goosebumps's guilty slime, Black Boot's interior conflicts. Not papering over the cracks with patriotism or economics, no pride or defiance, just picking at the scab of lowlife city existence, subway monsters and ratpiss alleys.

At any one time punk is in the middle of dozens of mini-revivals and reconstitutions, as older sounds are rediscovered, repurposed, bent into shape for the next attack, and it's really impossible to keep on top of all of them, so why you might see someone decrying 'this goth shit trend' that's they're tired of spreading through punk, at the the same time you might see someone praising 'the fresh wave of deathrock' that seems to be just springing up. Punk splinters and runs in divergent furrows, constantly crosscutting, doubling back on itself, reworking older forms, combining them. So in Ground Zero Hardcore you've got the gothy Anasazi, the pogo nonsense of Sad Boys, the garage slop of Hank Wood, the Japanese noisepunk worship of Nomad, the crashing d-beat of Perdition.

Yet despite these many subgenres, this comp does seem to have something of a unified sound. There's this chuntering punk rhythm, train track hardcore, scratching maniacally as it tumbles downhill, that you can find in the literate scramblings of La Misma's Saudade, the witchy mutant gallop of Crazy Spirit's Rough on Rats, in Murderer's Hush Baby, Don't Cry and it's driving despairing repetition, in Dawn of Humans comp-stealing in-and-out toddler whine and insectoid madness. And if they haven't got that particular shiver, they've got the hissing noise of sewer steam.

Noise and rhythm pull this together, Black Boot's The Ladder dragging equally from both, starting all crazed incomprehensibility, and then in the latter half descends from the more terrible noise, into this rumble and ruckus digging it's way through the murk. Bortgang seems to be some approximation of searing Japanese hardcore lost in the fuzzstorm. The noise blooms across the records, giving some tarnish to the shimmering goffpunk of Anasazi, wallowing Putrida's echo-drenched chaosbath, almost engulfing Sad Boys' delirious pogo runs. Each track offering a different take, each track burbling with spit, streaming out of this citystatic.

Another thing that happened in New York in 2013 was that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had an exhibition called Punk: From Chaos to Couture. I have a very important fully-formed lengthy opinion on this: lol. Celebrate the dead and appropriated culture from thirty years ago if you want, there will always be new scenes popping up, small groups of determined weirdos forging these places, doodling these doodles, crashing around in the ugly dark shitheart of the city, making what can be. La Misma, on the opener, sing of reinvention and refreshment "From what was is now only debris/Once reality faded thoughts have been/released to the sea", Perdition sing of destruction, Sad Boys of isolation. All the bands sing of New York, whatever it means to them, free to blast apart whatever has come before, free to build anew, or just keep destroying, chaotic and shitty sloppy. On Toxic State records.

Hank Wood and the Hammerheads - Go Home

What would The Mummies be like if their gimmick wasn't being incompetent revenant lounge-lizards of Karloff-pulp garage-snot, but being swing-first emotionally-stunted Noo Yawk assholes. Go Home is city beasts and contempt, spiking snare hits, revelling in subway graffiti and proclaiming Ground Zero Hardcore over burning towers on the back cover. This is 96 tears drawn from leathery bullies sticking knives into mortar, chanting murder and trouble amongst simple organ lines and surf meannesses. It's Hard On The Street is a tramp home where you drag yourself back from some shitty nightjob or bad bar letting the loathing and hatred of your sad traipse roll around inside of you and sharpen your step into a don't-fuck-with-me stalk that tries to grind its way through the asphalt and tarmac with each hated step. It's also got something of that tight crew face-in-the-camera backed-up shit with its little choral echoes of "FUCK THE STREET!". Don't Walk Away From Me rides its buzzy keyboard underruns from a little lumbering bug-beat into an urgent runaway downtown ride into the dankness and blight. This album is about those wormy twin feelings of city living, where you despise the alienation and industrial numbness of these human-factory farms ("I don't belong here." broods Snide...Petty...Fools) but also revel in the badass ice-eyed streetwise motherfuck-goddamn-superstar-Luke-Cage-fearless cynosure shitcun' cunt you cut yourself into in order to survive.

Most of the tracks have simple refrains that build and twist in on themselves, growling and snapping at you, twitching inwards and out with raw raw firehose power, like the song My House which consists almost entirely of the line "HEY YOU! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" like that point of utter dissolution in an argument that ends a party or relationship when you just hang on to one phrase repeating it with machine-malfunction rhythm again and again and a-fucking-gain to the slippery point of semantic satiation because its that now-or-never separation you need right now, not any sort of showdown, not any sort of explication of issues and history you just need the lonesomeness and you can't see anywhere, think of anything, but that repitition and the respite it seems to shape.

This whole record, from the clanking sewer-noise of its untitled track, to the redneck rumblings at the start of Bad Things which quickly devolving into another growling stompy scratching-at-the-seams mess, is a jittery uncomfortable grumble on urban rot and the Mega-City Dredd attitude it cultivates inside us that boots up against our smarts and dreams and failing stars and tussles there til we drown it with alcohol or cyborg drugs or abandon the fight, the blame and the corruption, for the quieter apocalypses of suburban blowjobs.

This is violent, stripped-down catchy-as-fuck garage-punk, all Lee Ving pose and Travis Bickle psychosis, Dee Dee anxiety and Hubert Selby Jr depravity, itching and twirling in its own rock and roll pissstains and spraypaint-hiss, culminating in genuinely fucking painful nasty rant on I Don't See Nothin' where the shitskein unravels and the plastered-on nihilism and worldfuck demeanor turns finally in itself in an comes apart shuddering with trypophobic reaction to the neurotic holes in ourself and our lives, screaming with hate and panicattack flames that burn themselves out into dry declarations of all-encompassing negative realities, as the album stumbles to an unhappy sobbing end amongst the clatter of drums, the dimming of the city's glamour and the taut keening of suicidal ideation and guitar feedback.