Capturing a liveshow as barbed and intense as No Form's regular stage-destructions is an almost futile task. I missed their first London show as they were playing on a Monday night and I was knackered from a real heavy weekend, only to wake up to a barrage of tweets and statuses from all my mates proclaiming them the best live band in the UK. Luckily I didn't have to wait long to catch them and see that the hype was real. I've seen them several times since then and they have always utterly owned the space, filling any room with tortured noise, confrontational theatrics, performance art precision and hardcore fire.
Their first vinyl release, a 12" on Muscle Horse Records, inevitably falls short of those ferocious and captivating sets, but that's no criticism. A band always should be better live than recorded, should always thrive more readily in the whirr and spirit of stagework and affray. For anyone who has not had the luck to see No Form in the flesh, this is a more than adequate primer. Five tracks of acute bitterness, flayed hardcore noise, a grisly clatter pitched somewhere in the barren abrasion/power hinterlands between Harry Pussy and Mecht Mensch, but wholly its own, screeching and keening, pulsing and slamming, writhing and roaring. Freakout upon freakout, scarifying glares and feedback flues. Goddess of Fire, Barrier and Meander are all wild ones, utterly unhinged, paroxysms of buzz and blood, screaming with pain, pounding with ravaged zeal. "Plasmatic ooze penetrates the brain/The liquid becomes the acrid rain" tears Barrier. "Abyss of skin and muscle covered shit. I may be inhibited by a cretinous cancer but at least it means there is something inside" rages Meander.
The Untitled track on side A and the long jam that eats up the whole of side B are dangerous throbs, building out of bassline in the manner of less-spiritual, more-fucked-off Les Rallizes Denudes, hanging the flaying chaos around a simple axial point. Whereas I've always found the rhythm-rooted noiseswirls of Les Rallizes Denudes enormously calming, something that brings me down from heights of anxiety, letting you focus on something central and uncomplicated as the sheaves of guitardiscord slip off and you emerge more focused, less frazzled. No Form allow no such dive into the noise-serene, living more like a wartrudge, beset by demons and lithe scuttling terrors, a monotonous process of bloodied bruised determination, a caustic drag through a mephitic bog. No release, no escape, no compromise, No Form. See them live.
Showing posts with label hardcore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardcore. Show all posts
Sunday, 16 August 2015
Sunday, 9 August 2015
Inmates - s/t LP
Inmates first LP in 12 years is everything you could expect from the band that typified a time and a place that's come to be spoken of in shitpunk circles with the kind of semi-apprehensive reverence reserved for the edge-riding scenes of crazed hardcore violence, responsible for some of the best fucking records and the most dangerous shows of the 90s and early 2000s. The oh-shit heady riot-madness and hardnut aura that's super cool when viewed through the intoxicating lens of old teenage wildness and the distancing prism of grainy youtube videos, but the more adult person inside you kind of knows would probably leave you real real fucked up in actual fact.
This is a consummately put together violent ugly record. It knows when to drive, when to snap, to stop, to stomp, to grab you with the rough thickness of the sound like you're hearing the reverberations of rusted steel cables rather than guitar strings, when to squeal clean in the solos, the vocals a perfect blend of menace and method, wrapped up in mutant snarl and growl. Got its Japanese/American hardcore roots balanced and locked in. It's music well-versed in that cathartic power of capturing that semi-inchoate anger that inevitably swirls out of you as a potent amalgam of sublimated depression, unshakeable frustration and gut-stuck futility. The only problem is that its also everything you could expect from a band that hasn't released an LP in 12 years.
Sushi; 39.6 lyrically brings to mind nothing so much as Separation of Church and Skate, NOFX song from 2003 that got immediately put-on blast by Propagandhi for its tired-ass olds-gonna-old premise way back then, Joe Dolce is literally a Joe Dolce cover, whose 70s cod-Italian novelty hit is repurposed as a hardcore anthem, and there's a a storming cover of a Cleveland hardcore banger from 1984, The Guns' Rotting Away. Crust Dust is a song about how crusties are stupid, a punk song about how crusties are stupid is possibly the only thing more played out than a crust song about how nuclear war sucks. It's all a bit like Eminem's Rap God, formally sick genre-savvy constructions, but essentially reruns of stuff that played well 15 years ago, Em dropping six minute tracks of dense hyperspeed multi-syllabic rhymes and still making tired gay jokes and Monica Lewinsky references. Inmates writing a slammin song about annoying oogles.
The panic and pain of Into Crypts of Smith is a tough hit though, touching a deeper darker emotion than most of the other songs, the generalised threats about running someone out of town, envisioning beating the shit out of some fucking prick, that classic subtweet hardcore, on Little Bitch or Form a Mob, still kill, still get into that primal righteous stomping part of you, cos it's a perfectly hardcore record, but too perfect to be a perfect hardcore record. Or to phrase it in a even glibber fashion, it's hard but there's not much at its core.
This is a consummately put together violent ugly record. It knows when to drive, when to snap, to stop, to stomp, to grab you with the rough thickness of the sound like you're hearing the reverberations of rusted steel cables rather than guitar strings, when to squeal clean in the solos, the vocals a perfect blend of menace and method, wrapped up in mutant snarl and growl. Got its Japanese/American hardcore roots balanced and locked in. It's music well-versed in that cathartic power of capturing that semi-inchoate anger that inevitably swirls out of you as a potent amalgam of sublimated depression, unshakeable frustration and gut-stuck futility. The only problem is that its also everything you could expect from a band that hasn't released an LP in 12 years.
Sushi; 39.6 lyrically brings to mind nothing so much as Separation of Church and Skate, NOFX song from 2003 that got immediately put-on blast by Propagandhi for its tired-ass olds-gonna-old premise way back then, Joe Dolce is literally a Joe Dolce cover, whose 70s cod-Italian novelty hit is repurposed as a hardcore anthem, and there's a a storming cover of a Cleveland hardcore banger from 1984, The Guns' Rotting Away. Crust Dust is a song about how crusties are stupid, a punk song about how crusties are stupid is possibly the only thing more played out than a crust song about how nuclear war sucks. It's all a bit like Eminem's Rap God, formally sick genre-savvy constructions, but essentially reruns of stuff that played well 15 years ago, Em dropping six minute tracks of dense hyperspeed multi-syllabic rhymes and still making tired gay jokes and Monica Lewinsky references. Inmates writing a slammin song about annoying oogles.
The panic and pain of Into Crypts of Smith is a tough hit though, touching a deeper darker emotion than most of the other songs, the generalised threats about running someone out of town, envisioning beating the shit out of some fucking prick, that classic subtweet hardcore, on Little Bitch or Form a Mob, still kill, still get into that primal righteous stomping part of you, cos it's a perfectly hardcore record, but too perfect to be a perfect hardcore record. Or to phrase it in a even glibber fashion, it's hard but there's not much at its core.
Monday, 1 September 2014
No Statik - Unity and Fragmentation
Beginning with an ending, No Statik's 3rd LP Unity and Fragmentation opens with a heavy chug before fading out into keening feedback, from there it bursts, crunching hardcore rages. From this point on, No Statik shift and scrap with the hardcore, jerking it about, from unstoppable drives to slow drones to speedcrazed reelings. Never Be a Martyr opening fast swooping at machinegun metalspeeds, hitting a wall, slipping in murk and unsteady stumbles, then pushing forward wild. The ferocious vocals that lead the band sometimes doubled up, the harsh unity of Ruby's main vox meshing with the fierce but deeper back-ups, giving some songs and more singalong purpose, rather than just the cutting anger. "SOMETIMES THINGS HAVE A TENDENCY TO CONTAIN THEIR OPPOSITE/BORN OUT OF DEATH ALL WE CAN DO IS DIE."
Like on Everywhere You Aren't Looking, the back half of the album is taken up by a single track, Faithless, a fifteen minute long track of ambient filings, cityghost whisper and cold emptiness, small shufflings, from which a thick hardcore burn emerges and then retreats back into the warble and danceskitter of voidechoes, the vocals still screaming hard, but from a great distance. By messing with and fucking with the hardcore formula, No Statik create a sweetly disturbing work, The Remembrance of Things Dead and Past, weighed down by tension, slowing into sinister tongues, searing again, then sucked back into itself screaming about how "THE HORRORS LEECH OUT OF OUR MISTAKES, THE PRICE ONE PAYS FOR PROGRESS", then backing up that disgust and unsettling closeness with music that reflects that. Hardcore infused with discomfort with the world, and with equal discomfort at its place in that world. It will tear and soar, but it will open itself up to the quieter darker moments too, when a crushing riff and a hard word will not lift you out of yourself.
Like on Everywhere You Aren't Looking, the back half of the album is taken up by a single track, Faithless, a fifteen minute long track of ambient filings, cityghost whisper and cold emptiness, small shufflings, from which a thick hardcore burn emerges and then retreats back into the warble and danceskitter of voidechoes, the vocals still screaming hard, but from a great distance. By messing with and fucking with the hardcore formula, No Statik create a sweetly disturbing work, The Remembrance of Things Dead and Past, weighed down by tension, slowing into sinister tongues, searing again, then sucked back into itself screaming about how "THE HORRORS LEECH OUT OF OUR MISTAKES, THE PRICE ONE PAYS FOR PROGRESS", then backing up that disgust and unsettling closeness with music that reflects that. Hardcore infused with discomfort with the world, and with equal discomfort at its place in that world. It will tear and soar, but it will open itself up to the quieter darker moments too, when a crushing riff and a hard word will not lift you out of yourself.
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
HOAX - s/t LP
From the album's lyrics sheets on 6 24"x24" posters, each with a different punk artist, to its thanx sections which apparently acknowledges everyone who ever booked a show for them, played on the same bill, or just lent any kind of a hand, everything about HOAX speaks to hardcore as totality, no corners cut, full-on, all-encompassing and self-actualised. Their shows eruptions of violence, their stage presence baleful and bloody, 2013 Chaos in Tejas found their lead singer almost a fashion icon, filled as it was with skinny creepy bald dudes rocking dirtstaches and 1000 yard creepy glowers.When you saw guys like this together it looked like the world's most unappealing gang. HOAX came up with a killer live presence, their leadsinger smashing his head up every show, prowrestling theatricality, the crusher you turkeynecks, one show apparently someone turned up with a box full of bandaids to chuck at him when the blood started flowing. Fake anger/real anger/real blood. All that squirting mix of stuff, their full-on genre slams too full-on for some, pushed as hard as it could and too hard for those smiling and shrugging around what is and isn't legit. It's cool to kill it live, but if you're killin it every night does it ever become rote? At the root of it all though, is a thick ugly sonic muck beaten into shape that sustains itself, feeds with and into those basements and bars and warehouses and industrial plants filled with tearaways and torn parts.
Opening with the suck and gurgle of chesty groans and cacophonous burps, before a hulking guitar chomp thuds in. Hoax go down the line with powerful burly hardcore. First seeming clear in their intent, self-loathing as terror on Hide, atheism as alienation on No Spirit, Hoax struggle with the worst of the world, but it's not just a pity pit. Hide's as dismissive as it is self-pitying, No Spirit is as much about crashing onwards free and clear as it is about writhing in agoraphobic panic at the wideopen unhindered choices a godless world offers you. Diseased and damaged by the shitty facts of the world, HOAX capture that evil twist between hating injustice, hating the nastiness and disorder, and being an ugly product of it. Using that anger as momentum that eats away at you as it forces you to confront some real shit. Drive rolls with the motion of Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures, Strandbeest unstoppable, until it crashes to a halt. Sick Punk gagging on mucus but reveling in its place as a "TRUE SICK PUNK. SCUMMY LITTLE FREAK". Anaesthetize bemoaning its own numbness, but then finding that numbness as an armour and shield. "HOW CAN I DIE? I CAN'T FEEL A FUCKING THING." HOAX may front as real terrors, but their songs, thumping dirty hardcore crunches, dynamic and packed with weird stiff reorderings, like the keening whispers among dronedumps on Blind, the thick cultish run down of Lost Control, are confused missives, brittle with despair, but improbably flowering out of the gloom.
Chunks of modern hardcore, but all the the fake anger/real anger/real blood discussion crackling back up, about whether HOAX (their name is HOAX) carry that shit heavy or whether they dance through it as some tossed off genre exercise, burning as they do each song with some other facet of the punx canon, to a cynic merely checking off a list, punk self-identification, struggles with mental anguish and gender pressures, urbansprawl dislocation, deathwish nothings, but they bite through, through the bandaids and the trends, whether it is reenactment, the blood remains real, the songs remain hard, the confusion is too present to ignore. But this shitworld syllabus is exactly the stuff that punk was built for, and through my own utterly punkshot troubles and turns I have winced with each twist of the knife that is untwisted here. If it can't be dealt with, or at least wrestled with, bitten at and spat out in these places then where can it be? HOAX got punk, sometimes blown-up in half-silly leering caricatures, bleeding, killing, every night, sometimes eased down into a painful settling, speaking to darker, more private places. Each are parts of the encompassing drive, the stalling fear, that is hardcore punk played with such rude purity.
Opening with the suck and gurgle of chesty groans and cacophonous burps, before a hulking guitar chomp thuds in. Hoax go down the line with powerful burly hardcore. First seeming clear in their intent, self-loathing as terror on Hide, atheism as alienation on No Spirit, Hoax struggle with the worst of the world, but it's not just a pity pit. Hide's as dismissive as it is self-pitying, No Spirit is as much about crashing onwards free and clear as it is about writhing in agoraphobic panic at the wideopen unhindered choices a godless world offers you. Diseased and damaged by the shitty facts of the world, HOAX capture that evil twist between hating injustice, hating the nastiness and disorder, and being an ugly product of it. Using that anger as momentum that eats away at you as it forces you to confront some real shit. Drive rolls with the motion of Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures, Strandbeest unstoppable, until it crashes to a halt. Sick Punk gagging on mucus but reveling in its place as a "TRUE SICK PUNK. SCUMMY LITTLE FREAK". Anaesthetize bemoaning its own numbness, but then finding that numbness as an armour and shield. "HOW CAN I DIE? I CAN'T FEEL A FUCKING THING." HOAX may front as real terrors, but their songs, thumping dirty hardcore crunches, dynamic and packed with weird stiff reorderings, like the keening whispers among dronedumps on Blind, the thick cultish run down of Lost Control, are confused missives, brittle with despair, but improbably flowering out of the gloom.
Chunks of modern hardcore, but all the the fake anger/real anger/real blood discussion crackling back up, about whether HOAX (their name is HOAX) carry that shit heavy or whether they dance through it as some tossed off genre exercise, burning as they do each song with some other facet of the punx canon, to a cynic merely checking off a list, punk self-identification, struggles with mental anguish and gender pressures, urbansprawl dislocation, deathwish nothings, but they bite through, through the bandaids and the trends, whether it is reenactment, the blood remains real, the songs remain hard, the confusion is too present to ignore. But this shitworld syllabus is exactly the stuff that punk was built for, and through my own utterly punkshot troubles and turns I have winced with each twist of the knife that is untwisted here. If it can't be dealt with, or at least wrestled with, bitten at and spat out in these places then where can it be? HOAX got punk, sometimes blown-up in half-silly leering caricatures, bleeding, killing, every night, sometimes eased down into a painful settling, speaking to darker, more private places. Each are parts of the encompassing drive, the stalling fear, that is hardcore punk played with such rude purity.
Wednesday, 6 August 2014
Gutter Gods - Innersense LP
Pulsing negative futurepunx, mechanistic hardcore chomping broken up with cyberparts, building a swirling surreality of samples, feedback sparks and guitar crunch, all encased with this kind of scummy hum. Virtual Reality squealing manically, barking rabidly as the song grumbles into life. Mind Corruption rolling slowly with the harmonica squawk of alarm blares reaching you through the din, then the feverish screech, then exploding, slowing, cracking onwards with its psychotic shifts."A SICKNESS TAKES HOLD ALL TOO OFTEN/ACCELERATING THOUGHTS/MIND CORRUPTION"
Constantly brutalised and confused, Gutter Gods attack with such relentless cynicism and antagonistic fervor as to spray its hostility on all it contacts, including itself. Hang Out burns with a rancor for all social scene shit, but as that kind of dismissive scream often is, it's matched to a stabbing self-loathing (which explodes on Rut) rather than an arrogance. And Street Walker might seem like a bleak scathing portrait of a prostitute, but it switches up between third and first person so quickly, marries itself to its target and then jumps away from that, snaps between the specific and the general, that all you're left with is just an overwhelming sense of unease and gathering despair, all thrust into your head by the thump of the hardcore.
Even the hearty Oi!-shot crew-stomper of Chosen Few oscillates between being the prototypical celebratory fist-in-face fucker-upper, and a snide, self-lacerating satirical take on that brainless violent mentality "BUNCH OF APES THROWING SHIT/WE DON'T TIRE WE DON'T QUIT/RUIN THE NIGHT FOR YOU/WHAT THE FUCK YOU GONNA DO?" Even at one point breaking down into peppy goofy handclaps, heightening the ridiculousness of that thugpunk shield-wall unity. "SPILLIN' GEAR CAUSIN' FEAR/SPILL A PUNK ROCKER'S BEER/SLAP OF REALITY ACROSS YOUR FACE/CLEAR THE POSERS OUT THE PLACE" Cos maybe even a brawl is a level of interaction that can't sit right with the forceful isolation of Community: "HUMAN NATURE/SUCK IT DRY/NO COMMUNITY/JUST ALIVE"
Allan where this all disintegrates, the purposeful noise losing that momentum, breaking apart with the strain of pessimistic totality, the energy previously corralled let loose, the constituent parts wild, damaging, unformed. Background turmoil and a rant of paranoia and nihilism, the coiled and wriggling thoughts that fester and live with mental quarantine, but this break is shouted again with such ferocity as to cut and bloody, just digging deeper as it's dragged out uncomfortably long.
As well as the uncompromising desire to push this negativity to hard blank endpoints, what makes Innersense really live is the way the album matches malevolent fury to the space-smooth sterling guitar whispertone, rocketship fuselage sheen over mucky snarls, Innersense chugs and cuts with Gutter Gods' perverse anti-faith, anti-human swivel. Hate articulated and thrown in all directions, animosity towards self and others and torn up with thunderous hardcore stomp and drive, but the psychshiver guitar that bookends Streetwalker, stabs out of Community, whips and swoops through Mind Corruption, and that constant wheedling squeal that lives to itch out of the quieter moments, take this venom into way weirder, darker, creepier places yet than simple fuck-you with a riff strapped-on.
Constantly brutalised and confused, Gutter Gods attack with such relentless cynicism and antagonistic fervor as to spray its hostility on all it contacts, including itself. Hang Out burns with a rancor for all social scene shit, but as that kind of dismissive scream often is, it's matched to a stabbing self-loathing (which explodes on Rut) rather than an arrogance. And Street Walker might seem like a bleak scathing portrait of a prostitute, but it switches up between third and first person so quickly, marries itself to its target and then jumps away from that, snaps between the specific and the general, that all you're left with is just an overwhelming sense of unease and gathering despair, all thrust into your head by the thump of the hardcore.
Even the hearty Oi!-shot crew-stomper of Chosen Few oscillates between being the prototypical celebratory fist-in-face fucker-upper, and a snide, self-lacerating satirical take on that brainless violent mentality "BUNCH OF APES THROWING SHIT/WE DON'T TIRE WE DON'T QUIT/RUIN THE NIGHT FOR YOU/WHAT THE FUCK YOU GONNA DO?" Even at one point breaking down into peppy goofy handclaps, heightening the ridiculousness of that thugpunk shield-wall unity. "SPILLIN' GEAR CAUSIN' FEAR/SPILL A PUNK ROCKER'S BEER/SLAP OF REALITY ACROSS YOUR FACE/CLEAR THE POSERS OUT THE PLACE" Cos maybe even a brawl is a level of interaction that can't sit right with the forceful isolation of Community: "HUMAN NATURE/SUCK IT DRY/NO COMMUNITY/JUST ALIVE"Allan where this all disintegrates, the purposeful noise losing that momentum, breaking apart with the strain of pessimistic totality, the energy previously corralled let loose, the constituent parts wild, damaging, unformed. Background turmoil and a rant of paranoia and nihilism, the coiled and wriggling thoughts that fester and live with mental quarantine, but this break is shouted again with such ferocity as to cut and bloody, just digging deeper as it's dragged out uncomfortably long.
As well as the uncompromising desire to push this negativity to hard blank endpoints, what makes Innersense really live is the way the album matches malevolent fury to the space-smooth sterling guitar whispertone, rocketship fuselage sheen over mucky snarls, Innersense chugs and cuts with Gutter Gods' perverse anti-faith, anti-human swivel. Hate articulated and thrown in all directions, animosity towards self and others and torn up with thunderous hardcore stomp and drive, but the psychshiver guitar that bookends Streetwalker, stabs out of Community, whips and swoops through Mind Corruption, and that constant wheedling squeal that lives to itch out of the quieter moments, take this venom into way weirder, darker, creepier places yet than simple fuck-you with a riff strapped-on.
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
Gag - This Punk Shit Is Cool But I Hope I'm Rob Zombie When I'm 28
Stealing the crown of best cover art of the year away from Criaturas' Espiritu De Libertad with their Who Killed Spikey Jacket? take on the Velvet Underground's banana thing, Gag's one sided 12" This Punk Shit Is Cool But I Hope I'm Rob Zombie When I'm 28 also completes the double with best album title of the year, narrowly pipping World Scariest Police Chases's NOFX And Out Come The Wolves Dookie and Japanther's Eat Like Lisa Act Like Bart at the finishing line.Five tracks of stompy evil stuff, slobbery snarls closer to hunger animal barks than recognisably human sound, cackle noise and besmeared adumbrations of speech, thrumming slumbass and lumbering ghouls, horrorpunk, not as in campy songs about vampire girlfriends and zombie hordes and facing off against zombie hordes with just your hot vampire girlfriend by your side. Fear in incomprehensibility, fear in noise, fear in the distorted gargle, the hardcore clump, the echoes of mocking Flipper-y laughter squirting out of the grasping noise, the nicks and cuts of the guitar, fear in the repetition of grunts and in the sick guttural grumble. The song titles hinting at some conjurings of ugly malevolence hidden in that bestial yelp that draws up nightmarish shivers of GISM's perfectly mutilated Nuclear Armed Hogs from your fearpunk hindbrain, CLOWN FARM, RAW MEAT, STEEL SHANK. This EP is the sound of something approaching and whatever that shit is it's not good.
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