Barcelona - Extremo Nihilismo en Barcelona MLP

10 minutes of rage, Extremo Nihilismo En Barcelona and all that conjures. The whole record reverberates with the heavy sinister throb of a bomb siren, not just in the flickering razortongue keening that opens Bomba in chaos and riot, but a deeper migraine ache, a sicker bonedeep pounding, panicked warning-pulse riffs, a broken half-groove, held slightly too long for a sway, dug in slightly too deep for a swagger, too rapid and swinging for a trudge, returned to again and again, dying off, stabbing forwards, set aside temporarily for chugging rumble on Pasión, laid over with a manic bawling on Bomba, swerving into hard burn on Ansiedad, more conventional hardcore stampede on Seguidores del Orden, but slipped back into again and again, like a returning pain, a familiar monotonous dread curling back up to you, rising up your throat and spine and flooding your skull. That crunch underpins the record, holds it together for its short scabrous life, that and the scorching vocals, laced deep with poison and anguish, enunciating ferociously and biting hard, screaming beyond words on Mi Ciudad. A sirencall of hardcore fury, an ominous wailing or an aftermath scramble, encircling the violence and torment in doubtbells, nagging squalls, painting it maybe as the wild flowers blooming from the rotten mulch of your torture and distress.

Soma Coma - Dust 12"

Sickened animalistic hardcore from Australia, frenzied and spewing bestial vitriol among thunderous beats, an unleashed creature of demonic hiccups and burps, inhuman acidspray growls, the guitar holding remnants of melody and stretched out like a pickled skin.

Ayak, Akai taking its name from the secret KKK codes, (Are You a Klansman? A Klansman Am I, bigots can't complicate things too much) a gnashing vision of vile cultic bullshit, hate hidden, secret decadences and rituals lurking behind respectability. "DISGUSTING PAST AND PRESENT OF HIGHLY EVOLVED MANKIND." This record is outraged by the world, its cruelty and coldness, its malicious acts. Area Boys is about the Igbo genocide of the 1960s, evil curling guitar lines, a stumbling into a thrashing panic as it digs into the monstrous specifics of violence as well as drawing broad strokes of frustration and beaten-in pain in songs like Gimme Soma and Never Again, thought and freewill excised slowly by the day.

Working in blunt declarations of anguish ("GOTTA RAM MY HEAD THROUGH THE WALL") and brutal bitter ironies, Imperial Dick's "TEACH ME CIVILISATION! TEACH ME MOTIVATION!", the title track's "SHIELD YOUR EYES/AS PEACE FALLS FROM THE SKY" before that constant fury rips itself apart, slowing and faltering, the ripping precision and consuming screams melting into themselves, warped and unsustainable. "IT TURNS TO DUST..."

Blazing Eye - s/t 7"

Killer LA hardcore punk, mutilated and GISM-throated snarlings, darkpunk undertones, noise an insistent presence but held at bay, dragged behind by the reckless pounding, the violent chopping riffs, the rash fraying solos. Reaping that brutish Japanese hardcore rush of the likes of Zouo's The Final Agony, LSD's Jast Last and The Execute, who might've caught hardcore more perfectly in two words than anyone else before or since with their Blunt Sleazy EP. Blunt. Sleazy. "I WILL KILL YOU" blasts Kill You and you believe.

Gas Rag - On the Beach 7"

The final and posthumous Gas Rag 7 inch rushes them out the door with the same screwed-tight hardcore fury that blazed them through their previous releases. The same speedpunk Fix fix, stamping runners of unbreakable cycles, vicious circles, snarling with cynical karma on On The Beach "Don't we all deserve to crawl?", confronting the inevitability of fucked destinies on Human Bomb "His path was clear he had no choice/Now he's a human bomb", the social prisons of Short Leash, the real prisons of Neglect, a series of jails spun out of complacencies and worn paths followed, built and maintained from structures unchallenged and flourishing, conventions obeyed. Burning and bright, Gas Rag made hardcore confined and screaming.

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.

G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society's Shit) - Demo

I've been slumping lately. I've been not feeling too good. Spent more time in the last month watching TV shows about superheros with really great abs than writing. There's plenty of 2014 music I loved or liked that I didn't get round to exegesising but every time I come to sit down to write I feel wasted, worn out. Whenever I get into ruts like that writing feels something unknowable, impossible. I look at pieces of written without the slightest idea of how I wrote them.

Yesterday was the third Monday in January, the most-depressing day of the year according to the sort of meaningless pseudo-scientific studies that newspapers and/or advertisers like to latch on in their unending conveyor belt of half-arsed content and it didn't feel great, but then it didn't feel too different to a lot of other days the last four or five months. Shit's just been stale.

But this G.L.O.S.S. demo dropped a couple days ago and it burst like a bomb, immediately it was burning a bushfire across every internet platform, frantic reblogs and retweets, the name on everyone's lips, the message reverberating: "This is the one. This is the one. This. Is. The. One." This G.L.O.S.S. demo dropped a couple days ago and from the first screams of G.L.O.S.S. (We're from the Future) through the mosh of Outcast Stomp to the tear of Targets of Men, it ripped me apart, swept out some of that staleness.

Fierce as storms and tough as bike leathers, G.L.O.S.S. play hardcore punk that makes you feel it like the first time, it's got that struggle-born uncomfortable realness, like Anomaly's demo last year, that deep agony, that fearless kick and scathing punk swagger that transmutes pain into power, rage into revolution. Cos this shit is about way more than my dumb little problems and my shitty little blog, I can only imagine the fear and stress of living while trans, while queer, while female, but Girls Living Outside Society Shit do that every day, and they take all that and mold it into the hardest fucking shit, a carapace of  constantly-reinforced bitterness, a repeated retch of frustration, a punk packed with true heretic sputum, flicking acid into eyes. Full of the sort of lines that are gonna be scratched into desks and daubed on jackets, spraypainted on punkhouse walls, written in blood and sweat and stamped deep as wards onto souls so scarily renegade that the world just wants to crush them to dust: "THIS MAKEUP IS FOR MY EYES/THESE FISHNETS ARE FOR MY THIGHS/THIS WALK IS HOW I GOT THROUGH LIFE/YOU WANT THE PEPPER SPRAY FIRST OR THE POCKET KNIFE?!" goes Targets of Men. The singer Sadie was (is?) also in the amazing Peeple Watchin', a band just as lyrically tight but there working an aching yearning softer vibe, here just taking that keenness of feeling and blowing doors down with it. "THIS IS FOR THE OUTCASTS/REJECTS/GIRLS AND THE QUEERS/FOR THE DOWNTRODDEN WOMEN WHO HAVE SHED THEIR LAST TEARS/FOR THE FIGHTERS/PSCYHOS/FREAKS AND THE FEMMES/FOR ALL THE TRANSGENDER LADIES IN CONSTANT TRANSITION" cries Outcast Stomp.



As thrilling as it was personally for something this damn good to drop, to see the excitement it immediately stoked in friends and others, imagining a phalanx of tired-ass punx across the world breaking into grins at the fury and promise of G.L.O.S.S. (We're from the Future), kicking out chairs and bedroom slamming to Outcast Stomp, that's really nothing compared to its realest purpose, its highest potential. As cool as that is, it's secondary to the true power that I know music like this contains, dragging the world into the future, into 2015 and beyond, burning down the bullshit of the past, living adamantine hard, switchblade sharp shining and slicing in the process and progress. Killer punk at its world-warping best. For people still struggling under the weighty pressures of the shite that G.L.O.S.S. take deadly aim at, this message from the future, from the ones who've made a bright burning life outside society's shit in these five songs, might just not be another way-cool demo among the cool demos, the rambling stream of punk releases, the hype and the backlash, the peaks and troughs in the tapes and the records trickling out of punk minds globally. For the ones who haven't found a place yet where they can feel tough and hard and unbeatable, or who have maybe just forgotten that that place exists, this could be so much more. This feels like the sort of thing that could save a fucking life.

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.

Arms Race - Gotta Get Out EP

Meanmugging rough London hardcore bursting with hoarse fury and Oi!-toughened conviction. 6 tracks of storming anger, packed with righteous violence, simplistic solutions for pederast politicians and corrupt cops. Hang the Scum, Kill the Bill, no words minced, just fury in scything guitars, stomps and leers, aggression unbound. Bastard a tear of online alienation, dropping into a muddy half-singsong trudge. Gotta Get Out thumping in like a terrace chant, ripping apart a life with fucked-off spit "HATE MY JOB/HATE MY LIFE", aware of it's own futility but also cognizant of the fact that that doesn't really mean shit when you're living in a blank hole of depression and drudgery, like a half-asphyxiated mutant digging out of the old Animals song. "SAME OLD STORIES YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD/IT'S TIRED, IT'S RECYCLED BUT IT'S FUCKING TRUE." On My Face showing up rage as a wild unhinged form of vulnerability, cos that level of guttural rage comes from a deep dark place, one usually sublimated in the day-to-day mechanics of survival, it gathers together the angers, personal and political and bites them off one by one. "IT'S ONE LAW FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US/AND THERE AIN'T A CUNT ON THE STREETS THAT I CAN TRUST/GIMME A PEOPLE THAT CAN FUCKING FEEL/SHOW A CITY THAT'S FUCKING REAL."

What really pulls the songs here together though is the final track, Mongrel Crew, and its flailing leviathan of a fucking singalong, one of those huge gang-lore screamers that gets right down into your bones with its hooligan bundling, laying waste to the stress and shite drawn on the other songs just through the sheer obliterating power of that punk/hardcore communal violence, packed with self-mythologising, the city geography so loathed on On My Face marked as territory, a couple punk nods to past and present (Conflict's The Ungovernable Force, the band's own label Quality Control). A chorus that makes the personal anguish of Gotta Get Out and On My Face slip away, the societal wrongs-rightings of Hang the Scum and Kill the Bill be just a swing of a fist away, a tangible arm-in-arm possibility. "OI! OI! MONGREL CREW/WE'RE MONGREL ARMY AND WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!" While most of the songs here make you wanna break the world, rearrange it with kicks and glassings, 45 seconds into Mongrel Crew and you fucking can.

 

Replica - Beast EP

Another EP of faithful-to-the-line boot-tough fiery hardcore from these Bay Area's finest. Terrifying pace, dropping with unfuckwithable precision into rugged stomps and pulling out again, retaining a focused fury throughout. Trust a rage of betrayal, turning back in on itself, intoning the title with a sickened growl. Imagine Sisyphus burning with a stubbornness, turning over with just small requests in the face of a futile day-to-day, little nuggets of meaning grasped at "I ASK TO BE A FUCKING PERSON IN THIS WORLD. I ASK TO HAVE A NAME." Night Life struggles with obliteration, Beast with violence, chugging mean and dirty, racing with mach one desire, trudging to a stop. Six stone bullets of hardcore, dealing brutal visions of a painful world, through rugged vocals, all deep snarl and long-cultivated disdain, whirling along with the threshing speed.

S.H.I.T. - Generation S.H.I.T. 7"

The second 7" from Toronto's S.H.I.T., nailing down their place as one of 2014 hardcore's brightest burning fires. Four tracks of death and alienation, vacant scrapings gathered, soldered, shone up into a whirring fury of modern existence, with shivers of Gauze, Inmates, Gudon and the like. The war whip of Eraser II, the blankness of distanced violence ("HUMAN TERROR/COLD TECHNOLOGY/GOD'S OWN POWER/AT TERMINAL VELOCITY") brought home, close and smoldering. Fuck All a frustrated bite, the vocals a deep bloodied sneer, "OBLIVIOUS INCOMPETENT BELIEF/FESTER IN THE PRIDE OF THE NAIVE". Mockery 1-2 beat and shivering guitar butting into a simplistic jabbing punk fragment. Generation Shit's guitar scribble, constant clatter and smeared out thrum comprising a scuttering anthem of blossoming anger. "THEY ARE THE NEW WASTE/THE DISPOSABLE YOUTH/A GENERATION OF SHIT/NO FUTURE FOR YOU" it rips in a dragged apart bawl. Angry beyond measure, scoured and shaped into a fierce nihilistic violence. "NAPALM THE KIDS"

DiE - Vexed EP

"Because what did it mean to say that something represented a cross between primitive insensitivity and chillingly inane emptiness in a bottomless pit of unbridled dark?!" - Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango

Concrete cunt UK hardcore following up one of last years best seven inches. Eight tracks of grimworld negativity, enacted in tenebrous churning punk perfection, drawing on hardcore's many curdled corners. Monotony thrumming with Discharge fire, Exterminate wailing Pig Champion surly, throughout there are deep veins of Chaos UK bluntness, SSD waste-laying. A seemless melding of hardcore's hate-heavy highlights, its darkest distillations, all utilised to construct a EP of heady desolation, almost rejuvenating in its relentless punch, its unmitigated bleakness, a holistic disgust. Pressure all expiring gasps and claustrophobic panic, BTK searing with serial killer malevolence, Exterminate bitter and murderous, a brief existence of where "DEAD-EYED DEMONS PREY UPON THE WEAK" in Dark, "MIND IS MANACLED/BRAIN IS CHAINED" on Life Sentence, "NO LIFE'S WORTH LIVING WHERE MONOTONY REIGNS" on Monotony, just your purest nihilistic affectations made flesh, indulgent hate, all laid out together, the temporary joys of life blotted out by Life Sentence's knife-edge guitar flails, Pressure's hostile thump, your brow furrows, your lip curls into a sneer, your voice drops into a threatchoked deadness, your movements restricted into brutal simplistic bluster and temporarily become one with the gloom, living long minutes in that mean tough shell, ready to bite heads off, Ready to Rot.

That kind of unremitting dejection is unsustainable, but it's a place that a lot of us have lived in at times, have got drunk and dirty on in the worst moments, the panic attacks, the depressive episodes, the enduring anxiety and pummeling hopeless funks, and the tools used to deal with the shit, that abjection of self, that self-transformation into a self-named bastard, that concomitant desire to just listen to 80s hardcore bands singing about dead soldiers and suicidal ideation, killer cops and cop killers and heroin overdoses, to obsessively play that music from waking up at noon to sleeping at four, those tools call out to you, lie unused and rusting when you do finally move on, find a better place for your head to be at. DiE are built from that energy, they're crafting and carving with those exact tools, and for a ten minutes you can slip freely into that bastard mindset, into that hard cunt animus, roiling in malice and despair in a cathartic engagement with the worst of the world, for that ten minutes you breath the gagging smog, taste the blood on your teeth, scratch with the spite, devolve, swing and turn with the vigor of the falling, the luster of the damned, before you come up for air again, you can abandon that hard-earned hope like a dog-end tossed casually into the gutter, for that Vexed ten minutes you can feel the fucking hate.

Absolut - Punk Survival LP

Crunching hardcore in the international mode, matching that Scandi-bombblast to the squeal and wail of Japanese legends like The Sexual or Deathside, thick gory riffs, vocals echoing back into the raw thunder and hail like deathhowls blown futile away in the night. Your Fraud chugs with motorpunk purpose, it's guitars bend gracefully above the storm before faltering and collapsing back into the roiling sea. Neo Fuckers gouges out thick rents in the pavement, its solo a slipping and squirming beast, the drums relentless, the vocals one more animalistic tear. Loveless Noise building out of one manic squealing into another, one chaos slips into a deeper one. 9 songs of full and bloodwarm hardcore punk, burning and bludgeoning, no rest, no quarter given, Punk Survival.

The Repossessed - demo CS

Eye-scratching feminist hardcore punk from Sheffield, brief and biting,  bold and blunt, all the waste burnt off. The guitar a garage-raw scrape, the vocals a bitter scream. Shifting from crude thumps into searing choruses. "MAKE YOUR OWN UTOPIA/OR BURN EVERYTHING DOWN!" on Make Your Own Utopia, "TRY! TRY! TRY! OR DIE! DIE! DIE!" on Try "IT KILLS ME, KILLS ME KILLS ME!" on Falling Down. Lyrics reiterating struggles lived and lumped, the inevitability of failure running up into the impossibility of surrender. The Repossessed stamp with the repetitive chickenwire punk of Buck Biloxi and the Fucks, bloodied up with the sore savagery of Neopunkz or other early 80s hardcore cutting hard and fast.

Snob - s/t 7"

Muddied up hardcore punk out of the pulsating current London scene. It's Crazy Spirit/Disorder trashthrash, early-Rudimentary Peni clatter and sputter, a thick guttural bass roll, a skinning guitar skid grouting over the gaps, occasionally slipping up and crashing into weird broken shards. Matter-of-fact vocals laying down tracks that build in spite. Harassed, like Hysterics Leave Me Alone, displays a burning anger stoked and compounded every day, rising from fear "CAN'T COUNT THE TIME/I'VE FELT TERRIFIED" to righteous destruction "RIP THEIR EYES FROM SOCKETS/RIP THEIR TONGUES FROM THEIR MOUTHS." Mother a terrifically dismissive snap sneering at the fuckwitted fedoraed ranks (actually, it's about ethics in games journalism). Piss a panicked primitive shout, the classic hardcore punk trick of sticking a puerile song about bodily fluids in with five furious attacks on shit that matters, like Send in the Mayor, wavering and whispering and darting forward, hanging out to dry every pub bore's favourite post-satirical bumbler. Buzzing with energy, trapped down in its shitty punk hole, kicking dirt into everyone's faces.

Perspex Flesh - s/t LP

Grimey anti-social anti-self hardcore from one of the UK's best bands doing it. Noise from dark places, the filth and pressures that life struggles forward and cracks apart under, all the little annihilations, all the real stones in your shoes, nails in your eyes, bubbles in your blood. It explodes with physical humours and decay, bile and bitterness, body and brain succumbing, betraying you. "CHEST TIGHTENS AND BRAIN BLEEDS BLACK/SKIN STRETCHES UNTIL IT STARTS TO CRACK." on Perspex Flesh. "WELLED INSIDE MY STOMACH CHURNS/A DARK FORCE STARTS TO BURN" on Cancer Black. It reels with streetviolence on Feeding Time, antithetical to a triumphalist hooligan stomp, panicked, bad nights and catastrophic consequences. "GLAZED HOOLIGAN EYES DESTINED TO FIGHT/38 BLOWS TO THE HEAD/LEFT IN THE GUTTER TO DIE."  There's anxiety physicalised as a destructive force, in the choking silence of Tongue-Tied ("WORDS TRAPPED/BITTEN TONGUE/TONGUE-TIED/ACHING LUNGS"), the warping terror of Prison of Glass "MAN AT THE MIRROR/HE DOES NOT SEE/IMAGE OF HIMSELF/PAITNED FEAR COMES FREE." All this pain and paranoia realised in apocalyptic swirl and clamor, shivers and screams, the clank and whistle, crash and convulsions, thumping hardcore assaults, frenzied punk retches, moments when the songs empty out into the drip and whisper of factory echoes, ugly necrotising emotions sucking in lifeforce and breathing out deadening threat. Unnamed things snarlsing and scuttering about in the murk.

Orden Mundial - Obediencia Debida MLP

Raw Mallorcan punk exploding with bite. Sharing members with Maquina Muerta but working with more range and space in their Wretched-raddled fury. Hardcore punk done up all screaming bright and staticky rough, the guitar tone a textured buzz, an undulating prickle of noise over quick shifts as the songs bark and scratch. The vocals matching the music torment for torment, rawness to rawness, deep and scathing and exposed. Son Fantasmas a scornful swagger, cracking apart into feedback squalls, grunts and drumrolls retreating like a spider into the dark. Gusanos a plodder and breaker, settling into a monotonous groove that builds in threat and promise, guitar scrawled over the top like wild childish graffiti, aimless tangle of noiselines obscurant. Accion Humanitaria has a similar dance, a steady streetpunk roll under morsecode blips, wild wirey guitar freakouts always ready to burst forth as on Camino Inevitable's manic scrabbling. Fosas Abiertas that wellworn ironic punk march amongst the din, the feedback pulled and roughly manipulated into sharp steel flowers of high broken vengeance, squeaks and peaks of rage for humanity, against leaders and wars and the putrefying grasp that is present in each trapping violence.

Party Plates - s/t EP

Real dirty Cleveland hardcore from Inmates people, a furious grubby bass ripping and curling underneath, holding it all together in rubbedraw anguish. Kidnapping Quatro pushed forward at a relentless pace, vocals breaking and screaming, the guitar reverberating out with a tone something like a death-rock shiver that's been beaten and bloodied, lost its airy grace in favour of bladed killing power. Disforeplay more midtempo, digging into thicker grooves. Intro walks with a deep drowning chugging like a steam engine, unintelligible screaming and bellows sing-songy children taunts before it breaks into the metalpunk rumble Galloping Ghost, motorpunk rhythms, that fuzzknackered bass murk, the guitar snatching and scratching, as it falls apart into demonic growls and a thick blush of unsteady self-destruction.

The Combat Zone - s/t LP

Negative Boston hardcore coming with straight up ugly loner shit, built from the barbrawl-bruised scraps of Jerry's Kids energy, clattering train-track relentless and smacking with that real rudimentary broken energy, drum-thump to guitar snap, working at barely coherent purposes, strung-together with wire and contempt, stomping and slithering on Give Me War, pounding on Run and Hide, tense and taut on Fucked Up Head, rollin hard into the riot on Inevitable, the vocals a thick SSD snarl of grit and venom, breaking out into some shoutalong Iron Cross goonspite on Stay Away and Bottom of the Charles. "SOCIAL REJECTION! LEAVE ME ALONE!" bites Untamed, "NO EYE CONTACT DON'T LOOK AT ME/I DON'T NEED SOCIETY" on Stay Away, "I'M A CLASSY GUY/I'M AN ANTI-SOCIALITE" goes A.S.M.

A monomaniacal devotion to topic, as hockey and beer are to the Hanson Brothers, as being awesome and snakes are to The Awesome Snakes, so is anti-social fervour to The Combat Zone. How do I hate the fucking world? Let me count the ways. Every song reaffirming its obsession with, its binding ties to, isolation and alienation, a hostile cough contracted inhaling the sickness of society with no filter, living its violence, withdrawing then spitting it back out with fierce simple disgust. Waking up every morning with an unmovable pissy scowl. Malice-drenched, grudge-tough and ready to ruck. "VIOLENCE IS REAL. HATE IS A DRIVING FORCE" proclaims the back cover. "ENJOY IT OR GO FUCK YOURSELF."

Tercer Mundo - Ser Nosotros Mismos

The first 12" from these Mexican punx, following on from their killer EP. Eight scrabbling hardcore punk tunes in a little under twelve minutes. Striking a balance between biting rawness and catchy rock and roll, Tercer Mundo have crafted one of the best punk releases of 2014. The title track opens mid-tempo, guitar whispers and a matter-of-fact sung-spoken vocals, before crashing apart, tumbling down into a pained bellowing. Similarly, Veijas Glorias runs an insistent post-punky riff around for a while until it as well blows up. Songs like Horrible Realidad are a thrumming tear from the off, but even then pulling back to redouble the scathing sonic attack. Tercer Mundo uses these punchy scuzz-forged hardcore punk to rip into the centre of a fucked society, to expose its ills, its crushing bleakness, and to find the dinged-up creaking human heart that lives and and burns within those fucked spaces.

 Opener Caidos sets the rage: "THEY HAVE FALLEN IN THIS WAR/THEY HAVEN'T GONE, STILL FIGHTING", closing in a defiant clatter: "THERE IS NO FEAR/THERE IS NO FEAR/THERE IS NO FEAR/FEAR DOESN'T EXIST" Not "I'm not afraid", but so burnt with the shitty state of things, with this "HORRIBLE REALITY OF HUNGER AND TORTURE/HORRIBLE REALITY OF DEATH AND INSANITY" as Horrible Realidad screams, as to transcend the terror of living, an zen fucked-offness, a purposeful unbreakable force. Maybe too broken right now, too beaten down by the work, the struggle ("ANXIETY TERRIFIES ME" admits Extincion, in an open moment) at times but still killing with feeling ("I DESPISE YOU WITH ALL MY STRENGTH" warns Te Desprecio) and still present in this place.

"WE DON'T FIT IN, IN THIS SHITTY SOCIETY! WE DON'T FIT IN, IN THIS STUPID CULTURE!" the title track states, but ending as a reaffirmation of the power of punk, in a society where violence infects each moment, to find a place, feeling the ugliness upfront and the strength buried deep within: "IN PUNK/WE WILL BE OURSELVES/IN PUNK/IT'S ALL WE HAVE LEFT/IN PUNK/WE WILL BE OURSELVES/IN PUNK/ALL FOR OURSELVES" That's where it is, that's where you can find the power, the drive, the last spark of energy to clench your hand into a fist and rise it to the sky. That's where they take all that balled-up fear, anxiety, stress at being cognizant in a shitstorm of cops and politicians and drugs, the swirling hateruck of capitalist violence, and beat it into rock to throw. "I HOPE THE DAY ARRIVES/IN WHICH MY SOUL EXPANDS" roars Sin Rostro Ni Corazon, cutting up streaming rawpunk brutality, with militaristic stamps. The world should be watching as the students and workers and people of Mexico explode with longheld anger at the sickening violence done unto them in the name of security and profit, as they continue the longstruggle that lives for and with us all, in many places, in many forms, in some places keener and far more dangerous than others, this is an album of frustration, this is an album of hope, this is an album of 'not yet', this is an album of 'but it will'.

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.