Voco Protesta - Neniam Konfidu al la Stato

"I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability of an universal language; but I do not believe it will be brought about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language. Such a course of action, or rather of slavish inaction, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for mastery between the languages of the greater powers.

On the other hand, a large number of small communities, speaking different tongues, are more likely to agree upon a common language as a common means of communication than a small number of great empires, each jealous of its own power and seeking its own supremacy." James Connolly, 1908

Raw punk from Japan screamed bitterly in Esperanto, a melding of form and content, a language built to erase borders, unify humanity in one tongue, one language. The use of Esperanto harkens back to movements of the early 20th century, futurists as optimists, the wide open possibilities of revolutionary camaraderie spanning the world, before futurism played its hand as fascistic ugly machineworship, Esperanto is new rules as new loves, new grammars as new communities. It's an old-fashioned idea, because the imposition of new languages is now synonymous with the erasure of old ways, those "smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language" that James Connolly wrote of, the native kids taught English or Spanish or French and punished for using the words that connect them to their heritage, it's been a severing, controlling tool, a cleaver, so that the more revolutionary act is one of reclaiming lost tongues, preserving languages sitting on the brink, crafting literature and poetry and song in a voice that speaks to your family but not the majority, that you hold tighter, make those who wish to see and understand you have to work at it actively engage with your voice, the intimacy holding back the malicious hegemony that globalisation carries with it. Charu Nivedita's Zero Degree written in Tamil not Malayalam or English, Der Nister's The Family Mashber in Yiddish not Russian. Punk bands across the world letting loose enraged rants in every language under the sun. Esperanto is seen as an odd utopian relic.

Voco Protesta embrace this revolutionary tradition of the language fully, although it is a far from utopian perspective expressed in this album, a raw graze of violence and struggle, pain and burning, capitalism, bureacracy, police violence, profits and nuclear fallout, a litany of illnesses poisoning the planet. The unifying force of Esperanto here is the unity of struggle and the promise of anarchism, the reaching grasp of hunger and unhappiness, in this we find a makeshift communion with people across the globe, and languages so steeped in blood as English or Japanese, though they are capable of great beauty and truth as all language, are unfit for purpose to lay this struggle bare. Reach back into the past to find this half-forgotten thing to blast apart bureaucratic nightmares and nuclear traps.

The brutality here, as in the works of Pichismo, an Esperanto punk band hailing from Ukraine, is fully alive in the music, blistering and violent, underpinned by a radiation hum, exploding out of tension on Kontrauatako, setting up moments of respite from the thrashbuzz, sweet woundings on Divido Kaj Konflikto, jaunty marching on Vivas Morte, only to kick them in with unnatural forces of distortion. Only to crash onwards.

Eight years after he penned the words at the top of this review, James Connolly was standing before a British firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising. In word and deed, commitment to a better world is what we all aspire to, and almost always fall short of, battered by the blows of an unjust world, tugged down by the human compromise, but we can find moments and small places where these revolutions live, in protests, in voices, in the shape of the language we use or refuse to use, in art and in song. And for some of us, in the warm savagery of noise.

On La Vida Es Un Mus.

Zyanose - Why There Grieve?

I am way into into when bands insist on coining their own subgenres to describe their music, that act of marking out your sound as something different something not quite containable is an act of meaningless artistic bravado that always makes me smile, the Taxpayers with goofpunk for example, on Why There Grieve? Zyanose have dubbed their twin-bass fury DITCH CRUST NOISE CORE, at once a descriptor for their sound and a herald of their attack. Zyanose make punishing stuff, deep, burbling, biting noise that crashes with the force of buildings falling.

While their last 12" Insane Noise Raid focused on sin, Why There Grieve? moves slightly outside these classical interior failings to deal with more modern pressures. Keep Yourself is a punx on punx song, namechecking Gloom, Confuse, the forerunners of Zyanose's ugly sound. "I beleave in punk" it screams. Maybe the one thing that Zyanose do believe in, the rest of the album torn through with looming nuclear spectres and smaller quieter forms of oblivion, drudgery of work, the venal machinations of politicians, apathy creeping like frostbite, irritation, anger, all drawn in chaotic blasts, as the noise swirls in panic on Silent or F.O.A.D., rumbles then bursts on Snapped Pappet, clangors in incomprehensible conflict on the Die is Cast (while the liner notes give lyrics in both Japanese and English, the long string of kanji that is The Die Is Cast is translated into English as Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhrrrr!!!!).

Nihilistic squealings. Pulse is a 13 second wordless, well, pulse, that ends off the first side of the record. The sound of a countdown, or a time marker, an underwater bloop, like a baby version of the rest of the records explosions, a short snap of the worldbeat that Zyanose feel down in the corroded bones of the world, that they explicate on in the militaristically underpinned Camouflage or the anguished vocalisations of Options for the Fool.

Before the album runs out to a stop with the drums on Keep Yourself, Zyanose construct an awful world of awful noise, few releases from its pain, just the slightly longer bite and rumble of that final track and its strength in punk, strength in the noise that's ripped out of the earth in order to mirror the noise that's pressed down on you. F.O.A.D. Fuck off and die. Fuck off and dance.

Amnesea - 1st EP

Blown all the way out past all orbitary waystations, a storming Japanese hardcore release on Tadpole Records. That sort of total splatternoise distortion that Zyanose trade in, ferocity totality. The vocals squeeze out of the signalscatter cacophony in a ghostly half-buried echo. Glitchy guitar solos breaking apart on re-entry on ソケイヘルニア. The final song gets kinda mellow and but still noisy as hell, kind of like the song Vanette topping off Slight Slappers's A Selfish World Called Freedom LP, there's tension and building threat there which isn't present on the rest of the EPs crashercrust tumbles. Slowly leading into another purewrath explosion, a raw rippedapart beast, dropping out into mid-tempo variation on that sinister runaround, erupting again. Furious and unfuckwithable brokenpunx.

Paintbox - Trip, Trance and Travelling

Maybe the strength of this album is diluted if I actually talk about what it sounds like before you listen to it. Certainly some of the strongest reactions that people I know have given it come from the utter shock of its sound. So I will beseech you to fucking trust me on this and just get this bloody album.

Okay, that's not really enough for some people, and fair enough. So here are some pithy sonic comparisons to get you to listen to it: GISM if they allied their searing solos with a forthright melodic sensibility rather than their low-fi minatory drone. Motörhead if they covered the songs you generally get over the ending credits of Japanese beat-em-ups. Chinese Democracy if it was worth the wait.

I don't have a huge grounding in the history of Japanese punk, so there may be some factual errors here, but as I understand it, Paintbox were a Japanese hardcore band who traveled in a particular subgenre known as burning spirits, apparently named after a certain tour in Japan, the characteristic sound of which is basically a defiantly uptempo punk thrasher featuring the sort of solos you haven't heard since the last time you stumbled across the Beat It video on a Sounds of the 80s marathon and listened to Eddie Van Halen make his guitar wail over the sight of a bunch of extras from The Warriors abandoning violence in favour of meticulously synchronised dance moves. The band that defined this style was Death Side who existed from 87-94 before disbanding and all their members going on to further develop the sound in the bands Judgement, Forward and Paintbox.

Out of those three bands, Paintbox are by far the easiest on the ears, on their albums Singing, Shouting, Crying and Earth Ball Sports Tournament they begin incorporate a myriad of other styles and sensibilities into the core of their burning spirits sound, but when I first came to Trip, Trance and Travelling I didn't know that. I had never heard of this band. All I knew was that I was listening to what I had been assured was a completely rocking album which began with a whole lot of mellow spacey guitar noodling and I was just starting to wonder whether I'd been prog-rolled when, almost two minutes in, the song bursts into angry thrashing life and I found myself swept up in a current of an irresistible hardcore punk rhythm, rough throaty vocals, marvelling more with each seamless sonic development, a chugging guitar part, a rumbling wandering bassline, a huge nonsensical chorus (one of the few bits of English on the album), a delirious guitar solo, keyboards, heraldic trumpets, a mellifluous lullaby of female vocals. After the first song, I was entranced, but I thought they surely couldn't keep up this intense and insane blend of styles for the whole album, there have been many bands where I've encountered a thrilling song only to find it to be the one moment when their talents and intentions transcended their limitations and they produce something amazing before collapsing into a generic samey mush. That is not Paintbox. This entire album, from the first note to the last, is imbued with the same nutty thrill of the first track, even on the mellower songs which are perfectly placed throughout the album for breathing space in the galloping onslaught punk rock that dominates the album. And this album lasts over seventy fucking minutes. Seventy!

Now when I listen to that first song I find the intro filled with tension, the bass swelling underneath, the soft guitar rising and falling, expanding and contracting, teasing you for the joyous moment when it rips into gear. It's one of those little bits of music, like the chorus in Dear Landlord's Three to the Beach, like first time the backing vocals kick in on The Vindictives' Assembly Line, that never fails to elicit a completely shit-eating grin from me. The most effective use of establishing and then subverting the expectations of a tender aural caress since the Butthole Surfers shouted SATAN! SATAN! SATAN! at the start of Locust Abortion Technician and then ploughed into a massive blast of Black Sabbath's Sweat Leaf tastefully retitled Sweat Loaf. There are far too many beautiful giddy moments like that on this album to catalogue them all, and part of the joy of this album is being constantly surprised by it, constantly finding bits where if you were were going to describe them to someone you would be constantly bookending your assessment of the sound with the panicky phrase 'but good', but here are a couple of bits that stand out to me:

• 
  the mariachi horns on Mental Picnic
• the whole of Fields in the Moonlight, which for large parts of its seven minute duration gives itself over to the more melodic influences of the album until the screaming inevitably kicks in and its like you were listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack on Winamp when someone linked you to a webpage which autoplayed Dangers. In fact, possibly the pithiest musical description of this entire beautiful mess to stand next to my previous comparisons would be four words: Yoko Kanno's hardcore album
• the way the riff (which bears an odd resemblance to Jona Lewie's Stop the Cavalry) on the final track speeds up
• the Chemical Warfare-esque squealing madness at the end of Raw Ore
• the brief bass break in the middle of Retribution
• the little tinkle before the guitar solo at the start of Praying

Lyrically I don't really have much to say about this album. I fell in love with it before I knew what the hell they were singing, which is fairly unusual for me. Even if a band's lyrics are completely dumb, I like to be able to singalong with them, but that's just another testament to the overwhelming power of the music. Since I first heard it, I've purchased the gorgeous gatefold double LP which comes complete with lyrical translations, and while its a relief to know I haven't been madly besotted with a concept album endorsing the Rape of Nanking, I still don't really care about what they're singing. The lyrics are kind of clunky in translation, but are perfectly workable fun punk exhortations of freedom. They don't completely work on paper, but few punk lyrics do. It's always about the way they're sung, the force put into them. I'm sure if you knew Japanese it would be a lot of fun to sing along to lines like "It's not enough/Destroy all the rules/ You will strike a mine called shyness and explode yourself/We are making preparations steadily" or "Going to the ends of the endless world/Using every trick to coax my rickety body/Swinging paralysing gasoline/Let's become ape-men with an engine and go" but for me they're sadly just a peripheral part of the whole experience.

I have utterly no problem with a band that just wants to play punk rock and never alter their style. I love The Copyrights more and more with each release and never expect them to change much. I'm enamoured with The Lillingtons, Guitar Wolf and Threatener and countless other bands that stick rigidly to a particular basic punk rock template, but there's such a complete feeling of delight to hear a band push the envelope of punk rock so far beyond its conventional bounds without ever losing the vim and fury that makes it so appealing. I've never been much of a metal fan, but this album is like everything I would always sort of want metal to sound like in its noise and bombast streamlined perfectly into happy bursts of infectious cacophony.

In the making of this album, Chelsea, the guitarist of Paintbox and before that Death Side, died, as did Mayuko Sakai, the woman responsible for the beautiful ethereal female vocals that perfectly counterpoint the angry growl of the lead singer (whose name remains unstranslated in the lyrics booklet). Now it would be jejune and probably offensive to speculate that the decade long struggle to produce this album in all its epic scope contributed to their death (Chelsea by all accounts had a pretty big drug problem for a long time (online you can find a report of someone seeing him play a show with a heroin baggie hanging from the mic) and died after apparently spending several days getting drunk and not eating in a hot apartment without adequate air-conditioning), instead I'll say that in the searing beauty of this album, the glorious derangement of the whole endeavour, the way it makes the absurd sounding mix of psychedelia and punk rock, J-pop and thrash, lounge jazz and metal, prog and hardcore sound like the most natural thing in the world and never gets tired or boring over a running time about the same as Buster Keaton's The General, there exists a testament to the astounding skill and artistry of all involved in making this masterpiece, and to the assimilative powers of all punk rock, and ultimately to just the way that music itself is constantly evolving and constantly surprising and constantly finding strange and madcap new approaches to soundtrack the fractal delirium of the human condition.