VCR - Greatest Hits 7"

Buggy-eyed, bloody-lipped eejit squabbling from Toronto, springing from an overcaffeinated and understimulated mind, all e-numbers and teengang spit: "WE'RE VCR! FREAK PUNKS AND TOTAL FUCKING HUNKS!". Fluorescent synth squawks goofily jabbing through the dirtied up gitpunk like bubblegum blisters, careening through the splintered remnants of Swankys burble with jellylegs rhythms and sneering, screams, whoops and barks that snap out like involuntary tics. Playground taunts like the drawl of "I THINK YOUR LIFE IS PISS COS YOU CAN'T DANCE AND YOU'RE A PRICK" on Fake Freaks Fuck Off, Danzig/Shakira style non sequitur couplets like One Trick Dog's "AIN'T A PHONY/MACARONI/RIGATONI". Truly dumb and way too great.

L.O.T.I.O.N. - Second Audio Document 2014 CS

Brutal cyberpunk smearings, inept industrial thumpings, noisepunk static swirlings, voices like bugs in the machine given angry life. A broken fifth-generation corrupted rendering of Butthole Surfers digital growls, a lowdown lump of sub-basement Atari Teenage Riot electronic mess burbling and choking. "CELEBRATING THE NEWEST FLAVOR OF DIET COLA KNOWN TO GIVE RATS CANCER." The final track a long warnoise instrumental, drill screamings and oppressive helicopter throb.

GAZE - demo CS

Noisy Irish d-beat hardcore fux. The dragged away vocals battling through the fuzz, employed more as another piercing noisemechanic than anything conveying specific meaning, the eponymous track laying down a mid-tempo march for before it breaks rapidly into a sheer riot. Shit With Your Eyes thunders onwards, Won't Move is a panic attack, the vocals desperate as the fall off into the deathly chaos, What Are We Living For crashes and clatters against itself in drum flurries, the bass scraping on, a thick layer of feedback, fizzburn and shitnoise pulling it all down, the tempo shifting from drive to fight, from warring rumble to petulant stomp. There is a song called Fuck You, Fuck Off. Yeah. That is what you need to know.

The Formby Channel - The Saucy Seaside EP

The latest EP of true British weirdness from Wankys side-project The Formby Channel, combining a hideous noisepunk hiss with the sunny allure of the British seaside. As the name suggests, it's George Formby meets Chaos Channel, a combination no one was really screaming out for, but the banjolele is integrated surprisingly well to the Wankys/Swankys sound, mirroring the bassline bounce with it's choppy charms, catchy, with the fizz like the chatter of overpriced arcades.

Fish Supper is a na-na-na-na-na ode to fish 'n' chips and, predictably, oral sex, done in weird scritchy noise. Last Year's Holiday like a nightmare version of Last Christmas. Kiss Me's banjolele breakdowns and pucker sound ends slipping beneath the breakers of buzz. Top Deck Shandy Lads a cunted carousing. The presence of kazoo and innuendo throughout recalling true British scum The Macc Lads, who lifted their sense of humour from British seaside postcards, which generally feature things like large-breasted women carrying suggestively shaped fruit captioned things like "How about these melons!?" which are giggled at by drunk middle-aged people and children aware that there's something vaguely forbidden about a woman saying something like "I thought the Blackpool tower would be bigger." as her husband blushes in bed beside her.

The British seaside is a fucking weird place, filled with that sort of ooh-er-nudge-nudge-wink-wink bullshit, only really attaining that carefree glow in the brief summer months, transforming the rest of the year into a kind of barren apocalyptic greyscape, take this as someone who spent Christmasses in Cleethorpes as a kid. The Formby Channel are clearly a pisstake, but there's something in this splattered shit-fi vomitof holiday cliches (Seaside Beat busting out of, falling into the classic tribute to the British beaches, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside) that speaks of the shitty misery that underpins behind happy times, happy pictures. The dark economies that lurk in any tourist trap.

The darkness hiding behind the clean clut Cliff Richard Young Ones summer stroll, the Brighton Rock menace. The Formby Channel sneer with the manic energy of Mr Punch, which if you're not familiar, is the lead character of Punch & Judy, a traditional children's seaside puppet show based around the themes of domestic violence and police brutality. This is a Viz cartoon made flesh, intentionally groanworthy lewd puns and obnoxion, silly drunken dances, putting the cunt in Scunthorpe.

The Friday - Our Body Made in Fukushima

Just as Chernobyl spawned punktakes from the likes of punk-pop J-rockers Blue Hearts' Blue Hearts Theme, Greek d-beat Chernobyl Attack, low-fi Russian rebels Grazhdanskaya Oborona folk He Saw the Sun to Slang's terrifying metalpunk Chernobyl Necklace on LIFE MADE ME HARDCORE, the pogonutters Chernobyl Babies, punk bands eddy and swirl in the aftermath of horrific events, twisting, riding the violence and pain in their darkworld/fuckedworld conceptions. The tragedy at Fukushima has already led to Irish mutants Rats Blood's No More Fukushima, New York cyberthugs L.O.T.I.O.N.'s Fukushima Fallout, Swedish crustcunts Anger Burning's Fukushima Fireworks, Spanish hardcore band Fukushima, real Fukushima rawpunx Strange Factory's Fukushima Nightmare, probably many more already and many more to come.

Straight outta Fukushima, an all-girl trio who produce an unnerving combination of this clean chunky bass with the sort of tinny fuzz found on early 80s Spanish shit-fi classics like Qloaqa Letal and Los Punk Rockers. The vocals a ratty snatch and call, screaming. All-girl teenpunk carries stereotypes and connotations of bubblegum, Unlovables sweetness, conceived in the shadow of nuclear oblivion, these songs have touches of the noisecore of Stagnation, ruthless breakings and beatings of Disorder/Chaos UK punx, those sounds taken apart and skin stretched between pikes, blood soaking the ground. The onwards tumble of Stupid Animal, drums clatter and pounding as if trying to find a way out, the stop-and-go graze of Chicken Feed, the stabbing noisespike and bassy tickle of Common Sense, the monotonous drive and thump of Sein Und Zeit, the basic solo whinnying off into the dirty churning ether. Nuclear threat is more than just a Discharge lyric. It's a hovering evil that kills, deforms, rearranges lives and landscapes. The Friday are all too aware of that as they scream and snarl over this weirdpunk all imbued with a real human rage at ungodly power, chaos and bonescrape, and on the title track it lumbers like revenant beast, full of pain and purpose, Our Body Made in Fukushima.

Scumraid - Out of Order

Korean terrornoise, raw D-Clone burn, on D-takt & Råpunk, distilled from their 2012 demo, clearer, but no less furious, the murk wiped away to show the sharpness of the sound, accidental noise replaced with purposeful noise. Scorched earth howls of injustice, dread, panic and TOTAL IGNORANT PARASITE BASTARDS. "CLIMAX OF HUMAN ERROR/REASONLESS LIFE TERROR/THAT ENDLESS FEAR OF DEATH FROM THE ONE GENERATION" rages Tsar-Bomba, splaying out this deep cocktail of interior emotions, depression, anxiety, sickness, and how those struggles intertwine, and are compounded by, the outside struggles, wondering how to deal with that fear, how to heal (Scar: "WE ARE BREATHING DEAD AIR/NOT FOR HEAL SCAR") under the prospects of annihilation, disenfranchisement, state-sponsored violence. Often featuring a deep afterburner blare as backdrop as it mirrors that rocket roar with it's fierce guitar churn. Out of Order leveling down out of the turbulent crashercrust tide into a harsh midtempo lumbering spiked and skewered with cacklescreams and noiseglut before it works itself up again into that terrible tear. Painful sounds for a painful world.

Black Boot - demo CS

More of that Toxic State New York nastiness, noisy and bloody, rubbed raw down to the bone, vocals like a tongueless bark. False Rune is an unhinged stamp, clattering down with an exposing glare: "YOU SHIT/YOUR SILK PANTS/THEY ARE/STILL SILK". Clawed a scrabble, Spitshine a blunt relentless drive, Grave a tear, slamming in concrete, squealing and rubbing with grabbing intensity, Mirage a thrust of paranoiac ooze. Labyrinth has more deep lost terror, flailing "CLAUSTROPHOBIC/SPIRALING CORNERS/BOTH THE SAME/BARREN JOURNEY". A punk struggle buried in a grief of turbulent black noise, clipping and crackling. A blastedwall haemorrhaging of rot and panic.

Aborticidio - s/t EP

Trashfuck noise from Mexico. Swankys by way of Ataque Frontal and M.E.L.I. 時々私は死ぬしたい is a deep ugly slop, barely held together. Basurales De Miseria is a pierching smear of cackle, cruddy fizz and drumsplats. Asdfghjk! rumbles and groans. "PUNK! I LOVE YOU MORE THAN MY LIFE!" it screams as it shouts about The Comes, Confuse and Gudon. Está Culero opens with the shitbass, breaks open the cockroachbox of feedback, kills and eats a rotten staticsqueal solo. Let's Dance to Noisepunk is tired old rocknroll riffs detourned bloodily, buried and burnt, like People's nutty Kyushu/Pistols-shuffle, but more unforgiving in its crashing inept harshness. Hellish, relentless, rudimentary, punk.

Scumheads - Demo 2014

Discombobulated nitwit noisepunk from Ireland in the Wankys/Swankys/Vaginors/Dislike vein, squawking over fuzz, manic and careening onwards like trollies with jacked-up wheels being flung down hills, mirroring the insouciant chaos and prickling agitation of childish or adolescent needs and impulses. I'm a Dog and Shitty Kitty indulging in animal inanity, like the screeched and tortured remnant's of children's ditties. Smell and Problem sweatsticky squeals of hormone and odours, crashing apart. Stick Fight's a burst of roughly orchestrated violence, Scumheads are the moment when it stops being fun and games and someone loses an eye.  The hopped up glee of Sex Music's feverish pogo "I LIKE GIRLS AND I LIKE BOYS/I LIKE SEX AND I LIKE TOYS/BUT MOST OF ALL I LIKE NOIZE!". The blackly comic stump-punk of Perfect for War: "I GOT NO HEAD/I GOT NO ARMS/MADE OF CHICKEN LEGS/AND BITS OF STRAW/I'M THE PERFECT MAN/PERFECT FOR WAR!" Scumheads writhe around showing off a venereal love for dischord and noise, exhibiting a smile that you know isn't a happy one at a world animalised and bloody, stomping in puddles of shit and phlegm, kicking rocks, breaking the few things that aren't already broken, caught up following the simplistic and inchoate logic of a mind that could be still-forming, or half-dead and acid-decayed.

Chaos Destroy - Lightning Strikes Twice

Chaos Destroy have always been a band that sounds like a band called Chaos Destroy.

On Lightning Strikes Twice, released by Olde English Spelling Bee Records, gone are the chaos-pogo mad-libs of titles like Damaging Anarchy Chaos Disorder, Damaging Damnation, Damaging Indignation, Damaging Nuclear Nonsense, Fucking Merciless Nuclear Chaotic Violent Noise etc. Songs now appear to be about something at first glance, even if that something is as jejune as It's Always Dinnertime (Somewhere) or NO PUNKS, NO MOUSTACHES. It even takes aim at Chaos Destroy's own Swankys-leanings with the song Dumbaging Noise. Song titles though are as close as you're gonna get to unravelling the intent of these songs beyond chomping noise.

They are catchy as fuck. Utterly incomprehensible, but more like People's Ausentic Oral Communication record than the scutterblasts of Collection Not Collection, rock and roll ruckus done-up all sparkling and party ready with the blinding sheen of shitkill distortion, chaotic and destructive, destructive and chaotic.

Mouth utitilised as chewing percussion, the noise employed as texture, heavy texture yeah, rough and grazeraw, but not like the huge tsunami of feedback that drowned all on earlier outings, these are songs that are maybe just deep deep down in their murderous misshapen heart carefree indie-pop songs, but made by the meanest weirdest kids you know, spitting and prattling on with nah-nah-nuh-nah-nah taunts, childish imitations of speech drawl and babble. Pissy smirking snot. Pop songs from the hate place, pop songs twisted into jabbering freakouts dripping with the radioactive pus of noisepunk, or coming the other way, the structureless sewage of noise songs crafted into sloppy crackling form with punchy pop sensibilities. Beautiful Sound (Ugly Noise) sums up this conflict in its title and proceeds to rock back and forth with its addlepated and anxious swoosh and shiver punk rock.

Noise (Here We Come) breaks with this danceable bassline and guitar scratch descending into pinhead noise, but never losing that shuffle and shake, even as the feedback squawks pierce and skitter like morse code. (Slender) and (Long) handclaps its way into atomic destruction. (The Shame) Till the Last Generation runs mid-tempo, complete with worn-out ooh-oohs surviving barely amongst its onwards march. (Greased) Lightning wavers between fast flat toxicpunk and a sad trudging amongst noise sweeps. Dumbaging Noise is a dissonant threatening pianocrash, a jarring amongst jarrings.  A Long Life of Shame (Noise Life) a real hell-dimension boogie, a dancefloor filler for cut-price b-movie monsters. This is the most fun you can have holding your hands over your ears and wishing for the idiocy and pain to cease with alleviating silence of death.

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.

Nomad - 自殺

Raw punk from New York with it's spirit from Japan, learning from bands like Confuse and Contrast Attitude. Featuring members of Sad Boys, Perdition and Cervix, all the song titles are in Japanese, I think the vocals are too, the vocals are in punk rock language, where even if they were in English I'd have a hard time making out anything but the fury carried by the raging sandpaper shouts. Scorching through 10 tracks in 11 minutes, d-beat rushes that fight onwards only to be engulfed by noise-punk squalls. It's no gradual degradation either, the noise hits like a damn burst, sudden and total, flailing, the scream of a creature unleashed, each time a drowning shower. Unforgiving stuff, built from the sour squeaks of feedback, the searing force of distortion, and the flat relentless drum drive. On Toxic State records.

Perfect Pussy - I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling

You've got like three seconds of choppy indie guitar on the first song before this thing betrays its true colours, noisy, not crush and burn oppressive noise, but chaotic, shambling noise of collision and inept makings, where distortion pops and gurgles between the melodies, synthlines a little to sharp for comfort, vocals getting swept away in the crash and blare, the songs take flight with stumbles and rips, flinging themselves finally into the air, then crashing down like the gaunt rumblings that end III and IV, the sickly sweet moments that tried to make themselves known giving way to an industrial buzz and clang.


The lyrics carry the weight of trauma and the broken world that cuts and bludgeons and chokes, capable both of the dry depictions of pain and emotion, "she must have been desperate; she acted so lonely. she is deserving of affection, i am glad that she found love." on I, and knife-edge collocations that break through these flatter ruminations and then dart away in the noise, stuffed with power, "there is a sick grace inherent in healing, i had finally choked that down." on III. The way these two tones sit next to each other, struggle with each other, illuminate and colour each other is the key to that power, rooting the poetry in the reality, the trudge, pulling the ugly facts into brighter light with the darker/sweeter/lusher/more symbolically loaded imagery "i'll kiss myself to prove that i'm not afraid of snakes."

Like hallucinatory shifting of Grace Krilanovich's teen/punk/hobo/vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps, the songs often cycle rapidly through identities and experiences, discarding bits of themselves each time as they struggles for a rock to hold fast to "all things pass through me, i'm a tough boy, wild and innocent and dangerous as hell. i'm awake and awakening. i am here and i have died. i killed the parts of me that said that i know. i killed off all the parts that keep me awake." on II, "first i was softer, then i was stronger, now i am frightened, would you look at me now?" on III.



IV opens with a sort of sticky rockabilly riff before it bursts with anguish and rage, feminist noise thrashings, righteous in the furious punk churn, biting at its own torment. "i'm a real piece of shit, i'm a real lost cause. dare to act like you're surviving and get thrown to the dogs." I'm really terrible about writing about real shit, but this is real shit. Music capable of confronting the worst of the world, the worst of ourselves, the murk and bloodiness, the flesh and the cardinal humours, the personal and the pain of it, in its noise and words, Perfect Pussy captures and confronts, twirls with and twists away from, the violence and the shit, blackened memories. In the way the sheen of the riffs and melodies and vocals are blown apart, tarnished by the reckless noise, you get a sense of how ourselves, our bodies and minds are cracked apart by the awfulness that lives snickering in the unchecked wants and uncaring desires of society and social interaction, but despite the noise, the roar, the melody remains there, in the clatter, battered and struggling not to fall behind, the soaring parts still live, and you feel despite losing the desire to.

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.

Hunger - Dying is Ordinary

Exposed nerve noisepunk on Muscle Horse records, shrill and piercing, bloody and pummeling. Stuck in your head like an icepick, wincing with the feedback blares. One of those times when the idea of distortion seems half-ridiculous, this can't be some recognisable sound twisted into this painful form, but more a barbedwire clang of its own particular shrill birth, bursting from some new argute origin. It's less blown out than collapsed-in, slaps of drums and duelling vocal screams underneath the rubble of noise.


Calling up D-Clone/Confuse/Dust Noise/Frenzy, all markers of blistering noise, it's a world consumed in dentist drill feedback, tearing on Press, stomping and thrashing on Human Hand, wilding out on Well Rounded, running up and down in that brutal squeal. Raging distressed and poisonous against self ("WHAT IS THIS WORLD I'VE CARVED FOR MYSELF?" on Forced Hand) and world ("JUST BECAUSE IT'S WRITTEN DOESN'T MAKE IT RIGHT") on Press. Serrated hardcore, acidbath torments. Really profoundly uncomfortable stuff.

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.

Pissbath - Can't Stop Noize!!

After a couple of great demos, Pissbath come forth with Can't Stop Noize!!, which is fucking noise punk, man.

Piece of Shit!! (there are a lot of exclamation points in this thing, Elmore Leonard is probably spinning like a buzzsaw in his freshly dug grave) has this great pulsing bassline that the noise tumbles over, coming in waves, built of feedback squeals, banks of fuzz and echoing droning threats like ghosts hiding in the noise, swelling and receding. The drums cutting out, that bassline running onwards, like the engine throb of a pick-up rolling down a haunted highway. Hash Addicts!! is more furious, the flurries harsher, but still it's got that throughline.

It's not those entirely solid blasts, neither is it the goofy bouncy noise-punk of The Wankys or Vaginors though it does share thoses bands trick of tying this pandemonium to a central point, it's less monomaniacal than a song like Punk Rock Life, the madness wanders more, comes in and out. It's chaos dynamics, rise and fall, screaming female vocals, obviously incomprehensible, as another disorientating sound, sometimes shrieking as on No Name Sorry!!, sometimes trading stabs with the screech of the feedback, No Name Sorry!!'s shrill guitars tearing up and down, then echoing themselves in less manic pose, the various sonic weapons are hit and refracted off each other, but they don't clash in pure fury.

Noize You Can Trust!! has a fantastic sharp guitar line that explodes into another noise attack. It's all about the flux of this chaos, the rhythm beset by evil uproar, the clamor tugging at the core of the song, trying to shred and degrade it but usually failing, just failing, Nuclear End!! sticks on this Timmy the Turtle kinda bassline which gets covered up in more and more cacophonous structure, layering the din, before turning into the harshest blast of the whole EP to play it out in explosive terror.

Can't Stop Noize!! is a great fucking title, because often noise feels like a heavy immobile object, Some stuff is just so packed with feedback and torture screams that it loses all sense of movement, D-Clone for example, are fantastic, yet that shit is so intense it looms over you like a wall, it hits you like a half-bricked sock. Here there are plenty of flensing squeals and discordant rumbles, and that utterly uncompromising crash is tilted at someplaces, at the end of Nuclear End!!, in parts of Hash Addicts!!, on Incest!! (Death!!), but then on Incest Death!! it moves out of unreal roar, the choking babble, to cut loose with a quick horrorpunk solo before diving back in. Pissbath have, and never really lose, that propulsive energy, noise that carries you, rather than destroys and cripples you. Moving forward through the chaos. Can't stop, noize.

On Primitive Prison. PWYW download.

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.

 

Isterismo - Follia Verso L'inferno

Hailing from Japan, singing in Italian (the title is translates as something like Folly Inwards or Interior Madness), Isterismo play that crasher crust that the cool kids love! It doesn't quite have the relentlessness of D-Clone though it approaches that level of uncompromising viciousness on tracks like Distruttivo Rabbia. It feels like there's slightly more texture to the noise though, the crackle of tape-degradation run up into brain, the rocketnoise pulled apart and stretched a little, the chatter of engine turnover swilled around withunderwater iceberg reverbations. The mid-tempo opener Nuova Mundo rolls about in that bombination, the bass swelling ominously underneath, Giustizia Assurdita builds in the clatter and throws ripping guitar solos out through the noise to emerge battered and scratched but still squealing as it wails about war-profiteering, Trascendere Istinto (Instinct to Transcend) screams in agony through the vocals and the music, begging for positive progress against a nihilistic inevitability, Perdita opens with a dramatic burp and then just tears. An album of dirtily constructed chaos prowess screaming about despair and rage and cosmic loss in a cacophony fit for those aching endless pains and the insane world which they live and fester in.

People - Ausentic Oral Communication

Starting with a bassline that sounds like the soundtrack of a cartoon about a mischievous cat, while weirdo barely-human distorted vocals start to echo in the background which sets the tone for the album, playful but noisy, simple but unhinged, fun. Rock and roll songs so basic Billy Childish would be proud of them, but with an extra hit of Chaos Destroy-noise, for these '77 stumblers to bounce and slice about in. Strained drunken rants for vocals, fried and flattened Todd Pot sneers packed with pukebits of despair and sloppy halfway-too-fucked-to-care anguish, over idiot basslines that refuse to leave your head, nihilistic noise-fuzz and stabbing riffs that pucker up with the of broken-down pop of rockabilly scum. Grimy and nauseating, noise-punk at its most basic, stupid and catchy. (I didn't post the song on this page because the only one I could find on youtube had a big ol' swastika as the video. Punk rock! Still on that inexcusably dumb fucking shitbag moron trip. What twats.)