A release that's seemingly been greeted with as much surprise as it has acclaim, Oi! having painted itself into a particularly narrow corner of punk rock's sprawling family tree, the prospect of a modern Oi! record that appeals to those beyond the sort of people who would willingly listen to the Gonads (the worst band of all time? probably, yes, the worst band of all time) doesn't come along that often. More recently New York's Vanity and London's Crown Court have been some of the few bands that eschew the parochial oldbloke mutterings and mouthings, to escape the especially harsh Sturgeoning tendencies of bands formed by people hanging on a bit too tight to Shock Troops or Voice of a Generation.
Add to them this crunching French stomper that similarly avoids the smoothed-and-sanded banality that characterises a lot of modern tilts at that subgenre. Inevitably invoking comparisons to the classics of French Oi!, the more straight-down-the-line Camera Silens songs, the whirring bite of L'Infanterie Sauvage demos, it's also got more than a touch of Nabat's roughed-up Skins E Punks attitude in its commanding drive, but its tone is all its own, a thick, muddied and fuzzed depth that powers its stocky collection of shoutalongs. Four grubrock fightstarters with choruses to get stuck into even if your schooldays French is a wispy disjointed memory of random nouns and half-declensed verbs floating grammarless in the more motheaten corners of your head, no matter how much (or how little) hair it may sport.
Showing posts with label oi!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oi!. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 August 2015
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Vanity - Vain in Life LP
Oi! influences have been sliding their way into hardcore for a hot minute now and Vanity just drop all the pretenses. A straight-up Oi! album from a bunch of people from hardcore bands like Creem and The Rival Mob that draws from a bunch of early streetpunk/late pubrock, though probably most prominently and noticably, All Skrewed Up-era Skrewdriver.
The Skrewdriver question is, like stagediving, one of punk's spiralling athanastic debates, the sort of thing where you could drop out of punk for 15 years and walk right back in to find people reiterating the same points. All Skrewed Up is an album of catchy nihilistic punk rock that, probably more than any other album of the time, hews closer to the more distant R'n'B origins of the genre, exhibiting a greater truth in the cliche of punk as supercharged rock and roll, which obviously lends a dreadful irony the swerve they took into vile haterock. It also inevitably probably owes a chunk of its popularity for its place as a straight down-the-line punk album made by one of the most notorious bands of all time, a safe way of flirting with the titillation of the taboo, the same proximity to the macabre that gives the hint of the forbidden to Death in June or NSBM, a similar impulse to ghoulish adolescent fascinations with serial killers, Faces of Death videos and the yawning horrors of history. So with that Rocket 88 shake and and 14/88 morbidity, All Skrewed Up occupies its own special acrid little spot in the punk pantheon. Personally, having heard all the hype, I opted to forego listening to it for years, only to find myself at a party where someone put on a super-catchy punk song and I had a conversation that went something like "This is pretty sick. Who is it?" "Skrewdriver." "Ah."
Though since Rock Against Communism and its fellows bloomed out of the insecure turbulence of troglodytic white rage of the late 70s/early 80s, plenty of bands have tilted at ripping Oi! back from its nationalistic posturing, to wipe it clean of its heinous racist taint, the circular inanities of politicised apolitics like Discharger, a phalanx of SHARPies and commie skinheads (bizarrely but somewhat predictably claiming the name 'redskins') like Malaysia's A.C.A.B., Catalonia's Inadaptats, the UK's Blaggers ITA and countless others armed with similar shoutalong anthems and about 8 million songs called R.A.S.H. or Good Night White Pride, just as dozens of bands like Iskra, Iprit, Torture Garden, PunaTerrori etc have sought to lace blackmetal with hardleft and anarcho perspectives.
Those proceeding paragraphs right there are the kind of de rigeur exegesis that springs forth anytime every time the name Skrewdriver pops up. Vanity drive with that swaggering streetrock chomp, that rollicking rhythm and vocals that switch between a bloody rasp and more soulful half-croon, not R.A.S.H. types, but moving with a counterfactual vigour from a world where Ian Stuart's fatal car crash happened 12 years earlier than it really did.
On the louche bluster and shunt of Can't Be Bothered, the rattling gusto of Ya Don't Know? and The King Drinks, the bludgeon brassy fuck-right-off of Fuck Right Off, the slick midtempo fightmusic of Might Trumps Thought they succeed, crafting anthems as catchy as anything, cock-of-the-walk pubrock, pugilistic and powerful, packed with lines that read like a litany of unwise bar confrontations, adrenaline rising and eyes whiskey-wild, "You ain't got no fuckin bite, no" on No Bite, "Glass in hand and cowardice don't mix" on The King Drinks, less convincing are moments like the glammed up twang of Bal Des Ardents, the slow run into closer New York City, I do find myself flagging in the back half of the album, but there are a couple of tracks when it does live that dream of forging carefree cutthroat singalong rippers, guiltfree gutpunches and silly stompers, the "This is pretty sick" without the "Ah.", punk songs that may be kinda dumb-as-fuck, but certainly don't require two rambling explanatory paragraphs when you put them on, just two movin feet and a voice to burn.
The Skrewdriver question is, like stagediving, one of punk's spiralling athanastic debates, the sort of thing where you could drop out of punk for 15 years and walk right back in to find people reiterating the same points. All Skrewed Up is an album of catchy nihilistic punk rock that, probably more than any other album of the time, hews closer to the more distant R'n'B origins of the genre, exhibiting a greater truth in the cliche of punk as supercharged rock and roll, which obviously lends a dreadful irony the swerve they took into vile haterock. It also inevitably probably owes a chunk of its popularity for its place as a straight down-the-line punk album made by one of the most notorious bands of all time, a safe way of flirting with the titillation of the taboo, the same proximity to the macabre that gives the hint of the forbidden to Death in June or NSBM, a similar impulse to ghoulish adolescent fascinations with serial killers, Faces of Death videos and the yawning horrors of history. So with that Rocket 88 shake and and 14/88 morbidity, All Skrewed Up occupies its own special acrid little spot in the punk pantheon. Personally, having heard all the hype, I opted to forego listening to it for years, only to find myself at a party where someone put on a super-catchy punk song and I had a conversation that went something like "This is pretty sick. Who is it?" "Skrewdriver." "Ah."
Though since Rock Against Communism and its fellows bloomed out of the insecure turbulence of troglodytic white rage of the late 70s/early 80s, plenty of bands have tilted at ripping Oi! back from its nationalistic posturing, to wipe it clean of its heinous racist taint, the circular inanities of politicised apolitics like Discharger, a phalanx of SHARPies and commie skinheads (bizarrely but somewhat predictably claiming the name 'redskins') like Malaysia's A.C.A.B., Catalonia's Inadaptats, the UK's Blaggers ITA and countless others armed with similar shoutalong anthems and about 8 million songs called R.A.S.H. or Good Night White Pride, just as dozens of bands like Iskra, Iprit, Torture Garden, PunaTerrori etc have sought to lace blackmetal with hardleft and anarcho perspectives.
Those proceeding paragraphs right there are the kind of de rigeur exegesis that springs forth anytime every time the name Skrewdriver pops up. Vanity drive with that swaggering streetrock chomp, that rollicking rhythm and vocals that switch between a bloody rasp and more soulful half-croon, not R.A.S.H. types, but moving with a counterfactual vigour from a world where Ian Stuart's fatal car crash happened 12 years earlier than it really did.
Saturday, 4 October 2014
Hard Skin - On The Balls & Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?
"Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Think about Oi! Oi! Oi!" - The Crested, Think About Oi
"STOP THINKING! START DRINKING!" - Hard Skin, First Day Angry Song
Like the Formby Channel, Hard Skin are a band that could only have emerged from this sceptred isle. And when I say sceptred, I mean shithole, grey bitter dank sarcastic nimby fading delusional shit-fucking hole-isle. Some real John King spirit imbues these songs, that mixture of soaring terrace community, the kicks and knocks of poverty, a familiarity with violence, a tense heartworn tearing underneath, a faded rug at your nan's with the colour scuffed out of it but the pattern still peeking through, the warmth in the brokenness.
Sure America has OIL! with their pumped up ridiculous violence, cliches stacked high and smashed down, Crucified Hammerskins, Proud of my Pride, Pulling on the Boots, but Hard Skin are cut through with sharper, more poignant silliness, beyond their bluntfuck singalongs, like Beer and Fags's loutish drunken joy in the face of the grim march of history on Hard Nuts and Hard Cunts, drawing on Cock Sparrer's England Belongs to Me, and its investment in the smaller twists of home, Cock Sparrer sang of England looking not at verdant fields and glory, but 'the dirty water in its rivers', the little grotty shit that you hold deep in your heart as signifiers of a private belonging, stake a claim to what you have, no matter how insignificant or crap it is.
Still Fighting Thatcher they roared twenty odd years ago, and she lies six feet deep but her stabbing hate lives on. Council Estate deals, with surprisingly affectingly, with the lasting brutality of her legacy on ordinary people. Dark fucking times when even your comedy Oi! bands are painting bleak landscapes of the grueling slog of austerity. A pained tale steeped psycho-geography, the malign concrete, infecting its residents with a certain hard heart. No jokes just a desperate cry. "EVERYONE DIES! BUT NOT EVERYONE LIVES! I'M SOMEBODY! I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO GIVE!" Real shit right there.
On The Kids Are Innocent that nebulous notion of 'the kids' invoked in that Upstarts, Blitz, Sham, way, they're the kids that you meet, they don't care and if they're united then they'll never be divided. A warm cuff-about-the-ear for scamps and tearaways, embracing the young as just weird fuckabouts, like they are, like we were, it's an idea that fights back against the real youthhate of mid-market tabloids, terror scattered across newspaper pages, feverish whispers of 'feral' and 'inherent criminality' burning with that eugenic tang. The Kids Are Innocent, the homeless are treated with the same warmth on You Still Here? and it's dismissive toss-off of PCSOs, as angry at the fact that it's not a real cop doing the bothering as it is at the fact that a cop's bothering them, and a lot of this album, is anti-nihilistic, a vaguely charming vision of Britain full of salt-of-the-earth cunts stumbling through interesting times, punches and police harassment.
Hard Skin bounce between modes. There's the storming self-mythologising of Another Terrace Anthem, boasting of "Bit of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham/I'm taking it back to where it began!" and cracking apart with purposefully lame jokes. There's the triumphal violence of rougher-uppers The Man Who Ran the Town with skins as avenging angels, puttin in a loan shark's head, and We're Gonna Do Them Cunts, rolling on that terse economy of threat, "I'm gonna do you" carrying more power than any super-specific murderous hyperbole. A take on I, Ludicrous's Preposterous Tales in That's Bollocks, Mate and its pissed-off pissed fuck-off of a mouth-running pub bore. The lonely swaying whisper of The Gipsy Hill, a wander round South London, a litany of a neighbourhood's comforting peculiarities. It all sits together in a cordial crash of streetlights and dogshit, belligerent barroom stompers, sidestreet serenade, flitting between cock-o'-the-walk swagger and softer more morose musings, but all invested with the slap of the pavement, the roots of meandering alleyways, the shortcuts and graffiti of a living city.
And even better, beyond the instant classic of On The Balls, is Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?, the same album, the same songs, but coming from a murderer's row of female vocalists, real punk sneer, relishing that snap of melody and power. The notion of guilty pleasures has been well wrung out to dry as a bullshit concept born of insecurity and snobbery, but if there was one thing I'd classify as that, it's the sheer amount of generic female-fronted streetpunk I can consume without tiring, no-one should have listened to The N.Y. Rel-X as much as I have. And this is far from that, Hard Skin's melodic chops, their songwriting skills, their ability to appropriate those bits of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham with total aplomb, make this play like a whole album of Action Pact's London Bouncers, something like Atlanta's Man's Ruin with better tunes, a beefed-up sweary Gymslips, from Joanna Newsom's (yeah that Joanna Newsom) cackle on the jubilant The Man Who Ran the Town, to Miki Berenyi's ire on You Still Here?, the runaway sting of Liela Moss's Police Car (Chasing You), 2013's second best song about a police car, Debbie Smith's bellow on the innuendo of Sausage Man, it's even better than On the Balls, feeling more chaotic (the cadence of the vocals, which were probably more hastily recorded than On The Balls occasionally slips and clatters up against the forward power of the songs) and more vital, rougher. While both albums are fucking great, I'm picking this one if given the choice every time.
Like Who Killed Spikey Jacket?, like Who's a Punk?, like Fuck You! Get Pumped!, it's a joke than runs deeper, hides truths in the smile behind its mugging and gurning, stiob vs slobs, the communal catharsis of screaming "TWO CHORDS! TWO FINGERS!" or "YOU STILL 'ERE? WE TOLD YOU WHERE TO GO!" is strong no matter how silly it is. I've seen Hard Skin live maybe half a dozen times over the past two years (one of the joys of seeing them in London is the chance that one of the vocalists from Why Do Birds... might pop up and sing a song) and every time I've felt better afterwards, running out into a city of council estates, police cars, two bob cunts; fulfilled, feeling deeper and more cognizant, feeling unbreakable, heartstrong and in possession of some hardy urban truths, at one with the bullshit. "SING LOUD! SING PROUD! LET'S GET AT 'EM! THIS IS ANOTHER TERRACE ANTHEM!"
"STOP THINKING! START DRINKING!" - Hard Skin, First Day Angry Song
Like the Formby Channel, Hard Skin are a band that could only have emerged from this sceptred isle. And when I say sceptred, I mean shithole, grey bitter dank sarcastic nimby fading delusional shit-fucking hole-isle. Some real John King spirit imbues these songs, that mixture of soaring terrace community, the kicks and knocks of poverty, a familiarity with violence, a tense heartworn tearing underneath, a faded rug at your nan's with the colour scuffed out of it but the pattern still peeking through, the warmth in the brokenness.
Sure America has OIL! with their pumped up ridiculous violence, cliches stacked high and smashed down, Crucified Hammerskins, Proud of my Pride, Pulling on the Boots, but Hard Skin are cut through with sharper, more poignant silliness, beyond their bluntfuck singalongs, like Beer and Fags's loutish drunken joy in the face of the grim march of history on Hard Nuts and Hard Cunts, drawing on Cock Sparrer's England Belongs to Me, and its investment in the smaller twists of home, Cock Sparrer sang of England looking not at verdant fields and glory, but 'the dirty water in its rivers', the little grotty shit that you hold deep in your heart as signifiers of a private belonging, stake a claim to what you have, no matter how insignificant or crap it is.
Still Fighting Thatcher they roared twenty odd years ago, and she lies six feet deep but her stabbing hate lives on. Council Estate deals, with surprisingly affectingly, with the lasting brutality of her legacy on ordinary people. Dark fucking times when even your comedy Oi! bands are painting bleak landscapes of the grueling slog of austerity. A pained tale steeped psycho-geography, the malign concrete, infecting its residents with a certain hard heart. No jokes just a desperate cry. "EVERYONE DIES! BUT NOT EVERYONE LIVES! I'M SOMEBODY! I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO GIVE!" Real shit right there.
On The Kids Are Innocent that nebulous notion of 'the kids' invoked in that Upstarts, Blitz, Sham, way, they're the kids that you meet, they don't care and if they're united then they'll never be divided. A warm cuff-about-the-ear for scamps and tearaways, embracing the young as just weird fuckabouts, like they are, like we were, it's an idea that fights back against the real youthhate of mid-market tabloids, terror scattered across newspaper pages, feverish whispers of 'feral' and 'inherent criminality' burning with that eugenic tang. The Kids Are Innocent, the homeless are treated with the same warmth on You Still Here? and it's dismissive toss-off of PCSOs, as angry at the fact that it's not a real cop doing the bothering as it is at the fact that a cop's bothering them, and a lot of this album, is anti-nihilistic, a vaguely charming vision of Britain full of salt-of-the-earth cunts stumbling through interesting times, punches and police harassment.
Hard Skin bounce between modes. There's the storming self-mythologising of Another Terrace Anthem, boasting of "Bit of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham/I'm taking it back to where it began!" and cracking apart with purposefully lame jokes. There's the triumphal violence of rougher-uppers The Man Who Ran the Town with skins as avenging angels, puttin in a loan shark's head, and We're Gonna Do Them Cunts, rolling on that terse economy of threat, "I'm gonna do you" carrying more power than any super-specific murderous hyperbole. A take on I, Ludicrous's Preposterous Tales in That's Bollocks, Mate and its pissed-off pissed fuck-off of a mouth-running pub bore. The lonely swaying whisper of The Gipsy Hill, a wander round South London, a litany of a neighbourhood's comforting peculiarities. It all sits together in a cordial crash of streetlights and dogshit, belligerent barroom stompers, sidestreet serenade, flitting between cock-o'-the-walk swagger and softer more morose musings, but all invested with the slap of the pavement, the roots of meandering alleyways, the shortcuts and graffiti of a living city.
And even better, beyond the instant classic of On The Balls, is Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?, the same album, the same songs, but coming from a murderer's row of female vocalists, real punk sneer, relishing that snap of melody and power. The notion of guilty pleasures has been well wrung out to dry as a bullshit concept born of insecurity and snobbery, but if there was one thing I'd classify as that, it's the sheer amount of generic female-fronted streetpunk I can consume without tiring, no-one should have listened to The N.Y. Rel-X as much as I have. And this is far from that, Hard Skin's melodic chops, their songwriting skills, their ability to appropriate those bits of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham with total aplomb, make this play like a whole album of Action Pact's London Bouncers, something like Atlanta's Man's Ruin with better tunes, a beefed-up sweary Gymslips, from Joanna Newsom's (yeah that Joanna Newsom) cackle on the jubilant The Man Who Ran the Town, to Miki Berenyi's ire on You Still Here?, the runaway sting of Liela Moss's Police Car (Chasing You), 2013's second best song about a police car, Debbie Smith's bellow on the innuendo of Sausage Man, it's even better than On the Balls, feeling more chaotic (the cadence of the vocals, which were probably more hastily recorded than On The Balls occasionally slips and clatters up against the forward power of the songs) and more vital, rougher. While both albums are fucking great, I'm picking this one if given the choice every time.
Like Who Killed Spikey Jacket?, like Who's a Punk?, like Fuck You! Get Pumped!, it's a joke than runs deeper, hides truths in the smile behind its mugging and gurning, stiob vs slobs, the communal catharsis of screaming "TWO CHORDS! TWO FINGERS!" or "YOU STILL 'ERE? WE TOLD YOU WHERE TO GO!" is strong no matter how silly it is. I've seen Hard Skin live maybe half a dozen times over the past two years (one of the joys of seeing them in London is the chance that one of the vocalists from Why Do Birds... might pop up and sing a song) and every time I've felt better afterwards, running out into a city of council estates, police cars, two bob cunts; fulfilled, feeling deeper and more cognizant, feeling unbreakable, heartstrong and in possession of some hardy urban truths, at one with the bullshit. "SING LOUD! SING PROUD! LET'S GET AT 'EM! THIS IS ANOTHER TERRACE ANTHEM!"
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Crown Court - Trouble From London
Thumping new stuff, raw and blustery, the shoutalong momentum of Oi! combined with the melodic power of those early punks caught up in bashing in and fouling up early rock and roll templates like 999 or Slaughter and the Dogs, Chelsea or The Lurkers, sharp with the tang of public transport piss-stink, catchy but with the pinched edge of violence. Three London anthems, slapping down tedious crusties and their affectations on Hammer a Nail, screaming of endless nightbus journeys and the alienation and paranoia of the tube and its thousand watching eyes on TFL and BTP, songs pulled from the rusty arteries of the city sprawl, a transitory deadtime where you spend too much of your life, rolling from once grey suburb to another, overground, underground. Lately I've been fairly obsessed with a video of Jeff Turner kicking a Nazi out of a Cockney Rejects show, a video taken not in the bad ol' days of 1981 but in 20-fucking-14, where a performance of Are You Ready to Rucks switches immediately from the communal beery arm-in-arm singing to Jeff threatening to "punch the cunt outta ya", Jeff is totally fucking ready to ruck, that's the moment that Crown Court are living in, the snap from throaty bellowing ("OI! OI!") to dead-eyed threat. Howling roughs and bloody cunts.
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
Kromosom - Nuclear Reich
Australian rawpunx. They've got a split with Isterismo and a 12" called 8 Tracks, and instead of the next logical step, an 8 track called Twelve Inches, they've got this thing called Nuclear Reich. Some of this band have a really great true meathead music sideproject Bloody Hammer playing a crustied take street punk/Oi! and that Criminal Damage bent has bled back into Kromosom, infecting their Mauser/Giftgasattack/Kriegshög bluntness with a little bit of melody and communal spirit. Media Control has an intro that plays like a sharpened bonesplinter take on Cockney Rejects' I Am Not a Fool or maybe even Rancid's Avenue's and Alleyways and the fistpump of Culture Degeneration (CUL! TURE! DEGENERATION!) hits as one of those inept and inane irresistible shoutalongs like Lower Class Brats' Psycho. Elsewhere though they stick to the rawpunx and they do it fine but it's not quite as great as those moments where the Oi! degenerates into gross chaos roar, or the noise lifts up in brief melody.Draw the Line and Answer are punx scene songs, tearing at the place of punk within the world, attacking those who would exploit it from outside (Answer: "CUT OUT THE LEECH THAT FEEDS ON PUNK BLOOD.") and corrupt it mindlessly from inside (Draw the Line: "BRING BONEHEAD DESTRUCTION"), Draw the Line almost cuts itself to pieces with an anguished stumbling, but Answer is just straight tear. Nuclear Reich and Radiation are classic odes to the bomb in that pained Discharge style, the titular opening leading in with a bit of dirty postapocalyptic creep, Radiation being another real down-the-line up and out one. Culture Degeneration, Virtual Inmate and Media Control all take shots at the psychological destruction brought about by technology and media in their fallout-swathed guitar rush. Human Shell is all GISM in its makings though, creepy inhuman burps and swirling/squealing guitar solos that sit in weird contrast to the burn of the rest of the sound.
The lyrics often break into disjointed declarative shouts, like that of a migrained brain inable to construct syntax in the pain and lightning fury and just blurting out the basics of its point leaving you to put things back together, Media Control: "ARMY OF DRONES! MEDIA CONTROL! IDENTITY! MEDIA CONTROL!", Human Shell: "STERILE! CASTRATED! DOCILE!", Culture Degeration: "PROGRESSION! REGRESSION!", Radiation: "NUCLEAR LEAKAGE! NATURE RAVAGED!". Broken pieces of a broken world, stitched together by a breaking sound. Fullblast atomic stomppunx.
Friday, 4 January 2013
Bloody Hammer - Bloody Hammer
Oi!crust! From Australia, featuring people from Kromosom. I have no idea whether this is the best or worst shit ever, sometimes I think both at the same time. It's like a bunch of people into His Hero is Gone discovered Red Alert and went "Wow, that sounds much easier to play! That's something everyone can enjoy!" You know, pretty much what happened with the guy from Tragedy and Criminal Damage, except here the crust origins are a bit clearer, clambering through the pubpunk. They have a song called Bloody Hammer, and one called Smash Em All because maybe Cock Sparrer's Take 'Em All was too open to interpretation. They have a song called Streetfigther. Which I assumed was a typo but that's how it's spelled on the back cover and on the LP itself. Hard Skin by way of Antischism, Oi! The Aussies. Just big meaty unapologetic brawl music, because calling it fight music feels too ordered, there's no way this stuff soundtracks a rumble with less than eight people. Brick and mortar rock and roll, bellowalong terraceraw Blitz punk, for when you want to drunkenly kick a piece of furniture to pieces.
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