Dawn of Humans - Slurping at the Cosmos Spine LP

Another NY-beat monster squirming its way out of the Nuke York depths, long possessed of a transcendent liveshow, Dawn of Humans, transfer that energy to their first full length. Scuzzy guitar dragged over pogothump rhythms runs Slurping at the Cosmos Spine, strapped up equally ready for an imbecilic slamdance or fresh aperture gouged into your third-eye. The vocals are the most divergent instrument here, snapping lizardbrain warbling and strained whinnies, inane whirling ditties with the cadence of playground taunts, deep dogbitten threats, panicked jolts and spasms. There's the tapewhine and flickering spitshake of Possibility Box, the rattling of Secretion, the fleshy vellication of Painful Mountain, the restless clamor of Dug Hole, the pumpfake slobbering dronedrawl of Horseblind, slipping down into dark. All the way through to the pressing freakstamp of Foundation, Dawn of Humans snatch songs from fragments and shards.

Gnomic visions of a world in flux, half-glimpsed through a mucal veil. Oblique gerunds trailing off, "As we stand on firm ground, we sink in, callousing" on Horseblind, Fixation's repetitive sneer of "Always bending", Dug Hole "Creeping, seeping, crawling", Possibility Box "Knowing, not knowing". Dawn of Humans trick out the scribbly essence of thought, coalescing and tearing, tumbling off into the ether. It's a world of traps and terrors, fears lurking beyond or within, their clammy tendrils brushing against up against you as you surge bodily and stumblemosh in the gloom. Jump-up music for aborted seances, busted headcult punks in primordial movement, dancemoves and directions sucked greedily straight from the collective unconsciousness of the puerile choir immaterial.

Hank Wood & the Hammerheads - Stay Home LP

"It looked like a city. Ghostly, wavering buildings appeared through a drizzle of midnight rain. Of course, no two minds were alike..." - Terry Pratchett, Thud

Stay Home, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads second album of Mummies-beat New York squalorsquawk, Quintron-by-way-of-Queens, following on from 2012's Go Home, possibly my favourite release from that year. It's more panicky though, Go Home having its fair share of tuff cunt strut in songs like It's Hard On The Street and Don't Walk Away From Me, Stay Home rippling with more uncomfortable grooves, restless itchings, claustrophobic mutterings, skittering percussion like the ricochets of paranoia and angst of the inside of your skull. Go Home had a more conflicted attitude towards its city environs, stumbling between pissed-off rantings and face-up fuck-offs, Stay Home has burnt itself out, wrapped itself too deep in the toxic understandings and fetid cracklings of the city and it wants out.

It's an album living in a maze of traps, internal (Neurosis's agonised "THE DOCTOR SAID TO GO FUCK MYSELF/BUT I'M IN MAD PAIN/I KNOW IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD/BUT I CAN'T CHANGE", The Ghost's frantic "IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/THE MIND/THE MIND IS THE PROBLEM") and external (In Bookings' jailhouse lugging "THROWN INTO A CAGE UNDERGROUND/TRAPPED BEHIND BARS WITH A MILK DRINKING CLOWN/TAKE MY WILL/TAKE MY PRINTS/TAKE MY LACE", Shook & Hungry's propulsive roll of "I'M LIVING IN A DEEP DARK PIT/CONCRETE WALLS TALL AND THICK") and then times where these two merge in a psychogeographic wounding, ripping up city and head, pavement and frontal lobe shocked and splitting simultaneously as on Nervous City's repetitive rankle "BROKEN BRICKS/ANXIOUS CITY", These Chains's blunt instrument jabbing "THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE IN A CITY THAT DEPRAVES ME/CYCLE CYCLE PRISON CYCLE".


But whenever there are traps and prisons, dreams of escape snarl up, like This World Is Beat and In Space imagine a way out from these insomniac wanderings beset by chaotic urban chatter. Searching for silence and isolation, an escape from this noir of perpetual rain, this pulpy shitsmear of an Ed McBain potboiler, interminable degradation in familiar patterns, they imagine the free-floating void, "DRIFTING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS/PEACE AND QUIET/WHAT IS THIS" but these remain a fantastical vision, a utopian oblivion tickling inside the dank confines of a old city mentality, built-up tight and built-down deep, cramped, no sprawl.

Rollicking along, Stay Home bounces with gunk and gusto, keys jabbering, guitars gurgling and squeaking like cyclical thought patterns spinning off the axle, infectious skeleton-rattle rhythms like snatches of blackened calypsos, breathy oohs and aahs and huhs like James Brown interjections or stress-induced ticks, like little snorts of pressure released ("THE PRESSURE/THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING/AND I'M SUFFOCATING" on Shook & Hungry). Shaking with a cokesick shiver throughout, ratty gnawings at the worn burlap of your brainfilm, the fraying diaphanous membrane of your psychological wellbeing the relapses of What's So Bad About a Bad Idea, the ugly realisations of I Thought I was a Good Man, tuning into the repetitive rhythms of anxiety and anguish, depressive diggings. A city's bricked-up sickness let loose, the scratching inside the walls amplified and shaken out.

"He turned down a winding lane where pain had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people's feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air." - Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole

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.

Rotten UK - Bat Shit Crazy 7"

Stuff that comes from far away is better than stuff that comes from near you. Everyone knows that. Celebrities looking for the latest eastern religion to latch onto, foodies searching out the latest imported food fad, bibliophiles admiring the intensity of feeling in a magic realist novel from across a couple of oceans, and punks excitedly chattering about some old hardcore record that got a pressing of like a hundred 30 years ago and 10000 miles away.

If you know a lot of christians, it might be harder to see the divine in the book that they follow when you're keenly aware that they're just as full of shit as anyone else, but if that wisdom comes from a far-off place, then it might just be sweeter, less messy. With distance it's easy to romanticise, to see things as purer, unencumbered by all the tawdry human trappings that make bands from round the corner seem so pedestrian, to imagine that these punks on this wax from that country in that year are the realest motherfuckers possible, no day jobs, no scene squabbles, no bad shows, just pure 100% uncut sewersnake attitude. Even if you know that's gonna be bollocks, it's just easier to pretend. Nicer sometimes.

Unfortunately in that desire for that illusion clarity of thought, of action, what is actually happening over there gets flattened, warped into something other than human, when it's often the human drive behind it all that's the most interesting part, the art, the religion, the food, the literature. These things, and all their attendant mess, get stereotyped into things they're not, bite-sized nuggets of digestible misconceived culture to lend a faded sense of exoticism to your interests. Imagine if you were a follower of a religion whose most well-known proponent for most of the world was Richard Gere. It'd be a bit shit.

Rotten UK are not from the UK. They are from Rochester, New York, not Rochester, Kent. They offer a brand of punk ripped from UK82's moronic beat, using the UK as just a lazy cultural signifier, a snotty punk trope akin to d-beat 'dis's or garage-punk 'thee's. They take this whole pulsing nation of 60 million people and reduce it to naught but a mangled Exploited song.



And that's shit. Really really shit. And that's great.

Fuck this country. Fuck this shit rain-drenched feudal outcrop, this shithead isle, choking on its own thankfully dying relevance. Take it all and bash it into a cackling Disorder rip-off. Fuck Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, the Snapping Bogseats are as close as the UK ever got to a voice of the nation, aggressively ignorant, simplistic snaps of shite.

A seven inch in which at least two of the songs are bloodily rearranged nursery rhymes, a thick-as-shit Macc Lads nursery rhyme like Mary Had a Little Goat and the violent fantasy of Burnt Church. That's all we've got, the inane mouthings of babes thrashed into a scrapheap bang of Chaos UK like aggro football chants constructed out of vulgarised pop songs, thousands of voices calling you a cunt in unison. The chugging cut of Slipping Into Darkness. The sneer of Broken Coffins. Death and decline. The end can't come soon enough, and when it does it's gonna sound like Rotten UK. Burn everything down. Smash it up. Weigh the country down with the concrete boots of tradition and sink it in the north sea. Support your local punk scene, vote Tory.

"God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire" - William S. Burroughs, Place of the Dead Roads

Frau - Punk is My Boyfriend 7"

Following on from their killer demo turned 12", a devastating 7" from one of the UK's very best, bustedmachine feminist punk, cogs and pistons moving in different directions, skittering to a stop, spitting off bolts and washers. Goofier than the first release somewhat, but still packed with that same frenetic jerky energy, bristling with stabbing power. Punk is my Boyfriend a defiant punk tantrum, moving from a tightly coiled bassline to a staccato thrash to a driving drumbeat as the vocals take over: "PUNK IS MY BOYFRIEND! PUNK! I DON'T NEED NO MORE FRIENDS!" Snakeskin and Orca winding with animal rules, Snakeskin that of consumption and rebirth, Orca of imprisonment, freedom, self-affirmation. Snakeskin rumbling and stomping, Orca leading with a sinewy guitar line skidding it's way razor-keen across a wavery danceable rhythm, the song building with frustration, repetitions devolving in clarity, rising in fury and feeling: "I DON'T BELONG IN THIS POOL/I BELONG WITH MY PACK/CAPTIVITY'S FOR TEACHING/AND I'M BITING BACK." it screams. "I BELONG IN THE DEEP/I BELONG IN THE DEEP/I BELONG IN THE DEEP". An unstoppable live force, their annihilating fire is here on full display.

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.

Good Throb - Fuck Off LP

"SCORN. It is the opposite of the get-along, go-along, Jimmy Fallon kumbaya team comics gang. “Be more positive!” they say. “Nah son,” you say as you smile back, canines showing from ear-to-ear.

Let scorn into your heart. Sometimes you look at something and the most it’ll get out of you is a half-hearted smh. Sometimes the physical aspect of the thing is more useful than whatever pleasure you could glean from it. Sometimes you see something and the only thing you want to do is kick a hole in it for even existing in your reality." - David Brothers, in response to the question 'What is an emotion you think is undeservedly discarded? '

A band at the centre of London's sick punk scene, all the members taking part in other bands that combine to make the capital of this rain-drenched shit fascist island home one of the killingest punk scenes on the planet right now, No, Frau, Snob, Dregs, Semi, Personnel, all taking differing approaches to punk and hardcore and all tearing it up. And Good Throb, a teased and bent punk, as danceable as it is dangerous, tottering insistent basslines winding through springy scampering rhythms, vituperous guitar that shines with its teeth-bared, vocals spitting and scarring, tearing through contemporary life (inside and out) with swingeing wrath.

Piercing annoyances abound, shit blokes, mormons, morons, cut into snapshots and fleeting visions, caught in a strobe light, like Acid House's litany of nasty/ridiculous modern collocations. "CAT SHIT/WHITE GLOVES/FOLK PUNK/CHEAP DRUGS" the incremental pile-up of cultural and social debris, unraveling the stark viciousness of London living in cutthroat asyndetons, crashing out one after another in fierce clarity. The wobbly blur of nightclubs brought out on the shiver and snarl of Psycho Disco, "PSYCHO DISCO/BUNCH OF CUNTS/TRYING TO LAUGH/AT YOUR SHTITY STUNTS" broken down, the clinging heat of the tube on the stumbling Central Line "PUSH AND SHOVE/GOT TO COMPETE/AVOID EYE CONTACT/GET A SEAT". The broken stop-start rhythm of these accretions of tediously quotidian shit help the record reverberate with a nervy anxious energy, always on guard for another complication to rise and rip you from whatever brief moment of peace you were reaching for, no single outrage, just one more needle in the eye, one more tiresome chunk of angst on the stinking scrapheap of your day. This energy lives also in the way the music nags and clips at you, rickety catchy with that panicky post-punk shuffle, rawly wrought, jagged in its soldering, edges gleaming.

And these vexatious moments and situations eat at you, leaving you crawling with monstrous emotions to wrestle with, confronted and dissected here with smashgrab disbelief, Jealousy breaking apart into retching, Mummy I'm Ugly's manic self-loathing, Crab Walk's drunken embarrassment, No Taste's bile-drenched embrace of pariahdom, alternating puerile and splenetic, digging into the shit, the bare punk life, fucking the tone-police, getting into the ugly parts, the uncomfortable, the gauche and garish realness, Double White Denim's no-fucks-given cutloose triumph, You're Shit's unbridled anger, "STUPID FACE/ANNOYING TWAT/VACANT SMILE/JAUNTY HAT", Dog Food Dick's eviscerating rage, "PIECE OF SHIT MAN/SEES WOMEN AS FUCKS".

Sharing with Hank Wood and the Hammerheads' Go Home not only a two word imperative for a title, but a deep familiarity the pains and pangs of urban existence, the clatter and clash of too many lives shoved into an unknowable sprawl of concrete and commerce, Hank Wood bloodying up New York with blunt repetition, Good Throb doing a number on a London constantly under-construction with its own tear-it-up toughness, Fuck Off is the words under your breath as you navigate office politics, late night public transport, shit jobs, shitter parties, bad mornings, terrible empty nights, vocalised harshly and stuck into a reconfigured ricochet-snap sourpunk, it's the tension unleashed, the frustration exploding into a blur of fearless emotional shrapnel, skirring about the room, goin hard with phlegm to spare.

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.

Bishop's Green - Pressure LP

Bishop's Green could conceivably be described as 'old man streetpunk' which is a subgenre of punk that is usually responsible for the worst shit in the world, tepid, tedious, conservative blokery, middle-aged men with strong takes about what's wrong with society which revolve more around 'disrespect' and 'wimpiness' rather than 'patriarchal capitalist white supremacy'.

Too often punk is torn up from its wild teenage anguish, this is a natural consequence of punk's age as a subculture, further away now from Sid Vicious donning a swastika than Sid Vicious was from Hitler donning it, despite it's self-renewing athanasia, its constant wave of teenagers discovering Discharge or the Dickies or the Dicks for the first time, there are many who have grown old with the same, uninterested in the punk of 2014, who couldn't give a shit for the fresh new shit bursting out of every corner of the globe, The Friday, Las Otras, No Form, Anomaly, Stranger, S.H.I.T., hundreds of other bands that keep me in a constant self-excoriating struggle to get on top of writing-wise, a hundred punk bands live every minute, and these reviews are a somewhat sisyphean attempt to try and do justice to this breathing spurting culture that sustains me so often.

But do those motherfuckers, those barpunk cunts give a solitary fuck? Nah, they're just listening to The Clash again, happy in the knowledge that this makes them radical, for many tedious old motherfuckers, just the idea that they're 'punk' is enough to justify themselves. And maybe that's inevitable, and maybe that's cool, the young need their new fresh spaces, the dismissive fuckery of old shits is just gonna give em fire, but it's still tiresome, to stumble across all those "they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to" self-satisfied nods of people who came to awareness in a culture specifically aimed at smashing that attitude to pieces.

Why then have I listened to this oldman streetpunk album like 50 times in the past two weeks? Well, one thing is that the tunes are really fucking good. The other is probably that it's as far from self-satisfied as you can get. While it does have its choral moments, it offers picketline chants while not forgetting the picketline is a shit place to be, yes it's beautiful and communal, but you're hungry and cold, you're skint and angry. It's a place you don't choose to be, it's a place you're forced to be by circumstance and the strength you find there is in spite of your lot in the world, not because of it.

Bishops Green know bad days. They know the asphyxiating grip of labour. "Working all day, same old story. Watching the clock, I'm losing my mind." on Gross and Net. "You never had a chance to get ahead, no education/Got pushed down from the start, not many options." on Rat Race.

It turns on the wistful wryness of Cock Sparrer's Because You're Young, the battleworn hardiness of contemporary Cockney Rejects, the shit and youthful sneer and bark of Bad Man or Flares 'n' Slippers not there, but the big melodic sweep of Thin Lizzy-infused punk rock like Your Country Needs You or Back To My Roots. There is a sense of the road travelled in these songs, the nights and days spent dogtired and bonesick, beaten down by bosses, customers, aching feet, deadened minds, looking for oblivion as respite.

Those melodic basslines, those warm crunching guitars, the vocals smooth but laced with grit, the working class pride a deep needed succor not a smokescreen of shit and ignorance, unions and strength, in times of austerity, belt-tightening, downturns, whatever euphemisms given for the shit fucking state of things, the personal pains and tragedies of poverty engendered by the avarice of the city and the cowardice of the state. I mean that Rejects song Your Country Needs You, despite being utterly fuckwitted in the worst oldmanstreetpunk way possible, lyrically reading like something in the ballpark of UKIP Calypso, (sample lyric: "Stand up, beat your chest, when you hear God Save the Queen") really does kick shit with the best of them, it does get you fucking moving, and Bishops Green are much tighter, much sharper, lyrically, riding that line between drain-circling despair and forward momentum, avoiding easy moments, avoiding the angry populism of 'angry white man chants by professional musicians' that punkcritic/shitbucket Ben Weasel laid into on the song Tightrope, before he himself mutated utterly into that "I FORT PUNK WOZ SPOSED TO BE ABOUT PISSIN PEEOPLE OOFFF" caricature that live propping up the bar at shit dingy metal pubs across the country. With Bishop's Green, the reality of lines like "It's the same dance that we fight for/I'm telling you it's not enough" hit hard.

This pensiveness makes the times when it does break through, the times when it does see a light, "Cause I have walked with giants/Can't forget my past/Smash the shadows around me/There's no turning back." on Night Terror, the mantra of "Tomorrow brings us hope" repeated firmly on Tomorrow, more powerful, they're not aimless, naive, they're determined and rooted in pain, so a line like the title track's "Fucked up system/Burn it to the ground." is delivered as a soft growl of a rueful truism as much as a kick-the-doors-in rallying cry, following it not with a searing solo, but with a retreat back into quiet melancholy. It's left to sit and simmer, so you reflect on its impossibility as much as its opensky dreaming. Midtempo punk tunes, full of tense vulnerability and catchy power, full of wake singalongs, and bitter knowledge.

Maquina Muerta - Realidad Desesperada CS

From Guadalajara, Mexico by way of Mallorca, and sitting with bands like Cremalleras, Tercer Mundo, Dia Final and Peña Nieto as proof or Mexico's killer current punk scene, Maquina Muerta delve into rawpunk at its most primitive. Their seven inch last year was one of my favourite records of the year, and they maintain that fury here, rerecording a couple of the tracks and adding them to some new ones, here the sound is more a drilling buzz and less steamroller roar, but it's still got that relentless repetition, that uncompromising Discharge thrum, the drums eating at you like the turnover of a floodedengine and you're stuck on traintracks, the saltedearth choke in its scorchedthroat vocals, burning, breaking, with each anguish, nameable and unnameable, the guitar solos simplistic quiverings amongst the groan and drone.

I caught Maquina Muerta play in an torridly hot basement at the start of September. Barreling out of the venue into the street to cool down after the set a friend of mine asked me what I thought of it. "It was fucking great!" I breathlessly enthused "Every song was exactly the same!". 30 seconds later another friend of mine came out and was greeted with the same question "Eh... I wasn't too into it," she replied. "Every song was exactly the same." There's a particular groove, a certain dirty rut, that they're locked into and they're not breaking it, they're living with each scrap of terror and emotion and thunderous anger, at society, at authority, at politicians and the assorted scum that prop up these shiny venal gods, each last pusflecked bonemeal scrap that they can squeeze out of that ugly monotonous sonic wound.

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!"

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.

Peeple Watchin' - Somethin' Ta Tell Ya

Ex-Credentials queerpunx pukin' raw-throated and desperate with that Cleveland Bound Death Sentence scratch and kick punk rock, songs of sloppy design, melodic bite leaking out of scrappy tangles. It retains the lyrical sharpness of The Credentials, piercing specifics illuminating larger desolations, like the wasted wasted night of James F. Collins Sq., beaten down but present, "I stare through the chainlink as the trains pass right by me". 1995 opens with a soft dirty guitar line that explodes into a twirling of teenpunk nostalgia "Infomercials about getting ripped, talking about boys we'd want to kiss and we prank called the whole yellow pages, it was kinda mean, kinda contagious." Perfectly skewering/shining on those nasty/naive adolescent giggles.

The personal and the political intermingling as they always do, the places you spend getting drunk and the times you spend getting hurt, Just Like Them railing against queer assimilation, stamping out country licks on the lyrically minimal rebel rocker Riff-Raff, Grow Slow illuminates the daily toll of living as a transwoman, twisting the pain and pressure into a pure steely determination bursting out of the most anthemic chorus on the album, "THE ONLY THING THAT'S PASSING IS MY YOUTH. FORTIFY MY STUBBORNNESS AND SUFFER THE ABUSE. IT'S A LONG ROAD WITH VIOLENCE ALL AROUND/IT'S A HEAVY LOAD BUT I WON'T LET IT DRAG ME DOWN"

"1995 was all sparkle and fade. You're wearin' a suit now but I never changed" goes 1995, enduring punk, in the same mode as Dishpit's Forever Punk, but older, more rueful, harder and scabbier, "Can we still fuck this morning up with sour breath and punk haircuts before leaving behind friendships forged in convenience store parking lots" on the drier VHS. The Ones That You Can't Take Back carrying you away on sweet guitar lines and chopping through

It's nothing so much as the heir to the beautiful sinewy scrambles of Bent Outta Shape's Stray Dog Town, the momentum and the mess, the sugary guitar workings and salty fuck-offs, teased out wirey toughkid punk rock, struggling as it ages, breathless and leathery and ultimately unbowed

Proxy - Something We've All Seen Before

On their drop-everything smash-it-all best-punk-single-of-2013 Police Car, Proxy matched a relentless catchy streetpunk chug with lyrics at turns triumphant and wry, twisting bummers into smiles. On their full length Something We've All Seen Before they maintain those ripping streetpunk anthems, but the lyrics are darker, bleaker, more concerned with the pain, ugliness and battery of the world, rather than the uplifting joy of stealing a police car. Nurnburg Nightmare a World War 2 stomper, wide vistas of destruction painted clear, Insane wracked with bugs in the head, Johnny Got His Badge, a Riot Squad rumbler, dark whispers of violence exploding into killing choruses, "STICK EM UP/AGAINST THE WALL/GOTTA DRIVE A BULLET RIGHT THROUGH YOUR SKULL", Shackled to a Corpse digging into that Motorhead bounce as the guitars flail, Land of Guns stretching, drawing the punk out, drawing the pain out. The only relief here comes in the drive of the music, its onwards march maybe pointing to a way out, or at speaking of a strength to endure. A thick punk rock attack on the worst of the world, pushing through and kicking off.

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.

Las Otras - Devolver El Golpe LP

Deathly sharp Barcelona hardcore punk, nine tracks in nine minutes, expurgated of all needless waste. Puncturing power in curt anarcho-feminist attacks. Terseness and anger, snatches of Ultimo Resorte brief bounces, Indigesti fuzzy tears, wrongs righted in brief power, the choking bonds of the world snapped, Fronteras drawing the borders across itself, ("From my belly/My sharpened claws/My open eyes/My loaded veins"), Mujer Ficcion picking off the ties of representations, media impossibilities and fantasies held up as templates ("They are afraid/Of our potential/To stop being a fiction/To start being real"), every box broken out of, every wall scraped through, every mode of oppressive thought denounced and discarded. It'll cut you short as a song.

Nightmare Boyzzz - Bad Patterns

Hookmachine heartachers Nightmare Boyzzz crank out 11 tracks of sweet battered powerpop with bummer vibes, where the jump and yelp and "Whoa-ohs" and constantly seem like they're about to drift off and leave you stranded by the side of the road, ten miles from home with nothing but your thoughts and holey shoes to get you home. Each warm guitar lick feels like a goodbye, drawn in the milieu of bad decisions, empty bottles, hangovers and selfish self-destruction, Guitar Romantic echoes, the warm drunk buzz will leave you just as the songs in the rockin and rollin of You Have No Friends, the mellow wanderings of You're a Star, rapidscuttle garagepop of Baby It's Alright, the whiskey satisfaction fades and discomfort will grow in its place with tickling guitar solos and scratchy riffs,  Say What You Mean might be an up-down dance reminiscent of a punked-up run of Supergrass's Alright but it also lives to cool and burn off the beer in the sobering ennui. This'll help you move your feet so you don't have to think about it though.

True Sons of Thunder - Stop and Smell Your Face

The second album of gritty garage sludge from punk alleystars True Sons of Thunder. Dirty rock excavated from long graves of noise, shaking off the mud and roar, stomping through simple rockers with a babble of disharmony pulled in its wake, Dead Moon by way of Flipper's deep junk racket. There's the hanging punch and tumble of Don't Make It Stop, the twitching horrorpunk of Death Walks Behind You crackling with tension and panic, the belting KBD snot of These Days, a perfect rudimentary desperate punk grunt. There's the slower detours into the noiserock grumble of Glass Foot, marching through battering storms of feedback, dying in the din, the plodding deathblues of Mother May I Now Spell Cup, which comes like the degraded radiosignals of two stations cutting in over one other, melding and splintering.

Friends of Mine starts sung-spoken over simple gutsy riff, blowing into a big openfield 80s rock chorus, "JOSIE KNOWS SHE'S GONNA COME AROUND/ALL THE BOYS ARE GONNA SCREAM AND SHOUT/I KNOW SHE WANTS A PIECE OF ME/I KNOW THAT'S HOW IT'S GONNA BE" before falling back into the shaking repetition of the riff, the fiery clang of the noise. Gettin Kind of Cocky loses it totally in the scream and this odd plinky-plonk solo that clinks over the top of the chaotic squeal and drive.

Each song has its own take on some aspect of the garagepunk artifact mentality, scrabbling around in the twentieth century's dirty cupboards for those little lost bits of bent human swing, trawling through record bins, soulseek files, mp3 blogs, for the obliterated 80s hardcore demos, the privatepress inept blues messes, the 60s beat abominations, all those stabs at musical expression living more with the distortion and degradation and . From the simplistic rock and roll of Get on the Bus, shimmying with blasé fuck-it sneer "GET ON THE BUS AND GO HOME/GET ON THE BUS AND LET'S SPLIT", Beluga's animal inanity amongst the crash and blare "BELUGA! IT'S A WHALE! A WHITE WHALE! DO THE BELUGA!", offering no clues to what this dance entails, but exhorting listeners to get down to it nonetheless, it sounds like a bedraggled forgotten novelty from a dead scene, dancehalls torn down, memories dimmed. Like the Oblivians album from last year it displays familiarity with all sorts of oddball shouts, but it's far nastier, far more crummied-up, it's garagepunk that got lost in the garage, amongst the enginefilth and oily rags and black stains.

On Little Big Chief records.

Räjäyttäjät - Awopbopaloopop Alopbam Räjä LP & Räjäyttäjät LP

Two 2013 LPs of wildman garage plunder from Finnish mentalists, every riff sounding familiar, warm and welcoming snatches of classic rock swagger, bluesy beatback, lowdown boogies, rock and roll rebellion, but then banged full of bursting fizzing nutpunk energy. Half-batty tossed-off impressions of Chuck BerryBeatles, Elvis, all the rock gods since canonised and sterile, thrown into a joyous chaotic blender, reaching back for that 1-2-3-4 stomp and rip, getting into the movement of it, balls of fire that actually burn again. Dancefloor garagepunk built in a din, writhing around amongst clips of conversations where wild whoops abound, waggling tongues, handclaps, a peal of jabbering and gibberish runs in it, each rock and roll move replicated and revivified, reconstituted and rode hard. Through the cultish intonations Räjä 'n' Roll All Night Long, horn runs of Mitä Tapahtuu, freakouts of Veen päällä savuu, caterwauls of Vuosihuoltoon, backmasked noise and snap of Gnol Th'gin Lla Llor'n'äjär, chattering keys of 15 Vuoden Päästä, shake yourself to the real free stuff. Music to make out sloppily on boomer's graves to.

Criaturas - Espiritu De Libertad

Second album of choppingblock fury from these hispanophone Texas hardcore punx. Criaturas were preceded by Deskonocidos, and Espiritu De Libertad has got a bit more of that Deskonocidos trembling that the first Criaturas LP Oscuridad Eterna couldn't give much of a fuck for, such as when the title track gives way a little before exploding in a meteoric guitar solo. Move and retreat, swerve and burn. The way it matches those mellower slippings with the sort of Japanese hardcore guitar wildouts of Crude or DSB reminds me of the first Paintbox album, where they had that real melodic drive cutting through the Deathside razing, but hadn't quite yet blasted off to the fucking moon.

Anti-Autoridad a crazed ripping, Libertad o Muerte a skippy punk scamper, tripping forward, Dru Molina's vocals terrifying, the guitar sweet, Opresion beginning with the vocals dry before they spin away and wail. Cuatros Anos settling into a determined chug as the back-up vocals bark and again that guitar just tears you to pieces. Built perfectly on the interplay between these two voices, Invierno Nuclear drawling dismissive over a d-beat pace. And all cut free from noise, clear and unhindered in their scything gleam.

The lyrics are direct enough that even me, with my almost nonexistent Spanish built of latinate roots, false cognates, Crudos singalongs and that time I got super messed up and watched El Topo with the subtitles off can grab the gist of what's being said, their blunt power of outrage and fire comes from the way they are delivered, voice sharp as each guitar flail, sharper even. As the guitar might carry you away but the vocals puncture more often than not. 16 minutes of tightly controlled, whetted and unsheathed hardcore punk incandescence.