Fuck SS - demo CS

Skinner: Only one question remains, gentlemen...what do we call ourselves?
Nigel: How about, "Handsome Homer Simpson Plus Three?"
Barney: I like it!
Apu: Wait, I do not.
Skinner: Er, um, we need a name that's witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it.
Apu: How about, "The Be Sharps?" "Fuck SS?"
(Everyone laughs loud at first, then less, then the laughter tapers off)
Skinner: Perfect!

- Homer's Barbershop Quartet

From edge-pushing flirtation with fascist iconography a la Sid's notorious swastika shirt, to worn in and worn out nastypunk signifier, the SS appellation has proved almost as an enduring part of punk monikers as the Dis-prefix. From Japanese hardcore originators the SS and nearmythic neverwas potentiapunx London SS through Italian teenage lo-fi KBD idiots Hitler SS and Swedish rawpunk legends Crude SS (who maybe did more to popularise it than anyone else) all the way up to the present day and the likes of this band right here. Deployed for ironic juxtaposition (Black SS, Reagan SS, Sunshine SS, Lysol SS, Honnor SS, Stress SS, Stakanov SS, Blank SS, Harper SS, Stepdad SS) or just some shockrock collision of repulsive grotesqueries (White SS, Reagan SS, Attack SS, Heroin SS, Genocide SS) or even painting anything into a fearsome regiment of death (Tampere SS, Kajun SS, Ctakahoø SS, Netjajev SS, Veuve SS, Tempe SS). Commonly cited as Society System, but with those everpresent acrid Schutzstaffel overtones, it's a reminder of punk's eternal inability to sweep clean its vulgar obnoxious corners, guaranteed to get you some off looks, some sly chuckles, some knowing nods, guaranteed to lock you out of any fucking chance of being anything other than a way shitty basement punk band, just the way you'd probably want it.

So here's a list of free topical SS-based bandnames for anyone on the lookout, some of which may or may not get you sued:
Aspiration SS
Austerity SS
Neoliberal SS
Mortgages SS
Osborne SS
Corbyn SS
Obama SS
Skip Bayle SS
Newscorp SS
Trump SS
Walmart SS
Wholefoods SS
Fuckboy SS
Upworthy SS
Tumblr SS
Smartphone SS
Di SS (or maybe Dis SS)
Drake SS
Beyhive SS
Meme SS
Actually SS
T-shirt SS
Prince SS

It's also an interesting insight into the subtle details of associations. Flip that SS to the front of the word (SS Decontrol, SS Kaliert) and it brings to mind a big fucking boat more than a bunch of murderous scum. Or go the other way and drop a stray space somewhere onto carefree innocent band names and the meaning immediately slides into the dark, Crass become Cra SS, Piss become Pi SS, The New Dress become The New Dre SS. La Urss, Rock Goddess, Gess, Juntess, Gay Kiss, Kiss, The Mighty Mighty Bo SS Tones all end up grubbier and shittier and in the same realm as bands like the The Mau Maus, Joy Division, Adolf Hitler Klan, Sieg Heil, Nazi Dust, Marilyn Manson, Boston Strangler, Viet Cong, Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge, Jack & the Rippers, Doctor & the Crippens, Slaves, Massacre 68 and others who have or have not caught varying degrees of shit over their decision to emblazon something as ultimately trite and trivial as a rock and roll band with the moniker associated with the very worst moments and decisions and trends in human history.

SS's staying power probably springs from a particular balance of comic dulling and resonant notoriety, fed and sculpted by the constant pop culture presence of the Nazis, Hitler long more meme than man, running for election in a sleepy Somerset town in Monty Python, smashing through windows in Danger 5, his soldiers the go-to evil monsters for any guilt-free blast-em-all war movie along the lines of Where Eagles Dare, even profound attempts to get to grips with the horrible humanity present somewhere within like Downfall get flattened into safe silliness by endless youtube variations, all these things (and thousands more) putting us at some psychological remove from the disgusting truth of them and their acts. And the notoriety/familiarity coming into play cos there's no point tagging your band LRM and then spending loads of time explaining what the Lord's Resistance Movement is, you want that immediate jolt of shockvalue recognition.

"How many years was it between Charlie Manson being the terror of California and Charlie Manson being an image on joke t-shirts? I have a shirt somewhere with a pic of his face and, underneath it, the words CHARLIE DON'T SURF. Hitler's a cartoon figure now. Eminem dressed up as bin Laden within a couple of years of 9/11. It's interesting to me how we defang our nightmares -- by mocking them, but also by wearing their skins." - Warren Ellis

So here we have a contender for possibly the most spitefully moronic name yet (still waiting on a Cunt SS but I'm sure punk will make that leap some day). This demo comes emblazoned with a crossed out totenkopf, raising yet another interesting linguistic wrinkle, the difference in visions conjured by the name Fuck SS (sex party swinger death squad) and Fuck The SS (righteous antifa headkickers). It's all wretched out screams echoed into incomprehensibility and submerged deep in the filth and squawl of furious poundings and crushing raw guitar rage, from Trend On, bass thrum into crash and chaotic clinking, to the weirdo 1-2 stomp/warble of Social Real Estate, shadows of a sneer somehow present in the bonefeel of the blasted-out screams, descending into utter shitstorm panic. Slow Club's roll feeding into a superspeed thrash that rattles with grindcore relentlessness. Father's Day born out that noise, getting into jump-up punk beat, running itself over with weird scribbleshatters, exploding, fading. It's a compelling mix of modern punk's smoothest touchstones, d-beat fills, käng reminiscences, pogo guts, vocals like the excavated field-recordings of a rebellious tortured ghost, carrying a certain playful snot through hellish howls, like a tape-decayed longlost Comes demo filtered and churned up with Fader War noise.

Bloody dumb name though.

Steel Chains - Demo 2015 CS

Choppy poppy punk, running along like a pumped-up version of Screaming Sneakers's Violent Days, half-wistful guitar lines cutting across the songs, with a similar melodic bellow to The Gateway District teasing the most out of the lyrics about difficult routes through life strewn with broken ties and solid mistakes, and the stubborn persistence and ultimate reaffirmation that eventually flowers in the wake of these lessons learnt hard. "Things have been tough and/Things have been strange/There have been horrors, and we know by/And we know" as Instincts says.

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.

Big Zit - Electric Zit Vol. 1

Batty Midwestern mania, yipping and yowling its way through five tracks of mispelt and misshapen kidpunk, darting guitar lines squiggle their way scribble-sharp across your brainpain, riffs flip and kick against each other, the vocals another childish tantrum, strained and rubbed raw, the whole thing giving the odd feeling sometimes of an old shitty scratched-up heartlandrock 45" played at 78. In and out in five tracks under five minutes, from Suhbuhb'n Varmun's manic bass runs to Skoolyahd's runaway train drums, a real frantic squawky frenzy.

Sheer Mag - II 7"

The second 7" of this Philadelphia punk band. Sheer Mag lay a patina of dirt over classic rock riffs, like Thin Lizzy as a region rock band. Free bent outta shape, Bent Outta Shape dragged through with hooks. Echoes of bits of powerpop like The Frenchmen's No Surprise and its melancholic pomp, something like Hanson Brothers's Right Back Where We Started From cover but jumping back to Maxine Nightingale's original vocals.

It opens with Fan the Flames's shimmy swagger, rueful bad neighbourhood blues, singing of old houses and decrepit fixings, reverberating with that Double Duce charm, the chaos of a home that is shabby and barely held-together both inside ("Getting hard to stay in tune/The boys are getting me down/I'll be staying in my room") and out ("In the dark and the bitter cold/They're freezing us out/It's as good as gold"), but still shakes and lives with the feeling of a home in spite of the spectre of gentrification lurking in the background.


Travelin' On's jangle and sway cataloging the whispering lure of the roads, the rough shackles of wanderlust, living drifter mythic, burnt bridges and patched soles and leaving town as you watch yourself leave town, moving like a snowball down a hill, silently gathering yourself for an impact. "When all the smoke was clearing out/Oh yeah I was on my own/I ain't coming home to you/I was born to roam the streets yeah."

Button Up a fuck-you self-affirmation, that precarious place where telling others you're not to be fucked with and at the same time convincing yourself of that fact, of telling yourself you can deal with some shit, of screaming at the world that you're through with their shit. "I'm taking time whatever I do/I'm working hard whatever I do/With You"

Whose Side Are You On?, echoing the old union tune, but grounding it less in accusatory polemic than in the bonds of friendship and understanding stretched in the face of too much real shit, as slipperily unsteady as it it forceful and joyous. "The factory wheels'll keep spinnin along/It ain't cut and dried/And it never will/But the fightin' baby that's half of the thrill"

The diminutives and asides that pepper the lyrics adding to the sharp familiarity they carry, 2nd and 1st person, conversationally poetic, a distillation of times when you somehow managed to say the right thing. They assume you're conversant with certain knowledges, certain struggles. And these are often worn topics, the road, home, friendship, the fight, your fight, but they're worn like scarred fists, discoloured deformed couches, rusty cars with silly nicknames. They're worn with real living process and the battering winds of experience.

That's part of what gets this songs stuck so deep into you, like the way the Hold Steady could root around in a riffed up charger and pull out of it a smaller closer story, but with greater personal kick here, a more tender gutpunch, a brighter spark. Mixing those punk-fractured intimacies and dilemmas with a wayward scrappy version the kind of music that reminds you of your dad getting really drunk and ranting about how he wants this song, this song playing right now, blasted at his funeral good and loud.

I've had this EP on my phone for a couple months now and back in May after a show it had me half-cut and footloosin' it up around an empty coach station at 2am, work seven hours and 220 miles of megabus away, but I was skipping around free in myself in a way I rarely feel until I got too hype and attempted to leap gracefully onto a bench coming very close to a dramatic faceplant. These songs swallow you up in their world, they tell you to fuck off and hold you tight with the roughness of a true friend, they get you movin, whether it's out into the world or just onto to the dancefloor. There are always steps that you need to take, there are some steps that you need to be reminded to take. By a friend or by a song.

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.

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.

No Sir I Won't - The Whole Fucking World is Shit 12"

Goddamn No Sir I Won't are kind of a bollockache. After getting monstrously excited by their demo & first single their first 12" sent me into a tizzy where I got all worked up over the idea of the paradox of worship bands as resistance music before chilling myself out reconciling to the idea of repeated music for repeated struggles. Now their new 12" EP The Whole Fucking World Is Shit features some of their tightest stuff, really fulfilling that literate catchiness, that taut and sharpened rage that they hinted at with More Politicians and then it's got Radio Shit, Radio Shit, as tight a song as they've made, a real Subhumans sort of banger, clicking with sing-song rhythms, but lyrically dumb as dirt.

And okay, stupidity is fucking great in punk rock a bunch of the time, the puerile inanity of noisepunk, the pogo brain damage, the slackjawed monotony of a million generic d-beat crews and garage-punk knuckleheads, but a wordy anarcho band is hinged as much on making salient points about the power-structures it's kicking at as it is on successfully replicating the Bullshit Detector aural aesthetic.

Basically, there are certain modes of stupidity, certain types of idiocy that play and certain types that don't. A lot of punk (a lot of music? a lot of art?) is maybe trying to capture certain epiphanies and feelings that read as teenage. The pure warmth of feeling like there's a song/a band/a genre that is grabbing at your very soul, the coming up into realisation of how fucked the world is along with the conviction that you can make a tangible difference, but this growing up is an spikey uneven process. When I was 17 and reading Noam Chomsky, convinced I was some fucking real radical, I was still churning inside with unacknowledged internalised bigotries, born of a systemic indoctrination that I felt I was finally smart enough to see, but in reality I obviously was nowhere near smart or perceptive enough to grasp its true pervasiveness of and just how much it was still living inside of me.

Referring to anyone who makes pop music as 'scabs and turncoats', as Radio Shit does, referring to anyone who listens to it as 'fallen masses' in the savior-complex pompous condescension of a 17 year old who many doesn't have many real friends but knows an awful lot about death metal or jazz-fusion (or punk, obviously) to make up for it. That's fucking rockism at its height. There are certain modes of that teenage expression that ring true, the enthusiasm, the anger, but there's a lot of ugly shit, a pervading isolation that leads to the conviction that you're somehow different, which splits into two simultaneous feelings, one of self-loathing and alienation, and also of smug superiority and a million self-congratulatory "Still listening to this in 2014" and "You say Nicki Minaj/I say Led Zeppelin" YouTube comments.

You wanna capture that rawness, that feeling, maybe here trying to articulate and bring another life to the spit and fire that popped in your head the moment you first stumbled across Crass, overheard at a cooler punk friend's house, tucked away on the back half of some mixtape, in a youtube link thrown your way offhandedly and then replayed 18 fucking times straight. But you don't have to simultaneously roll with the snorting contempt for 'normals' or, the cackhanded dismissal or disbelief that anyone could have a genuinely transformative emotional experience with art that does not speak to you, that people who are blasting Beyoncé or Taylor Swift can't be invested in the struggle, you're not radical there, you're Liam Gallagher farting on about Jay-Z at Glastonbury, you're a shit old man complaining that bands don't sound like The Beatles anymore. "Radio was once the voice of the people." claims The Third Step, Radio Shit's clattering chaotic intro. The fuck it was. That sounds a fucking Gaslight Anthem lyric, and you wanna be swerving as far away from that conservative tapioca-Sorkin vision of the past as you really can. Punk is very fucking susceptible to believing its own revolutionary hype, to playing into that media-narrative of itself as the TRUE REVOLUTIONARY MUSIC, punkism as a ugly offshoot of lazy rockism, and if you're making revolutionary punk, you should be about kicking that fucking myth to pieces.

It's a fucking shame, cos the songs on this EP really are killer. And a firm recreation first mindblowing epiphany of real punk attack is handily realised a lot of the time. Sharp barbs of anarcho-punk, like Radio Shit really closer to the Subhumans' compact bombs than the Crassic sprawl of songs like When You Gonna Realize? on The Door, these songs are stripped to their gleaming edges with no goth shiver that accompanies much of the modern day takes on the subgenre, just pure clear rage, throbbing and marching, herky jerky riffs bouncing like demented puppets, catchy basslines and itchy panicked guitar scrape, falling into and rising out of apocalyptic sound collages rippling with threat and chaos and doom. The vocals snapping with venom, slithering with demented hope, punching with power, asking real questions, playing characters, caricatures, carrying like crowd chants over police lines. Songs like Broadcast Tower with its 1-2 stomp, Bring the Boys Back Home with its peppy yelps, The Third World with its gentle guitar trickles filtering through the fury and indignance, are small masterpieces of restless punk shiftings, skipping from crash to shuffle, blunt messages of resistance delivered with real conviction, "MAYBE THE BOSSES DON'T GIVE A FUCK", creeping dawns of solidarity spotted somewhere off in the dark, making you keep fighting, dancing. And keeping fighting is important, just as keeping dancing is. Just don't be real fucking 100% oi-mate-i'm-punk punk dickheads about it, you know. Nicki Minaj fucking rules, mate.

Brain F≠ - Empty Set LP

Brain F≠'s 2nd LP of shabbily-hewn punk rock, catchy and crunching, poppy but not pop punk, gruff but not gruff punk. Flatly sweet, demonstratively sharp, Nick Goode and Elise Anderson's vocals cutting across each other, erasing and supporting each other, in dry knowing drawls and spiteful snaps. Dangerhouse dirt, a thickened and filled-out Avengers, a dented and kicked-in Thermals. Evocative visions of human mess spiralling and zagging through, faded scenes, wasted wishes. "We used the city like a fulcrum/Were we dumb?/We used our arms we used our hands to communicate and bent and bent and bending we make it work it until our backs break" on Fulcrum. "You want everybody on the balcony, mais/Secret's wrapped in money in the bathroom doorway/Gotta throw some pocket change to play/We lie like kings, lay all day" on Dirty Realism. 10 punk cuts with the shine rubbed off, the bruises still visible.

 

Teledrome - s/t LP

Super-catchy synthpunk moving with the same clackety robotic precision as the Spits, but not kicking sparks, warbling with the futuro-nostalgia of Buggles, a wistful tune to hum as your spaceship spins into the infinite airless yonder. Robot silly, android hearts crackling with rust, learning, growing, jealousy/abandonment/lust just bugs in the program, unrequited alarm beeps, heartbreak does not compute but it still hurts. The drums flat and stark, the synths as high cutting prows slicing through, as tickling electric burbles running under, as skittering chirps or wide-open vistas for you to get sucked into as the whispers get to you on Boyfriend, the confusion roots you to the spot in Spirals, the life slips out on Blood Drips, those synth melodies whooping and warping through you with goofy cybersadness. Laserprecision bummerpunk for broken machines.

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.

Tercer Mundo - Ser Nosotros Mismos

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

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

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

Disguise - System Shock

From members of Crowd Control, Strong Boys: gritty nasty Irish raw punk, d-beats and reverbed screams in the deep murk. The burn and thump of degenerate disfuckers, Japanese hardcore influences, Gudon messy, Bastard heavy. No Release strikes, churns, tension built to breaking. Institution thrashes hard. No Chaos digs in familiar disgusting patterns, the trembling guitar creeping out of the noxious dust that chokes and swallows the songs. System Shock in particular feels in moments like a sweeter, more palatable punk burner buried under a weight of crushing slag, the screams searing through. A pure slab of anguished hardcore punk.

The Modern Pets - Sorry, Thanks LP

Punchy jumpy punk rock from Genrmany, kicking hard and rockin and rollin'. Snappy tunes of Exploding Hearts/Tranzmitors/Buzzcocks power-pop, new-wave warbles, those disaffected dry vocals. From the bleary scumbag snap of Pilsator ("AGAIN YOU WOKE UP IN THE DIRT/"FUCK OFF!" IS THE LAST THING YOU'VE HEARD/ALL YOUR GOALS AND TRIES ARE JUST FOR VAIN...") cutting between simple key lines, guitar scrambles, handclaps, to the corpsing joy of Funeral Fun ("YOUR EYES ARE FULL OF JOY/SEEING ME IS BETTER THAN TV/NOT MY FAULT THAT YOU WEAR BLACK/NOW THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN GET BACK") and the choppy up-and-down ah-fuck-it skitter of I'm Not a Brick, with its whirlwind bass dances, its spinning-dizzily chorus, its fastpop jab: "IT'S ALL PART OF THE COSMIC JOKE". Catchy kicks and stupid fucks. Fuck work (Clocked Assholes), fuck the media (News), fuck me and my dumb mouth (The Walking Contradiction), fuck internet popularity contests (No Access) and above all, fuck not dancing, fuck not shaking it. It's the sort of album where you think they're gonna throw in the word 'baby' at the end of every line, even when they don't.
 

Family Outing - demo CS

Demo from shortlived Good Throb punk fuckers. A dirty mess of slimy hardcore noise and punk. Psychic Leech has melodic swoops that sound like a Trip, Trance & Travelling Paintbox guitar line over its basement burble, the pull and rip of Party Animal has some fleeting Crazy Spirit shiver, as does the drive of Waste of Space. Songs of hatred and spite, ripping into buzzkill pricks on Psychic Leech, pervert shits on Sickos, boss cunts on Boss Cunt. Pure fucking vitriol. "BOSS CUNT. SHIT FOR BRAINS. INSIPID MAN TRYING TO FUCK WITH MY HEAD SINCE THE CONTRACT BEGAN. BOSS CUNT. PIECE OF SHIT ON 35 GRAND." The other songs take that nasty butterflyknife contempt and twist it inwards to self-excoriation on Thicko, Waste of Space, Party Animal. "PUKE UP YOUR GUTS/COUGH UP YOUR GUTS/ IGNORANCE AND SCREECHING/GOOD TIMES BAD FEELINGS/I'M A CUNT I'M UNAPPEALING/GOOD TIMES BAD FEELINGS/LETTING THE SIDE DOWN PIGGIES SQUEALING." Negative shit from bad emotional spaces, shit jobs, shit parties, shit days, shit dreams, we've all had days like that, years like that, an all-enveloping hate, inside and out, a bitter destruction, a sourpunk killing.

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.

Black Panda - A La Caza Del U​-​666 LP

Hard kicking crust & roll from Spanish punx Black Panda, like a reverse-engineered Motorhead, building that speedpunk halfmetal rip not from pushing 60s rock as hard as it could go, but by taking the deep thick trenches of crust and imbuing them with rock and roll spin and spark. Swarming and tearing onwards, eating up the tarmac, cutting between demonic growls birthed of metal and darkness and desperate punk yelps, laid over unstoppable d-beat rhythms sweet dashes of guitar solos shoot past like bullet cracks, singalong chants on Ruedas de Fuego, music to drive fast to, music to crash and live to, rolling with that motorpunk realness.