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.

Disguise - Signs of the Future

Dublin, like New York or London, is a city whose punk in 2015 matches its vibrancy with its refusal to be defined by one sound. Multiple bands, all with wildly divergent takes on 2015 punk, all unified in their DIY ethic and refusal to compromise. The first 12" from searing rawpunx Disguise continues where their System Shock 7" left off, slamming together the lithe turmoil of Gloom, the monstrous purpose of Bastard, the ugly burn of Crude SS into a violent driving gunk, like Florida's Mauser or Australia's Kromosom, taking that Scandi-Japanese rawpunk axis and stretching it out to their own corner of the globe.

Built on a relentless sinister thrum, a taut propulsive clatter, Disguise explode with scalding fury in the screaming guitars and tortured barks and roars echoing out of the radioactive slurry. From Constant Victim pure vitriol rolling into Signs of the Future's noisestomp groove, to Depleted Uranium heady crash and Breed Bastards broken fade, this is ferocious hardcore punk, worked til its end.

Absolut - Punk Survival LP

Crunching hardcore in the international mode, matching that Scandi-bombblast to the squeal and wail of Japanese legends like The Sexual or Deathside, thick gory riffs, vocals echoing back into the raw thunder and hail like deathhowls blown futile away in the night. Your Fraud chugs with motorpunk purpose, it's guitars bend gracefully above the storm before faltering and collapsing back into the roiling sea. Neo Fuckers gouges out thick rents in the pavement, its solo a slipping and squirming beast, the drums relentless, the vocals one more animalistic tear. Loveless Noise building out of one manic squealing into another, one chaos slips into a deeper one. 9 songs of full and bloodwarm hardcore punk, burning and bludgeoning, no rest, no quarter given, Punk Survival.

Orden Mundial - Obediencia Debida MLP

Raw Mallorcan punk exploding with bite. Sharing members with Maquina Muerta but working with more range and space in their Wretched-raddled fury. Hardcore punk done up all screaming bright and staticky rough, the guitar tone a textured buzz, an undulating prickle of noise over quick shifts as the songs bark and scratch. The vocals matching the music torment for torment, rawness to rawness, deep and scathing and exposed. Son Fantasmas a scornful swagger, cracking apart into feedback squalls, grunts and drumrolls retreating like a spider into the dark. Gusanos a plodder and breaker, settling into a monotonous groove that builds in threat and promise, guitar scrawled over the top like wild childish graffiti, aimless tangle of noiselines obscurant. Accion Humanitaria has a similar dance, a steady streetpunk roll under morsecode blips, wild wirey guitar freakouts always ready to burst forth as on Camino Inevitable's manic scrabbling. Fosas Abiertas that wellworn ironic punk march amongst the din, the feedback pulled and roughly manipulated into sharp steel flowers of high broken vengeance, squeaks and peaks of rage for humanity, against leaders and wars and the putrefying grasp that is present in each trapping violence.

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.

GAZE - demo CS

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

Scumraid - Out of Order

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

Rats Blood - Punks is Mutants

Frightening depressive rawpunk from Ireland. Following on from their eight track demo, which screamed "This country's died a thousand times/Look at the past/Look back and laugh" and proclaimed "Ireland is falling apart. Stick together. Up the Punks." This is another potent melding of bleak futures with punk strength, riding Totalitar coarseness and Bastard blare up to the edge of the abyss. Rats Blood's is a world of monsters, of sadists in power, of invisible prisons, forces so malignant as to read demonic, drugs and nuclear threat and corporate neglect and the legitimised savagery of police violence as cruel looming titans, consuming the world.




No Exit is pure pain, Socio-Apathy pure rage. Heroin is as frustrated with the lack of empathy and easy moralising as it is angry with the dulling scourge of opiates: "I have friends/Who've fought wars alone/Who the fuck/Are you to judge?" Therein lies the resistance, cos though these soul-eating evils are big bad motherfuckers, there's no reason to succumb to their logic, to treat them as a just leveler, like the guilty always get arrested and the innocent always go free, like the poor deserve to be poor. Rats Blood refuses to be caught in the sway of the late-capitalist sanctimony, it refuses to join the righteous who will pave the road to hell will good intentions and a daddy-knows-best stripping of agency. Because, as it may roar on No More Fukushima, we are caught in "Arrogant human ambition/Mindless march into hell" Rats Blood will survive, they will hold it down, because they're punks. And PUNKS IS MUTANTS. GISM as tetragrammaton, their deep violent weirdness as a staging post in an expedition in the futuredark. Rats Blood live in a hateful world and are forged in that hate, ready to breathe in the toxic air and let it feed a toxic heart. "We will survive in the blistering heat/We will survive in the snow/We will survive in the blistering heat/Because we're scum". Do not gleam but ooze, slither between cracks, lurk like sneakthieves, a scabrous underbelly built for disdain. Punks as pestilent avengers, transforming the interior chaos of No Exit into a scabby armour, the world drowning in filth and punks as sewer creatures, swimming free, ready for the wave to come. In each uncomfortable future or fantastic dystopia, from Futurama to Demolition Man to The Wind Singer, Metropolis, there are basement dwellers, who survive, who live down there in the gloom. That's Rats Blood place, from where they lay out six tracks of anguish and excoriation, six tracks of unflinching raw punk tearing at the shames of the world, laying them bare with apocalyptic clarity.

Nomad - 自殺

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

Kromosom - Nuclear Reich

Australian rawpunx. They've got a split with Isterismo and a 12" called 8 Tracks, and instead of the next logical step, an 8 track called Twelve Inches, they've got this thing called Nuclear Reich. Some of this band have a really great true meathead music sideproject Bloody Hammer playing a crustied take street punk/Oi! and that Criminal Damage bent has bled back into Kromosom, infecting their Mauser/Giftgasattack/Kriegshög bluntness with a little bit of melody and communal spirit. Media Control has an intro that plays like a sharpened bonesplinter take on Cockney Rejects' I Am Not a Fool or maybe even Rancid's Avenue's and Alleyways and the fistpump of Culture Degeneration (CUL! TURE! DEGENERATION!) hits as one of those inept and inane irresistible shoutalongs like Lower Class Brats' Psycho. Elsewhere though they stick to the rawpunx and they do it fine but it's not quite as great as those moments where the Oi! degenerates into gross chaos roar, or the noise lifts up in brief melody.



Draw the Line and Answer are punx scene songs, tearing at the place of punk within the world, attacking those who would exploit it from outside (Answer: "CUT OUT THE LEECH THAT FEEDS ON PUNK BLOOD.") and corrupt it mindlessly from inside (Draw the Line: "BRING BONEHEAD DESTRUCTION"), Draw the Line almost cuts itself to pieces with an anguished stumbling, but Answer is just straight tear. Nuclear Reich and Radiation are classic odes to the bomb in that pained Discharge style, the titular opening leading in with a bit of dirty postapocalyptic creep, Radiation being another real down-the-line up and out one. Culture Degeneration, Virtual Inmate and Media Control all take shots at the psychological destruction brought about by technology and media in their fallout-swathed guitar rush. Human Shell is all GISM in its makings though, creepy inhuman burps and swirling/squealing guitar solos that sit in weird contrast to the burn of the rest of the sound.

The lyrics often break into disjointed declarative shouts, like that of a migrained brain inable to construct syntax in the pain and lightning fury and just blurting out the basics of its point leaving you to put things back together,  Media Control: "ARMY OF DRONES! MEDIA CONTROL! IDENTITY! MEDIA CONTROL!", Human Shell: "STERILE! CASTRATED! DOCILE!", Culture Degeration: "PROGRESSION! REGRESSION!", Radiation: "NUCLEAR LEAKAGE! NATURE RAVAGED!". Broken pieces of a broken world, stitched together by a breaking sound. Fullblast atomic stomppunx.

Hunger - Dying is Ordinary

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


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

Maquina Muerta - s/t EP

Scalding flat rawpunx from Mexico. Clattering, primitive and physical. Gimme that ineptitude. The drums slap and crash chaotically, the vocals burn mightily with the weight of passion and affliction, a worked and turned over field in the throat, blood in spit and sound. You can hear the creases and strain as it screams "MAQUINA DE MUERTE" like an invocation on the title track, "NO! NO! NO! NO!" on Sangre Inocente, leading into Todo El Odio with an unaccompanied blisterburst bellow of "RABIA! RABIA! RABIA!". These repetitions like the simplistic direct bludgeonpunk repetitions of the music, each riff simple and uncatchy, but relentless, driven into with conviction, reiterated without quarter given, message and bluntness undimmed, unaltered each time, a monotony of brutality. This noise comes round again, this noise doesn't leave, this noise doesn't know how. It all turns over in a such a way as to almost abnegate momentum with brickwall ugliness, sticking its guitars in such inelastic scritching grooves, rarely using them for anything but the abrading. There's a slippery wild movement at the end of Sangre Inocente, with noise wobbles flickering over rerun bass riffs, a small solo that picks and bites like mosquitoes in the murk on Vacio, another one that squeals panicked and off-kilter on Progreso Camicace, like the escape from those grooves will combust and kill it all. The vocals pull it back, hold it all barely together. They're so coarse, scarier even than the music, just in the emotion they eek out, rage laced with and deepened by grief, screaming over the dronepunk that bloodies on stubbornly, rumbling, repetitive as the throb from a wound, searing. Savage and painful and goddamn inept as all. On Metadona Records.

Pissheads - Kill Hippie System

Pissheads. Nasty noisy shit. Roar messes of relentless Shitlickers grit. Clattering rawpunk with thick ugly growls and strangled-short nip-and-tear solos. A reworking of their demo into an tighter, more ferocious beast. Kill Hippie System. ""BEATEN DOWN BY THE FUCKING CUNTS!" on Life. "GUTLESS BASTARDS KILLING THOUSANDS!" on Cowardly Games. This is ugly existence, lived under the pressure of, cudgels and jackboots wait to stomp and destroy, everything affected by the psychology of threat, "GRAVEYARDS BLANKET THE LAND" on Shadows of Power, we're all consumed, this disgusting fascism is not some stray aberration, but an enveloping night. Pissheads wait to explode it all. "LIFE IS A JACKBOOT TO THE THROAT" but Pissheads have boots of their own to kick and rearrange, to strut in through these apocalyptic curfews. 8 minutes, 8 tracks, the walls crashing down around you. Radioactive chainsaws for fucked-off times.

Zyanose - Insane Noise Raid

14 minutes of meticulous clattering noise. Not quite as harsh as D-Clone, but harsher than almost everything else. Drawing from Confuse's heaviest moments, or a less rigidly structured Contrast Attitude, three-piece Zyanose (drums, bass and noise-bass) construct a clanky crunching rumble of crasher-crust noise-punk vice blast. Framed mainly around songs devoted to the seven deadly sins, this album apparently took three years to record and was rerecorded several times. Albums like this, music devoted in its aesthetic to ripping apart all conventional musical pursuits in its tumble and grunt, so often gets dismissed on the basis that anyone can make a fucking racket, and it's true, anyone can, and that's part of the glory of punk and noise and all those simple genres beholden more to attitude than to virtuosity, but information like that, about the construction of the music, shows the artistry behind a piece of raging crust dissonance. They wanted it like this. EXACTLY like this. From the thick bassline that dominates Gluttony, holding fast against the noise and screams, to the way Envy swirls with ghost-feedback before thrashing into a blast of demented anger and then fading back down into that murk, to the end of the album when all this cacophony runs itself down into a soft simple buzz-bass-riff that drifts awaylike a beast into the night with the noise still chirruping about it, this album could not be done any other way. The red and white messy chaotic liner notes, bustling with about five differnt logos and a load of skulls, give the lyrics, seven of the nine tracks focusing on a particular sin, laying it down to its bare bones in each crashing blast. Greed: Debriseaaghrr!!!!/End of polution by side of you/Parasite! Wrath: Government control/Keep myself/Answer in chaos. Those are those songs in their entirety, and that's all you need to rip the human mess to shreds, with the noise of the noise-bass, the blaring of the... INSANE! INSANE NOISE RAID!

D-Clone - Creation and Destroy

A short metallic snap of a drum gives about half a second of warning and then this album hits high gear pretty fucking immediately. Blown the fuck out d-beat noise-core, like Disclose were really pussy-footing around the issue or something, jeez. The band named as a quick-smiling nod to the uniformity of lineage from which they spring, in which they rot and fucking howl, but they grab this raw-punk snake by its tail and shake it harder, push it further, kick it nastier, hold a heavier load of fuzz and co to that damn thrumhead Discharge rubble-quick skin-trash. Clones they are, but mutant unsteady creations, with the DNA corrupted. They're fifth, sixth, seventeenth iterations, scummier and filthier copies and further sunk into the nuclear scream, edges battle-blurred and then borders broken, songs adumbrated in the scuttle-murk cacophony, hate-system incomprehension, bled and blasted harsh and high, humming with the nihilism of coming bombs, signal barely there.


This is scary uncompromising wargutter noise, all wired through this big-distortion connectors, lit-up and sprawling like power-station control boards. This fear is not an isolated spark, the symbols and stages of this thing were set time ago, and have been echoed and reset, rerun and static loaded. Noise is not a distraction here, it's the raw aching bloodied point, destroying with creation, flattening you, making you feel mutable and turned-about, open to great internal changes, chaos in the core, rats in your mouse guts, this fear that the bodied burst of hardcore-attack has altered us too much from our basic construction. Here is will, here is living in chaos, here is hatred, and here, in the way this rages, there is, as the band screams, something approaching a shining, bright point, as visions of world's ending, retro-apocalypses and workhouse god slaughters fall about, here is a single cracked entity constructed from three parts, a loudness, a stupidity and a hope, with a violence to all three, here is making punk future, Creation and Destroy. Noise not music. Punk rock fuck you.