Thumping new stuff, raw and blustery, the shoutalong momentum of Oi! combined with the melodic power of those early punks caught up in bashing in and fouling up early rock and roll templates like 999 or Slaughter and the Dogs, Chelsea or The Lurkers, sharp with the tang of public transport piss-stink, catchy but with the pinched edge of violence. Three London anthems, slapping down tedious crusties and their affectations on Hammer a Nail, screaming of endless nightbus journeys and the alienation and paranoia of the tube and its thousand watching eyes on TFL and BTP, songs pulled from the rusty arteries of the city sprawl, a transitory deadtime where you spend too much of your life, rolling from once grey suburb to another, overground, underground. Lately I've been fairly obsessed with a video of Jeff Turner kicking a Nazi out of a Cockney Rejects show, a video taken not in the bad ol' days of 1981 but in 20-fucking-14, where a performance of Are You Ready to Rucks switches immediately from the communal beery arm-in-arm singing to Jeff threatening to "punch the cunt outta ya", Jeff is totally fucking ready to ruck, that's the moment that Crown Court are living in, the snap from throaty bellowing ("OI! OI!") to dead-eyed threat. Howling roughs and bloody cunts.
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Sunday, 5 January 2014
The Love Triangle - Clever Clever
Rumbling propulsive 77 punk punch. There are bits of power-pop smoothness, bits of garage-punk snot, closest in make-up maybe to straight-up punk bands like The Pigs or The Radiators, all those little first wave hangers on cranking out jumpy punk runarounds, or KBD soulpunk flashes like The Law's Hole in my Heart, in terms of more modern bands, it recalls stuff like the Exploding Hearts and their throwback rock and roll edge, but while bands like that are built more around the jab and itch of the guitar, Clever Clever for the most part tumbles along in the wake of the throb of the bass, scampering this way and that, hitched to the low-end. Yeah there are aggressively infectious guitar lines like on the vituperous Just You Wait ("Just you wait til I get cancer!"), or the suave spikepop of The Wait, the grubby needling of Swift Exit, but really this album feels meaty and blocky in its construction, feels deep and gutsy and bolted confidently to its own engine.
The Wait, Just You Wait, the chug and pump of I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, tension infects this album, the songs woundtight and cramped, pushed together and ready to snap, ready to spool out with snaking chaos, degrade and roll over the hill sad and old, like the promises of Just You Wait and Be Old Soon, it's an album aware of what lays ahead, so it crackles and dances with what life it has now.
It still slows down now and then, I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, the dragged out cynicism of Hollywood Sleaze, the chilledout fuck it of The Situation is Excellent ("Are we living in the end times?/Have a drink and take a rest") and those are nice change-ups, but when this album really hits its full pace, on Tangle or Future Tense or others, there's nothing like it.
Dancepunk does not mean what it could mean, it means all new-wavey stuff, cleaned-up funk-punk, echoes of Gang of Four and what not, art and keyboards and disco shine, which can be cool, can be a good time, but then it leaves me struggling to put words to the physical sensation of Clever Clever. But maybe that's a good thing, shutting off one linguistic alley makes you scramble and search for a new one, a more refined descriptor to pin into the music. Dancepunk, what it could mean are these sort of wriggly Lurkers-lumped punk rock numbers, that shuffle and step quickly and purposefully, that move like you want to move, that pull you out of yourself with every tossed-off riff or bass turn or drum shiver, punk for dancers. Move yourself to this beat, pop like a broken bass-string, find yourself, draw yourself, make yourself, punk melodic and guitar frantic.
On Static Shock records.
The Wait, Just You Wait, the chug and pump of I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, tension infects this album, the songs woundtight and cramped, pushed together and ready to snap, ready to spool out with snaking chaos, degrade and roll over the hill sad and old, like the promises of Just You Wait and Be Old Soon, it's an album aware of what lays ahead, so it crackles and dances with what life it has now.
It still slows down now and then, I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, the dragged out cynicism of Hollywood Sleaze, the chilledout fuck it of The Situation is Excellent ("Are we living in the end times?/Have a drink and take a rest") and those are nice change-ups, but when this album really hits its full pace, on Tangle or Future Tense or others, there's nothing like it.
Dancepunk does not mean what it could mean, it means all new-wavey stuff, cleaned-up funk-punk, echoes of Gang of Four and what not, art and keyboards and disco shine, which can be cool, can be a good time, but then it leaves me struggling to put words to the physical sensation of Clever Clever. But maybe that's a good thing, shutting off one linguistic alley makes you scramble and search for a new one, a more refined descriptor to pin into the music. Dancepunk, what it could mean are these sort of wriggly Lurkers-lumped punk rock numbers, that shuffle and step quickly and purposefully, that move like you want to move, that pull you out of yourself with every tossed-off riff or bass turn or drum shiver, punk for dancers. Move yourself to this beat, pop like a broken bass-string, find yourself, draw yourself, make yourself, punk melodic and guitar frantic.
On Static Shock records.
Perfect Pussy - I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling
You've got like three seconds of choppy indie guitar on the first song before this thing betrays its true colours, noisy, not crush and burn oppressive noise, but chaotic, shambling noise of collision and inept makings, where distortion pops and gurgles between the melodies, synthlines a little to sharp for comfort, vocals getting swept away in the crash and blare, the songs take flight with stumbles and rips, flinging themselves finally into the air, then crashing down like the gaunt rumblings that end III and IV, the sickly sweet moments that tried to make themselves known giving way to an industrial buzz and clang.
The lyrics carry the weight of trauma and the broken world that cuts and bludgeons and chokes, capable both of the dry depictions of pain and emotion, "she must have been desperate; she acted so lonely. she is deserving of affection, i am glad that she found love." on I, and knife-edge collocations that break through these flatter ruminations and then dart away in the noise, stuffed with power, "there is a sick grace inherent in healing, i had finally choked that down." on III. The way these two tones sit next to each other, struggle with each other, illuminate and colour each other is the key to that power, rooting the poetry in the reality, the trudge, pulling the ugly facts into brighter light with the darker/sweeter/lusher/more symbolically loaded imagery "i'll kiss myself to prove that i'm not afraid of snakes."
Like hallucinatory shifting of Grace Krilanovich's teen/punk/hobo/vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps, the songs often cycle rapidly through identities and experiences, discarding bits of themselves each time as they struggles for a rock to hold fast to "all things pass through me, i'm a tough boy, wild and innocent and dangerous as hell. i'm awake and awakening. i am here and i have died. i killed the parts of me that said that i know. i killed off all the parts that keep me awake." on II, "first i was softer, then i was stronger, now i am frightened, would you look at me now?" on III.
IV opens with a sort of sticky rockabilly riff before it bursts with anguish and rage, feminist noise thrashings, righteous in the furious punk churn, biting at its own torment. "i'm a real piece of shit, i'm a real lost cause. dare to act like you're surviving and get thrown to the dogs." I'm really terrible about writing about real shit, but this is real shit. Music capable of confronting the worst of the world, the worst of ourselves, the murk and bloodiness, the flesh and the cardinal humours, the personal and the pain of it, in its noise and words, Perfect Pussy captures and confronts, twirls with and twists away from, the violence and the shit, blackened memories. In the way the sheen of the riffs and melodies and vocals are blown apart, tarnished by the reckless noise, you get a sense of how ourselves, our bodies and minds are cracked apart by the awfulness that lives snickering in the unchecked wants and uncaring desires of society and social interaction, but despite the noise, the roar, the melody remains there, in the clatter, battered and struggling not to fall behind, the soaring parts still live, and you feel despite losing the desire to.
The lyrics carry the weight of trauma and the broken world that cuts and bludgeons and chokes, capable both of the dry depictions of pain and emotion, "she must have been desperate; she acted so lonely. she is deserving of affection, i am glad that she found love." on I, and knife-edge collocations that break through these flatter ruminations and then dart away in the noise, stuffed with power, "there is a sick grace inherent in healing, i had finally choked that down." on III. The way these two tones sit next to each other, struggle with each other, illuminate and colour each other is the key to that power, rooting the poetry in the reality, the trudge, pulling the ugly facts into brighter light with the darker/sweeter/lusher/more symbolically loaded imagery "i'll kiss myself to prove that i'm not afraid of snakes."
Like hallucinatory shifting of Grace Krilanovich's teen/punk/hobo/vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps, the songs often cycle rapidly through identities and experiences, discarding bits of themselves each time as they struggles for a rock to hold fast to "all things pass through me, i'm a tough boy, wild and innocent and dangerous as hell. i'm awake and awakening. i am here and i have died. i killed the parts of me that said that i know. i killed off all the parts that keep me awake." on II, "first i was softer, then i was stronger, now i am frightened, would you look at me now?" on III.
IV opens with a sort of sticky rockabilly riff before it bursts with anguish and rage, feminist noise thrashings, righteous in the furious punk churn, biting at its own torment. "i'm a real piece of shit, i'm a real lost cause. dare to act like you're surviving and get thrown to the dogs." I'm really terrible about writing about real shit, but this is real shit. Music capable of confronting the worst of the world, the worst of ourselves, the murk and bloodiness, the flesh and the cardinal humours, the personal and the pain of it, in its noise and words, Perfect Pussy captures and confronts, twirls with and twists away from, the violence and the shit, blackened memories. In the way the sheen of the riffs and melodies and vocals are blown apart, tarnished by the reckless noise, you get a sense of how ourselves, our bodies and minds are cracked apart by the awfulness that lives snickering in the unchecked wants and uncaring desires of society and social interaction, but despite the noise, the roar, the melody remains there, in the clatter, battered and struggling not to fall behind, the soaring parts still live, and you feel despite losing the desire to.
Friday, 3 January 2014
Cremalleras - s/t
Buzzfast punked-up two-piece thrashpop from Mexico. Curt punk songs that rattle around and hit with the quick crack of a dislocated joint being thwacked back into place. One of the first words I used to describe the band was 'zippy' and upon googling, turns out that Cremalleras is Spanish for 'zippers', much as I would like to take credit for some Joycean multilingual pun, I am not that smart, they just named their band well. From those sharp rising aaaahs on Ex-Novios and the shakearound shuffle of En Todos Lados to the rise and fall rumble of No Me Importa and the burntout caterwaul of Todo Esta Perdido, these songs pop with thin venom, danceable as much as they are aggressive, seducing and shimmying as much as they spit and crash, built from stark snippets of rough punk and sweet bouncy guitar thrum. On Cintas Pepe records.
Zyanose - Why There Grieve?
I am way into into when bands insist on coining their own subgenres to describe their music, that act of marking out your sound as something different something not quite containable is an act of meaningless artistic bravado that always makes me smile, the Taxpayers with goofpunk for example, on Why There Grieve? Zyanose have dubbed their twin-bass fury DITCH CRUST NOISE CORE, at once a descriptor for their sound and a herald of their attack. Zyanose make punishing stuff, deep, burbling, biting noise that crashes with the force of buildings falling.
While their last 12" Insane Noise Raid focused on sin, Why There Grieve? moves slightly outside these classical interior failings to deal with more modern pressures. Keep Yourself is a punx on punx song, namechecking Gloom, Confuse, the forerunners of Zyanose's ugly sound. "I beleave in punk" it screams. Maybe the one thing that Zyanose do believe in, the rest of the album torn through with looming nuclear spectres and smaller quieter forms of oblivion, drudgery of work, the venal machinations of politicians, apathy creeping like frostbite, irritation, anger, all drawn in chaotic blasts, as the noise swirls in panic on Silent or F.O.A.D., rumbles then bursts on Snapped Pappet, clangors in incomprehensible conflict on the Die is Cast (while the liner notes give lyrics in both Japanese and English, the long string of kanji that is The Die Is Cast is translated into English as Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhrrrr!!!!).
Nihilistic squealings. Pulse is a 13 second wordless, well, pulse, that ends off the first side of the record. The sound of a countdown, or a time marker, an underwater bloop, like a baby version of the rest of the records explosions, a short snap of the worldbeat that Zyanose feel down in the corroded bones of the world, that they explicate on in the militaristically underpinned Camouflage or the anguished vocalisations of Options for the Fool.
Before the album runs out to a stop with the drums on Keep Yourself, Zyanose construct an awful world of awful noise, few releases from its pain, just the slightly longer bite and rumble of that final track and its strength in punk, strength in the noise that's ripped out of the earth in order to mirror the noise that's pressed down on you. F.O.A.D. Fuck off and die. Fuck off and dance.
While their last 12" Insane Noise Raid focused on sin, Why There Grieve? moves slightly outside these classical interior failings to deal with more modern pressures. Keep Yourself is a punx on punx song, namechecking Gloom, Confuse, the forerunners of Zyanose's ugly sound. "I beleave in punk" it screams. Maybe the one thing that Zyanose do believe in, the rest of the album torn through with looming nuclear spectres and smaller quieter forms of oblivion, drudgery of work, the venal machinations of politicians, apathy creeping like frostbite, irritation, anger, all drawn in chaotic blasts, as the noise swirls in panic on Silent or F.O.A.D., rumbles then bursts on Snapped Pappet, clangors in incomprehensible conflict on the Die is Cast (while the liner notes give lyrics in both Japanese and English, the long string of kanji that is The Die Is Cast is translated into English as Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhrrrr!!!!).
Nihilistic squealings. Pulse is a 13 second wordless, well, pulse, that ends off the first side of the record. The sound of a countdown, or a time marker, an underwater bloop, like a baby version of the rest of the records explosions, a short snap of the worldbeat that Zyanose feel down in the corroded bones of the world, that they explicate on in the militaristically underpinned Camouflage or the anguished vocalisations of Options for the Fool.
Before the album runs out to a stop with the drums on Keep Yourself, Zyanose construct an awful world of awful noise, few releases from its pain, just the slightly longer bite and rumble of that final track and its strength in punk, strength in the noise that's ripped out of the earth in order to mirror the noise that's pressed down on you. F.O.A.D. Fuck off and die. Fuck off and dance.
Sunday, 29 December 2013
No - Great Space
Tearing herky-jerky hardcore from another band that joins DiE at the forefront of the UK's fertile UNGOOGLEABLEHC scene, pushing this way and pulling that way, "ON MY WAY HOME I FELL BACK AGAIN CLAWING AND STUMBLING AND FALLING AGAIN" the vocals snap in polysyndetonic rush as Become Less opens and the guitars shift and shake, burst out like warnings, whistle and click like computer destruction, never settling. It's all twirl and clamor, bouncing back and forth. Nothing is similarly twitchy, stepping in and cutting back, the violence and tautness of a dancing boxer. Too Easy is muddier, slower, lumbering onwards in murk, still with that tension and release, like a fist clenching and unclenching. "SHEETS OF SOUND/FROM WITHIN/DO IT AGAIN/IT'S NOT SO HARD" Skeletal Hand lays that twitchpunk sharpness over another stompy structure, the bass giving hints of a garage punk roller, the song speaking of desolation, inside, outside, and paranoia. "IN THE DESERT/SOMETHING MOVED/SKIN PEELS/FROM THE BONE". Shifting Clouds begins stop/start but bursts into another fast fragmentary one, "HOW COULD COULD I FIND/COMFORT IN TIME". The vocals throughout this 12" are arranged in fractured smacks, jumping like they're trying to compete with (escape from) the peaks of the guitar's scrambling alarums. Restless hardcore with no catchy handles, no hooks or mollifying choral unification, just the turbulence of punnk noise.
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
Gag - This Punk Shit Is Cool But I Hope I'm Rob Zombie When I'm 28
Stealing the crown of best cover art of the year away from Criaturas' Espiritu De Libertad with their Who Killed Spikey Jacket? take on the Velvet Underground's banana thing, Gag's one sided 12" This Punk Shit Is Cool But I Hope I'm Rob Zombie When I'm 28 also completes the double with best album title of the year, narrowly pipping World Scariest Police Chases's NOFX And Out Come The Wolves Dookie and Japanther's Eat Like Lisa Act Like Bart at the finishing line.Five tracks of stompy evil stuff, slobbery snarls closer to hunger animal barks than recognisably human sound, cackle noise and besmeared adumbrations of speech, thrumming slumbass and lumbering ghouls, horrorpunk, not as in campy songs about vampire girlfriends and zombie hordes and facing off against zombie hordes with just your hot vampire girlfriend by your side. Fear in incomprehensibility, fear in noise, fear in the distorted gargle, the hardcore clump, the echoes of mocking Flipper-y laughter squirting out of the grasping noise, the nicks and cuts of the guitar, fear in the repetition of grunts and in the sick guttural grumble. The song titles hinting at some conjurings of ugly malevolence hidden in that bestial yelp that draws up nightmarish shivers of GISM's perfectly mutilated Nuclear Armed Hogs from your fearpunk hindbrain, CLOWN FARM, RAW MEAT, STEEL SHANK. This EP is the sound of something approaching and whatever that shit is it's not good.
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
DiE EP
From new label Sonic Terror Discs, a vinyl rerecording of a ripping demo from this new UK punk band, who I've seen tear it up live a couple times. The vinyl's sound is naturally fuller and more packed out than the tape. Obnoxious (both tape and seven-inch acknowledgements proclaim "Thanks to: NO CUNT") and agitated, concerned with big picture hopelessness, no small moments of despair, big shit philosophical monoliths of anger and angst like on Life Is Hate, a slower thing than the hardcore punk drive of some of the other songs, needling with its guitar line at first, but chugging along and flaring up with slicing parts, and then running up again into those needles as it screams "LIFE IS HATE/LIFE IS HATE/LIFE IS SHAME/LIFE IS CHAINS/LIFE IS WAR/LIFE IS HATE." Futility has got some more street-punk tinges to it, in the way the background vocals chime in, equally as shouty as the main vox, as it slams itself bodily into government evil and thrashes about in underclass wrath. Bodies has a heavier bass rumble to its speed, like a kinda out-of-control truck kinda rhythm, No Vision is a mostly wordless stomper, stretched since the demo, that flails over a steady trudge, relentlessly oblivion bound in workmarch and daymares and and other killing drugs. "NEED DRUGS FOR HEALING/LIQUOR FOR BREEDING/DESTROY ALL FEELING/TIL YOU'RE FACE DOWN ON THE FLOOR". Their eponymous song is warm writhing hardcore punk with a background hum, nihilistically scorching with lines like "BORN INTO CHAOS/PURPOSE UNKNOWN" although "THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUTH/WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" here as the final line on the EP, almost doubles as an curt expression of showbound purpose as much as the bleak truth of shit life that it is. Real stuff.
Available on their bandcamp. Thankfully the page is no longer NSFPWDWTSSPGABJWSUATOWAGL. (Not Safe For People Who Don't Want To See Seth Putnam Getting a Blowjob While Shooting Up And Tying Off With a Guitar Lead).
Wednesday, 21 August 2013
Framtid - Defeat of Civilization
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way." - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
"In the pre-dawn glow the plain before us seemed to move like a vast grey ocean, undulating gently; but instead of water it was a sea of chitin, flecked with claw and fang rather than foam, rolling inexorably on towards the fragile defensive island of the artillery park, I would have wept with disappointment if I wasn't already too terrified for any other emotion." - Sandy Mitchell, Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium
These Japanese crust killers made us wait. 11 years since the release of the classic Under the Ashes, Framtid return to shock and awe. Defeat of Civilization, out on Black Water in US, La Vida Es Un Mus in Europe and Crust War in Japan. They have not lost the stark black-and-white art. They have not mellowed. This is relentless stuff, crust in the mold of the Shitlickers sickened dirt burn, stretched slightly longer that the 1 minute blasts of the Cracked Cop Skulls EP or Diskonto's discography but retaining all drive, all wounded beast power. It's crust without the anchoring rock and roll of stuff like Malignant Tumour or Black Panda, where the noise twists around some dimly recognisable Lemmyborn structure, without the sweeping neocrust machinations of the likes of Ekkaia where the soaring scope of wasteland epics struggle against the lowdown rockethrust, this is just the demented aural attack. Framtid sound like a fucking bomb going off.
Framtid pierce and Framtid push onwards in the black. Framtid attack.
Attack is the right word. Bomb is too. And shock and awe collocated nastily by snide Pentagon mappers and tacticians, because throughout Framtid use their terrible power to oppose greater, more terrible powers. I saw them explode in a Texas warehouse with a banner hung behind them stating BY ANY MEANS WAR IS UNNECESSARY. That is what Framtid primarily sing about. They've got the ills of society on blast (man, are Framtid a band that earns the term 'on blast') but more than anything they are ANTI-WAR and they are ANTI-NUKE.
Their anti-war, anti-nuke sentiment dominates this album, they come from a country who, both then and now has been on the sharp end of the worst parts of that particular chain reaction. Ashes to Ashes screams "INNOCENT SUFFER FIRST/INNOCENT DYING FIRST", the title track sets up humankind as on a battle with the ultimately uncontrollable forces of fission ("HUMAN KIND AND NUCLEUS/CAN'T COEXIST") and the song Nuclear Power Genocide. The lyrics for UCAV (unmanned combat air vehicle if you're not up to date with the current euphemism for senseless murder machines) "AND AGAIN THE SENSE OF SIN/DISAPPEARS FROM THE ACT OF WAR", one of the best lines on this album (not for this band are trite war sucks platitudes), containing so much wrong in one scream, breaking through the dearth of shame resulting from the sheltering effects of video game interfaces when real damn people are burning under the gun, piercing the disconnect between action and result.
A lot of the lyrics in here point to traps, point to repetitions of this cycle, that little 'and again' kicking off that line, the song Error Again ("ERROR AGAIN/SWAYED AGAIN!"), the unanswered howl of Will The World Change, the bitterness of Sarcastic Truth ("AFTER THE WAR IS OVER/THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE A LIFE IN PEACE") the opening line of Ashes to Ashes is "THEY ARE STILL IN BATTLEFIELDS!". Those little words, those agains and evers and stills that point to a continuous process, an ongoing struggle, maybe an endless one, caught in these circular motions. "JUSTICE DESTROYING JUSTICE/HOPE KILLING HOPE/LIFE ERASING LIFE/INHUMANITY'S ALSO HUMANITY" goes Sarcastic Truth's weltschmerz smear.
Attack. Bomb. Shock and awe. This reflective noise, like Crass proclaiming THE NATURE OF YOUR OPPRESSION IS THE AESTHETIC OF OUR ANGER from the art of Yes Sir, I will, like the grenades in the war scenes in Hal Duncan's Vellum bursting with an onomatopoeic DOOM!, a sound calling to mind all our worst moments and set-up to counter it, this is the meat of Discharge taken further, charging harder. The oppression Framtid face is oblivion strong, and the way they resist is the same. Once, when I was a dickhead youth (dickhead is such a more evocative and accurate word than callow), someone invited me to go on an anti-war march, and I, remembering a line from the preface to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, made some glib dickhead comment about it being about as much use as going on an anti-glacier march. I was wrong, obviously, because while shit gets shittier, politician cunts get more cuntish, and Framtid acknowledge that, they also, on probably the most anthemic moment of the album, scream "NEVER SURRENDER, OPPOSE THE POWER!". So I was wrong, because fuck giving up, fuck that sort of cynicism that lets them win, but maybe what matters most here, what matters is that Framtid sound like they could stop a fucking glacier.
NEVER SURRENDER! OPPOSE THE POWER! Uncompromising is as good a word as 'relentless' for Framtid's workings. As Rorschach had it in Watchmen, "Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise", you know, when he was just a character in a great comic that ticked along under the threat of the cold war and hadn't been adopted by a million self-satisfied fuckheads and had his Randian origins in Ditko's Mr A properly squeezed out and emphasised by people who are more than willing to compromise on everything, but just don't like people.
Though there is stuff other than war. There's Prison, attacking the incarcero-industrial complex amongst it's drum flurries, echoing the thoughts of Angela Davis when she said "Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other." Prisons are another example of justice destroying justice, humanity as inhumanity, where this time in the lyrics the literal explosions of Framtid's other tracks slide into a tearing metaphor for the irradiated pain of lives inside. A reckless run-up into shouts of "INSIDE THE HIGH STRETCHED FENCES/SOUNDS OF EXPLOSION NEVER STOPS/ENDLESS DESTRUCTION"
The crustswells of Deceived and Abused, riff ingurgitated in the thick murk of bassed-up Disclose sonics (this album is dedicated to that band's departed frontman Kawakami), but it is unlike though the ugly sublimate noise of someone like D-Clone where each instrument can find itself just shrieking as one with. In a Framtid song there is guitar. There is discernible purpose and momentum here, but it is all engine, all the skid and turn of tank tracks, it is the warmachine forward roar, not solos flailing high and above, not swaggering or gaudy like the slogans or cheesecake daubed on a bomber's nose. Deep buzz like convoy rumble, death attendant and sticky. "UNREASONABLE EXPLAINS/SOCIAL MALAISE/UNREASONABLE RESULT/SOCIAL MALAISE" continuing that self-repeating downward spiral, where the hate feeds the hate. Continuing that second coming, in madness, eye-tearing, skin-blistering madness, a voice of It sound.
Though there are little peaks of Jacky's guitar where it climbs out of the dark bubbling, there's a solo on NPG that hits out briefly before being dragged under, one that flails on Never Surrender before being dragged down almost immediately, feeling like it's been cut-off prematurely, brutally embraced, like it couldn't survive in the wild, outside the assaultative swirl of the rhythm section and its radiation bones.
Uncompromising. Relentless. Bombs. Awe. Attack. Shock. A complete fucking statement, built bunkerstrong. So much to take in. Makino's vocal anguish, a throat scorched by fire, a mouth full of salted earth and anger for the dead. Framtid. A ground-to-sky behemoth, a noise of depth, of death, destruction mechanics, blotting out the shine with bootblack and scumgod.
"In the pre-dawn glow the plain before us seemed to move like a vast grey ocean, undulating gently; but instead of water it was a sea of chitin, flecked with claw and fang rather than foam, rolling inexorably on towards the fragile defensive island of the artillery park, I would have wept with disappointment if I wasn't already too terrified for any other emotion." - Sandy Mitchell, Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium
These Japanese crust killers made us wait. 11 years since the release of the classic Under the Ashes, Framtid return to shock and awe. Defeat of Civilization, out on Black Water in US, La Vida Es Un Mus in Europe and Crust War in Japan. They have not lost the stark black-and-white art. They have not mellowed. This is relentless stuff, crust in the mold of the Shitlickers sickened dirt burn, stretched slightly longer that the 1 minute blasts of the Cracked Cop Skulls EP or Diskonto's discography but retaining all drive, all wounded beast power. It's crust without the anchoring rock and roll of stuff like Malignant Tumour or Black Panda, where the noise twists around some dimly recognisable Lemmyborn structure, without the sweeping neocrust machinations of the likes of Ekkaia where the soaring scope of wasteland epics struggle against the lowdown rockethrust, this is just the demented aural attack. Framtid sound like a fucking bomb going off.
Framtid pierce and Framtid push onwards in the black. Framtid attack.
Attack is the right word. Bomb is too. And shock and awe collocated nastily by snide Pentagon mappers and tacticians, because throughout Framtid use their terrible power to oppose greater, more terrible powers. I saw them explode in a Texas warehouse with a banner hung behind them stating BY ANY MEANS WAR IS UNNECESSARY. That is what Framtid primarily sing about. They've got the ills of society on blast (man, are Framtid a band that earns the term 'on blast') but more than anything they are ANTI-WAR and they are ANTI-NUKE.
Their anti-war, anti-nuke sentiment dominates this album, they come from a country who, both then and now has been on the sharp end of the worst parts of that particular chain reaction. Ashes to Ashes screams "INNOCENT SUFFER FIRST/INNOCENT DYING FIRST", the title track sets up humankind as on a battle with the ultimately uncontrollable forces of fission ("HUMAN KIND AND NUCLEUS/CAN'T COEXIST") and the song Nuclear Power Genocide. The lyrics for UCAV (unmanned combat air vehicle if you're not up to date with the current euphemism for senseless murder machines) "AND AGAIN THE SENSE OF SIN/DISAPPEARS FROM THE ACT OF WAR", one of the best lines on this album (not for this band are trite war sucks platitudes), containing so much wrong in one scream, breaking through the dearth of shame resulting from the sheltering effects of video game interfaces when real damn people are burning under the gun, piercing the disconnect between action and result.
A lot of the lyrics in here point to traps, point to repetitions of this cycle, that little 'and again' kicking off that line, the song Error Again ("ERROR AGAIN/SWAYED AGAIN!"), the unanswered howl of Will The World Change, the bitterness of Sarcastic Truth ("AFTER THE WAR IS OVER/THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE A LIFE IN PEACE") the opening line of Ashes to Ashes is "THEY ARE STILL IN BATTLEFIELDS!". Those little words, those agains and evers and stills that point to a continuous process, an ongoing struggle, maybe an endless one, caught in these circular motions. "JUSTICE DESTROYING JUSTICE/HOPE KILLING HOPE/LIFE ERASING LIFE/INHUMANITY'S ALSO HUMANITY" goes Sarcastic Truth's weltschmerz smear.
Attack. Bomb. Shock and awe. This reflective noise, like Crass proclaiming THE NATURE OF YOUR OPPRESSION IS THE AESTHETIC OF OUR ANGER from the art of Yes Sir, I will, like the grenades in the war scenes in Hal Duncan's Vellum bursting with an onomatopoeic DOOM!, a sound calling to mind all our worst moments and set-up to counter it, this is the meat of Discharge taken further, charging harder. The oppression Framtid face is oblivion strong, and the way they resist is the same. Once, when I was a dickhead youth (dickhead is such a more evocative and accurate word than callow), someone invited me to go on an anti-war march, and I, remembering a line from the preface to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, made some glib dickhead comment about it being about as much use as going on an anti-glacier march. I was wrong, obviously, because while shit gets shittier, politician cunts get more cuntish, and Framtid acknowledge that, they also, on probably the most anthemic moment of the album, scream "NEVER SURRENDER, OPPOSE THE POWER!". So I was wrong, because fuck giving up, fuck that sort of cynicism that lets them win, but maybe what matters most here, what matters is that Framtid sound like they could stop a fucking glacier.
NEVER SURRENDER! OPPOSE THE POWER! Uncompromising is as good a word as 'relentless' for Framtid's workings. As Rorschach had it in Watchmen, "Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise", you know, when he was just a character in a great comic that ticked along under the threat of the cold war and hadn't been adopted by a million self-satisfied fuckheads and had his Randian origins in Ditko's Mr A properly squeezed out and emphasised by people who are more than willing to compromise on everything, but just don't like people.
Though there is stuff other than war. There's Prison, attacking the incarcero-industrial complex amongst it's drum flurries, echoing the thoughts of Angela Davis when she said "Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other." Prisons are another example of justice destroying justice, humanity as inhumanity, where this time in the lyrics the literal explosions of Framtid's other tracks slide into a tearing metaphor for the irradiated pain of lives inside. A reckless run-up into shouts of "INSIDE THE HIGH STRETCHED FENCES/SOUNDS OF EXPLOSION NEVER STOPS/ENDLESS DESTRUCTION"
The crustswells of Deceived and Abused, riff ingurgitated in the thick murk of bassed-up Disclose sonics (this album is dedicated to that band's departed frontman Kawakami), but it is unlike though the ugly sublimate noise of someone like D-Clone where each instrument can find itself just shrieking as one with. In a Framtid song there is guitar. There is discernible purpose and momentum here, but it is all engine, all the skid and turn of tank tracks, it is the warmachine forward roar, not solos flailing high and above, not swaggering or gaudy like the slogans or cheesecake daubed on a bomber's nose. Deep buzz like convoy rumble, death attendant and sticky. "UNREASONABLE EXPLAINS/SOCIAL MALAISE/UNREASONABLE RESULT/SOCIAL MALAISE" continuing that self-repeating downward spiral, where the hate feeds the hate. Continuing that second coming, in madness, eye-tearing, skin-blistering madness, a voice of It sound.
Though there are little peaks of Jacky's guitar where it climbs out of the dark bubbling, there's a solo on NPG that hits out briefly before being dragged under, one that flails on Never Surrender before being dragged down almost immediately, feeling like it's been cut-off prematurely, brutally embraced, like it couldn't survive in the wild, outside the assaultative swirl of the rhythm section and its radiation bones.
Uncompromising. Relentless. Bombs. Awe. Attack. Shock. A complete fucking statement, built bunkerstrong. So much to take in. Makino's vocal anguish, a throat scorched by fire, a mouth full of salted earth and anger for the dead. Framtid. A ground-to-sky behemoth, a noise of depth, of death, destruction mechanics, blotting out the shine with bootblack and scumgod.
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Cülo - My Life Sucks And I Could Care Less
"I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve." - Sarah Kane, 4:48 Psychosis
Metal-umlauted buttpunk played at nosedive rates. Cülo smashed their way in with a series of fucking great demos and seven inches which were collected on Life Is Vile and So Are We. This is their first real full-length, My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less). Opening with the chirps and bloops of synths on Gestapo Boots of a Mutant, the album quickly tracks into its hazardous hardcore pace, running out this song in a punk instrumental, thrashing onwards with tension, setting the scene for this album's snarling confrontational stamp, which is anti-most shit.
ANTI-SOCIETY: Societies Claws, Dominant Farce. Lives lived in serried rows, proceeding down the same paths. Cülo ain't down with that.
ANTI-COP: On the Streets: squealing in and speeding up. Cops sharpen society's claws. Cülo ain't down with that.
ANTI-WAR: Down in Equador: dry vocals through a weedy death haze, like the jungle madness of Lucius Shepherd's Life During Wartime. Weird kid in a bad way soundtracked by soldier boot speed trampling. DOA In My Head twirling around in guitar tightness like sanity down a plughole.
ANTI-NOT BEING ON HEROIN: On the Nod. Cyanide Slug.
ANTI-LIFE: I Was Supposed to Be an Abortion. A longing for nothingness that goes beyond wiping out today with drugs. A time-travel reset wish so this could've never been. There's a line like this in Dead Milkmen's Nutrition too but they're it's played for fratty laughs, here it's painful.
ANTI-LOVE. Sick Sick Sick replete with organ stabs like The Misfits's Cough/Cool or the sharp urban throatcut of Hank Wood and the Hammerheads. "I GET DRUNK, I SAY SHIT/RAZORBLADE LOVE BABY, SICK, SICK, SICK." A take on companionship as bleak as The Mountain Goats's Alpha sequence. Cülo want no part of good, or they just feel like all the hate swilling about inside them that they don't deserve it.
ANTI-NOW: Modern Depressions (plural, that's important) with its bludgeoning drums and , that tears up suburban ruts ("I'M TOO BORED TO LIVE, TOO LAZY TO DIE!" rings out this death-to-monotony screed, this take is also present in It's My Life Sentence. ("IF THIS IS FREEDOM WORK OR DIE I WAS CURSED WITH A WORKING BRAIN!") There's a sadness ramped-up into anger here, as there is on Cyanide Slug.
ANTI-ART: Your Art is Getting All Over Me on the ickiness of nice things. "It's beautiful, you can be so boring and trite." Well maybe not anti-art. Anti-beauty, definitely. Anti-cool kid cos this punk trip is some nerdy undone shit (for people with working brains they want to break), maybe echoes of New Bomb Turk's classic takedown of artistic exceptionalism, Born Toulouse-Lautrec, but without the come-together chorus of that song, just the outrage at the self-satisfied poses, shooting with a dropout buzz and burn.
ANTI-EVERYTHING: "FUCK YOU! DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE RULES!" is the chorus of My Attitude. Adolescent fury unbound.
But while Cülo share some of the obsessions of similarly fantastic current hardcore band Wild Child with their monomaniacal devotion to the dirty scrapings of lives lived on the wrong side of trackmarks and brains in rebellion, they don't share that bands chaotic imprecations. Cülo are fucking tight. They burn with the impetus of live Ramones with the junkfed streetcurled obsessions of dead Ramones. They're a band for whom the vast majority of their itching being can probably be traced back to non-studio versions of the song Wart Hog (or maybe the terrific kiddy deathwarble Lolita No. 18 version of it), both in speed and slurred words and in lines like "Death, death, death it's the price I pay/It's a sick world, what can I say?" and "I wanna puke, I can't sit still/Just took some dope and I feel ill/It's a sick world, sick, sick, sick/It's a hopeless life, I hate it, hate it"
There are a million bands that have been influenced by the Ramones, you can find Ramones covers from every corner of the globe, but often they stick to the poppy simplicity of I Remember You and, while I love many pop-punk bands, that sort of unchanging Ramonescore can get pretty damn tiring because the Ramones were so much more than just the goofy teenage love scenes Oh Oh I Love Her So (not to shit on Oh Oh I Love Her So, that song is one of my all-time favourites). They were so much more (they were rappers and movie-stars), they were fucking dirty and weird. They were Sol Yurick thugs singing love songs, they were poppy, they were fast, they were fucked-up dysfunctional individuals capable of writing tragic dirges, beautiful soaring dreamy daggers, and yeah, two minute punk runners that can cut through everyday problems for a second like a bomb. People who say every Ramones song sounds the same are people who've read more shitty articles about the Ramones by ill-informed narratively-limited nostalgiafucks than listened to Ramones albums.
"And yet, these DORKS who have more or less devoted their life to cluelessly ripping off the Ramones have never noticed this, and are generally hard-pressed to come up with a good reason why they're so goddamn boring. I always get the impression bands like these leave the stage muttering things like "Hmm, I THOUGHT I had the right kind of U.S. pin on the lapel of my black leather jacket! Maybe if I get a better one, we will be considered more exciting!")." - Rev. Norb, ripping apart Ramones-clones in his Rules for the 1997 Punk Touring Season. Okay, I'm taking it out of context a bit and here he was actually talking about the tight adherence to two-measure chord changes that the Ramones didn't ever do that much by these sort of bands, but the sentiment probably applies to people who make every single Ramones rip-off song they squeeze out some trite shit about talking to girls or not talking to girls, combining the sweetness of Rockaway Beach with the lyrics of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.
Anyway The Ramones's dirt is what Cülo feeds off of, the self-destructive street Dee Dee of Chinese Rock, the hate between Johnny and Joey of The KKK Took My Baby Away, the abandonment of straight life from It's Not My Place in the 9 to 5 World, freak self-identification laments on Pinhead, looking cool while feeling burnt out in druggy need like I Wanna Be Sedated and just the fuck-it nihilism: WART HOG, the Cülo ur-text.
So while in their hardcore punk mess there are inevitable echoes of a slew of greats: D.O.A., 76% Uncertain, CIA, Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, Terveet Kadet etc, you've also got real pop-punk touches, like the guitar lick of Cyanide Slug, or the closing title track, whose opening is like a viperous sharpened take on the wistful little guitar whips of fellow-Chicagoans Screeching Weasel's The Girl Next Door (or Texas ramshackle-punk Stymie's How to be an ASS). Cülo hate most things: but they love the Ramones because the Ramones are as weird and as fucked-up as they are. Cülo are pro-Ramones. Cülo are pro-some shit.
PRO-MUTANT: Radiation Mutation's sloppy Troma punk. Swampmouth speed, an overworked tongue kicking one word into another in a feverish fury, like Bad Brains at their highest ebb on How Low Can a Punk Get? "Eins! We radiate! Zwei We mutate" snapping over each other, lyrics ruined in acidic mush until only the anger remains.
PRO-BEING ON HEROIN: A song about how heroin is good is pretty much indefensible on a number of levels, but in the obliterative hunger of On the Nod and Cyanide Slug there's a lot of Cülo's essential appeal. On The Nod with its closing cry of "GIMME GIMME JUNK! GIMME GIMME JUNK!" like a waygone version of the "Na-na-na-na-na I need a cigarette!" shouts that close out Fancy Pants and the Cellphones I Love Fags. Cyanide Slug: "I self-medicate because I can't get out of bed. I'm an addict, a faggot, with something wrong inside my head." might just be the key lyric on this album. A sense of otherness. A pain to dull with something. A pain to scream at someone. Drugs get done for a reason.
PRO-PUNK: Maybe that's the same as pro-mutant in Cülo's distorted world strung together from Nick Zedd movies and telling your minimum-wage boss to fuck off. The lyrics booklet is a ramshackle road-trip through the awesome truths of immaturity. Doodles that gets you sent to offices, sentient sandwiches giving birth to bits of bread, eyeballs falling out of irradiated heads, wolves with rifles, and the ultimate punk rock record insert: the arrest form for a band member, complete with the Received Clothing Receipt which read "Leather Jacket, black. Shirt, black. Jeans, black." Don't Care Part III rolls with the "I'm weird, I'm a cunt, I'm a freak, I'm a punk!" as a boast before sticking on "I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk!"
(There's also some 50s language in I Don't Care, a "Hey Daddio" probably cribbed from the Ramones' I Don't Wanna Go Down in the Basement. There's a playfulness of language in the booklet too, like the peculiarly prim: NO NINNIES, NO TWITS, copped from Devo's squawking herbert anthem Through Being Cool, which works in the same smiling way as Lumpy and the Dumpers "NITWITS!" call.)
Being a punk is what Cülo are ultimately about, and their conception of punk as outsider art. It's seems weird to talk of 'natural' punk topics, given how blatantly punk is a construct, but there they are: anti-society, anti-cop, anti-everything, anti-love, anti-most shit, pro-mutant, pro-drugs, pro-punk. All the bits of adolescent edginess that might just get rewired out of you at some later point but while they obsess you they crush and define.
I read Cülo described as 'refreshingly un-PC' by someone. What would be genuinely refreshing would to not read the phrase 'refreshingly un-PC' in a punk review ever again. I like a lot of music that is just concerned with its own obnoxiousness, but I never think that there's some sort of brave stand being made I just think the artist is expressing their self as artists are allowed to do, and that self is a bloody unfit-for-life dickhead, like a lot of artists are, like a lot of listeners are. I love Cülo, because they're angry and uncomfortable, and I've felt angry and uncomfortable a lot. But that's not a good thing, it's just a thing I can't avoid. It's not something to be praised in itself, it's something to be looked at maybe, definitely something to be struggled with. STOP TREATING PUNK MUSIC LIKE IT'S A FUCKING RICHARD LITTLEJOHN COLUMN. FUCK THOSE "TELLING IT LIKE IT IS!" SUPPORTIVE ARSEHOLE GRUNTS. It's dumb shit like this that makes me angry and uncomfortable enough to want to listen to stupid Cülo songs of unsustainable nihilism about how heroin is great.
Yes, there is a point in your life when you find yourself in a record store thinking "Yes, £5 is a great price but I really don't think I hate myself enough anymore to own a Spider Babies LP." but that sense of misfit rage, disconnection and loathing still resonates for a long time after you're moved into a headspace where you probably can't too often work up all the rage that's present on Your Art Is Getting All Over Me at shit empty art, but you still find that sort of attack to be something you can see being something you want to thrash along to. Cülo's essential appeal is that hearing people as fucked-up as you are, as fucked off as you are, torn between anger and angst in the same way that you've always been and articulating this bonedug obsession with infandous places and desires through songs equally catchy and furious is something fucking immense. It's not refreshing, it's definitely not comforting, it's just an acknowledgement of sorts of the bad bits inside you, the bad places that you're in, that can be twisted into this, twisted into something you can mosh your bedroom heart out to ignore the walls closing in. Sometimes you can't see a way out of this, and oftentimes that feels amazingly painful and upsetting and depressing, but sometimes you just don't give a fuck and it's liberating to be dumb and pain-gored and fronting like a Poison Idea badass in your untethered punxitude. You're a tormented imp but a king of punk.
"I might be getting too old to be called a problem child" is a line on My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less), the song that plays this yellow spitting thing out. It's possibly the only sign of growth exhibited on this album (emotional growth, not cancerous growth, that shit abounds). It momentarily touches on the fuck-up poetry of a D4 or Johnny Hobo song, where everything is ruined forever. "I didn't mean to take your drugs. But I had to take your drugs." it goes in such a flatly elegiac self-hating non-apology that it would slip right into a Dead Mechanical song. The only sign here that there is consequence beyond hangovers, "I can't help but feel like It's all a waste of time/I'm waiting for a future that I know I'll never find."
And how do Cülo feel about this? Through the highs and the hate and the thrashing and the crummy stuff. Ah, fuck it. This is what they signed up for when they snorted morguechemicals off their copy of Too Tough to Die and picked a fight with a wall and started a shitty amazing punk band. Aaaaah fuck it. They could care less.
Metal-umlauted buttpunk played at nosedive rates. Cülo smashed their way in with a series of fucking great demos and seven inches which were collected on Life Is Vile and So Are We. This is their first real full-length, My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less). Opening with the chirps and bloops of synths on Gestapo Boots of a Mutant, the album quickly tracks into its hazardous hardcore pace, running out this song in a punk instrumental, thrashing onwards with tension, setting the scene for this album's snarling confrontational stamp, which is anti-most shit.
ANTI-SOCIETY: Societies Claws, Dominant Farce. Lives lived in serried rows, proceeding down the same paths. Cülo ain't down with that.
ANTI-WAR: Down in Equador: dry vocals through a weedy death haze, like the jungle madness of Lucius Shepherd's Life During Wartime. Weird kid in a bad way soundtracked by soldier boot speed trampling. DOA In My Head twirling around in guitar tightness like sanity down a plughole.
ANTI-NOT BEING ON HEROIN: On the Nod. Cyanide Slug.
ANTI-LIFE: I Was Supposed to Be an Abortion. A longing for nothingness that goes beyond wiping out today with drugs. A time-travel reset wish so this could've never been. There's a line like this in Dead Milkmen's Nutrition too but they're it's played for fratty laughs, here it's painful.
ANTI-LOVE. Sick Sick Sick replete with organ stabs like The Misfits's Cough/Cool or the sharp urban throatcut of Hank Wood and the Hammerheads. "I GET DRUNK, I SAY SHIT/RAZORBLADE LOVE BABY, SICK, SICK, SICK." A take on companionship as bleak as The Mountain Goats's Alpha sequence. Cülo want no part of good, or they just feel like all the hate swilling about inside them that they don't deserve it.
ANTI-NOW: Modern Depressions (plural, that's important) with its bludgeoning drums and , that tears up suburban ruts ("I'M TOO BORED TO LIVE, TOO LAZY TO DIE!" rings out this death-to-monotony screed, this take is also present in It's My Life Sentence. ("IF THIS IS FREEDOM WORK OR DIE I WAS CURSED WITH A WORKING BRAIN!") There's a sadness ramped-up into anger here, as there is on Cyanide Slug.
ANTI-ART: Your Art is Getting All Over Me on the ickiness of nice things. "It's beautiful, you can be so boring and trite." Well maybe not anti-art. Anti-beauty, definitely. Anti-cool kid cos this punk trip is some nerdy undone shit (for people with working brains they want to break), maybe echoes of New Bomb Turk's classic takedown of artistic exceptionalism, Born Toulouse-Lautrec, but without the come-together chorus of that song, just the outrage at the self-satisfied poses, shooting with a dropout buzz and burn.
ANTI-EVERYTHING: "FUCK YOU! DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE RULES!" is the chorus of My Attitude. Adolescent fury unbound.
But while Cülo share some of the obsessions of similarly fantastic current hardcore band Wild Child with their monomaniacal devotion to the dirty scrapings of lives lived on the wrong side of trackmarks and brains in rebellion, they don't share that bands chaotic imprecations. Cülo are fucking tight. They burn with the impetus of live Ramones with the junkfed streetcurled obsessions of dead Ramones. They're a band for whom the vast majority of their itching being can probably be traced back to non-studio versions of the song Wart Hog (or maybe the terrific kiddy deathwarble Lolita No. 18 version of it), both in speed and slurred words and in lines like "Death, death, death it's the price I pay/It's a sick world, what can I say?" and "I wanna puke, I can't sit still/Just took some dope and I feel ill/It's a sick world, sick, sick, sick/It's a hopeless life, I hate it, hate it"
There are a million bands that have been influenced by the Ramones, you can find Ramones covers from every corner of the globe, but often they stick to the poppy simplicity of I Remember You and, while I love many pop-punk bands, that sort of unchanging Ramonescore can get pretty damn tiring because the Ramones were so much more than just the goofy teenage love scenes Oh Oh I Love Her So (not to shit on Oh Oh I Love Her So, that song is one of my all-time favourites). They were so much more (they were rappers and movie-stars), they were fucking dirty and weird. They were Sol Yurick thugs singing love songs, they were poppy, they were fast, they were fucked-up dysfunctional individuals capable of writing tragic dirges, beautiful soaring dreamy daggers, and yeah, two minute punk runners that can cut through everyday problems for a second like a bomb. People who say every Ramones song sounds the same are people who've read more shitty articles about the Ramones by ill-informed narratively-limited nostalgiafucks than listened to Ramones albums.
"And yet, these DORKS who have more or less devoted their life to cluelessly ripping off the Ramones have never noticed this, and are generally hard-pressed to come up with a good reason why they're so goddamn boring. I always get the impression bands like these leave the stage muttering things like "Hmm, I THOUGHT I had the right kind of U.S. pin on the lapel of my black leather jacket! Maybe if I get a better one, we will be considered more exciting!")." - Rev. Norb, ripping apart Ramones-clones in his Rules for the 1997 Punk Touring Season. Okay, I'm taking it out of context a bit and here he was actually talking about the tight adherence to two-measure chord changes that the Ramones didn't ever do that much by these sort of bands, but the sentiment probably applies to people who make every single Ramones rip-off song they squeeze out some trite shit about talking to girls or not talking to girls, combining the sweetness of Rockaway Beach with the lyrics of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.
Anyway The Ramones's dirt is what Cülo feeds off of, the self-destructive street Dee Dee of Chinese Rock, the hate between Johnny and Joey of The KKK Took My Baby Away, the abandonment of straight life from It's Not My Place in the 9 to 5 World, freak self-identification laments on Pinhead, looking cool while feeling burnt out in druggy need like I Wanna Be Sedated and just the fuck-it nihilism: WART HOG, the Cülo ur-text.
So while in their hardcore punk mess there are inevitable echoes of a slew of greats: D.O.A., 76% Uncertain, CIA, Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, Terveet Kadet etc, you've also got real pop-punk touches, like the guitar lick of Cyanide Slug, or the closing title track, whose opening is like a viperous sharpened take on the wistful little guitar whips of fellow-Chicagoans Screeching Weasel's The Girl Next Door (or Texas ramshackle-punk Stymie's How to be an ASS). Cülo hate most things: but they love the Ramones because the Ramones are as weird and as fucked-up as they are. Cülo are pro-Ramones. Cülo are pro-some shit.
PRO-MUTANT: Radiation Mutation's sloppy Troma punk. Swampmouth speed, an overworked tongue kicking one word into another in a feverish fury, like Bad Brains at their highest ebb on How Low Can a Punk Get? "Eins! We radiate! Zwei We mutate" snapping over each other, lyrics ruined in acidic mush until only the anger remains.
PRO-BEING ON HEROIN: A song about how heroin is good is pretty much indefensible on a number of levels, but in the obliterative hunger of On the Nod and Cyanide Slug there's a lot of Cülo's essential appeal. On The Nod with its closing cry of "GIMME GIMME JUNK! GIMME GIMME JUNK!" like a waygone version of the "Na-na-na-na-na I need a cigarette!" shouts that close out Fancy Pants and the Cellphones I Love Fags. Cyanide Slug: "I self-medicate because I can't get out of bed. I'm an addict, a faggot, with something wrong inside my head." might just be the key lyric on this album. A sense of otherness. A pain to dull with something. A pain to scream at someone. Drugs get done for a reason.
PRO-PUNK: Maybe that's the same as pro-mutant in Cülo's distorted world strung together from Nick Zedd movies and telling your minimum-wage boss to fuck off. The lyrics booklet is a ramshackle road-trip through the awesome truths of immaturity. Doodles that gets you sent to offices, sentient sandwiches giving birth to bits of bread, eyeballs falling out of irradiated heads, wolves with rifles, and the ultimate punk rock record insert: the arrest form for a band member, complete with the Received Clothing Receipt which read "Leather Jacket, black. Shirt, black. Jeans, black." Don't Care Part III rolls with the "I'm weird, I'm a cunt, I'm a freak, I'm a punk!" as a boast before sticking on "I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk!"
(There's also some 50s language in I Don't Care, a "Hey Daddio" probably cribbed from the Ramones' I Don't Wanna Go Down in the Basement. There's a playfulness of language in the booklet too, like the peculiarly prim: NO NINNIES, NO TWITS, copped from Devo's squawking herbert anthem Through Being Cool, which works in the same smiling way as Lumpy and the Dumpers "NITWITS!" call.)
Being a punk is what Cülo are ultimately about, and their conception of punk as outsider art. It's seems weird to talk of 'natural' punk topics, given how blatantly punk is a construct, but there they are: anti-society, anti-cop, anti-everything, anti-love, anti-most shit, pro-mutant, pro-drugs, pro-punk. All the bits of adolescent edginess that might just get rewired out of you at some later point but while they obsess you they crush and define.
I read Cülo described as 'refreshingly un-PC' by someone. What would be genuinely refreshing would to not read the phrase 'refreshingly un-PC' in a punk review ever again. I like a lot of music that is just concerned with its own obnoxiousness, but I never think that there's some sort of brave stand being made I just think the artist is expressing their self as artists are allowed to do, and that self is a bloody unfit-for-life dickhead, like a lot of artists are, like a lot of listeners are. I love Cülo, because they're angry and uncomfortable, and I've felt angry and uncomfortable a lot. But that's not a good thing, it's just a thing I can't avoid. It's not something to be praised in itself, it's something to be looked at maybe, definitely something to be struggled with. STOP TREATING PUNK MUSIC LIKE IT'S A FUCKING RICHARD LITTLEJOHN COLUMN. FUCK THOSE "TELLING IT LIKE IT IS!" SUPPORTIVE ARSEHOLE GRUNTS. It's dumb shit like this that makes me angry and uncomfortable enough to want to listen to stupid Cülo songs of unsustainable nihilism about how heroin is great.
Yes, there is a point in your life when you find yourself in a record store thinking "Yes, £5 is a great price but I really don't think I hate myself enough anymore to own a Spider Babies LP." but that sense of misfit rage, disconnection and loathing still resonates for a long time after you're moved into a headspace where you probably can't too often work up all the rage that's present on Your Art Is Getting All Over Me at shit empty art, but you still find that sort of attack to be something you can see being something you want to thrash along to. Cülo's essential appeal is that hearing people as fucked-up as you are, as fucked off as you are, torn between anger and angst in the same way that you've always been and articulating this bonedug obsession with infandous places and desires through songs equally catchy and furious is something fucking immense. It's not refreshing, it's definitely not comforting, it's just an acknowledgement of sorts of the bad bits inside you, the bad places that you're in, that can be twisted into this, twisted into something you can mosh your bedroom heart out to ignore the walls closing in. Sometimes you can't see a way out of this, and oftentimes that feels amazingly painful and upsetting and depressing, but sometimes you just don't give a fuck and it's liberating to be dumb and pain-gored and fronting like a Poison Idea badass in your untethered punxitude. You're a tormented imp but a king of punk.
"I might be getting too old to be called a problem child" is a line on My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less), the song that plays this yellow spitting thing out. It's possibly the only sign of growth exhibited on this album (emotional growth, not cancerous growth, that shit abounds). It momentarily touches on the fuck-up poetry of a D4 or Johnny Hobo song, where everything is ruined forever. "I didn't mean to take your drugs. But I had to take your drugs." it goes in such a flatly elegiac self-hating non-apology that it would slip right into a Dead Mechanical song. The only sign here that there is consequence beyond hangovers, "I can't help but feel like It's all a waste of time/I'm waiting for a future that I know I'll never find."
And how do Cülo feel about this? Through the highs and the hate and the thrashing and the crummy stuff. Ah, fuck it. This is what they signed up for when they snorted morguechemicals off their copy of Too Tough to Die and picked a fight with a wall and started a shitty amazing punk band. Aaaaah fuck it. They could care less.
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Lumpy and the Dumpers
It's weird how quickly desire forms in punk circles, maybe one or two blogs or offhand mentions from a vaguely cool vaguely trusted source and a band can jump straight into the forefront of your mind as some of that real shit that you know you've got to get on. Two ripping demos from this band that popped up on a couple of my favourite punk internet spots and I was already unreasonably bummed when I found out I had missed them play a Thursday day show at Chaos in Tejas shortly after I arrived in Austin, and equally stoked when I found a flyer for their Saturday day show while wandering about on Friday morning.
Slop-punk slathered in fatty babble and tweaking on some true weirdone shit, Lumpy and the Dumpers first seven inch begins with Sex Pit. Opening in a trough of noise, Sex Pit has a long slurrylubed slide into a scuffed slobbering riff that kicks, and shines at the edges with pips and guitar squeaks. Screaming about a bacchanalia in filth, a fuck club lithe and squirming in a waste disposal. "I'M IN A POOL OF BUBBLING MUCK WHERE THE FLIES COME AROUND TO WIGGLE AND FUCK!" Transcendence through absolute degradation over "THE ONLY TRUTH IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PILE/NOT HOLY AND WHITE BUT STICKY AND VILE."
"FEELS SO RIGHT TO FUCK ON SLIME! FEELS SO RIGHT TO WASTE MY TIME IN THE SEX PIT!" the choruses blasts as the song wriggles and runs down into its foulness in tight circles with that sort of ripped-zip guitar tone like punk riffs squeezed through the bass grind of Chanes and Invy Da Truth's Loyalty.
Elephant Man opens with the line "LET ME SEE YOU NITWITS POGO!" I'm always a fan of when these sort of braincracked punk nuts employ the language of raging Nicktoons characters, their animosity neutered by content restrictions, but finding a certain specificity of contempt in their puerile attacks. It fits this bands kinda aesthetic, Lumpy and the Dumpers sounding exactly like what you'd imagine Ren & Stimpy's latin-jazz freakout band to be named should they ever get their shit together in that way. Elephant Man features a bunch of ugly incomprehensible screams and blurts from the vocals as Joseph Merrick, this song's protagonist, struggles with his deformity and "CAN'T TAKE A NAP WITHOUT STARTING TO OOZE!", continuing this band's obsession with viscous fluid, like a Dawn of Humans song painted from a five year old's post-Ghostbusters 2 night terrors, making it feel sometimes like they're the prop-guys on a mid-90s kids game show. Mean Jeans have a song called Slime Time but with their pop-punk pull its more like a summertime slip-and-slide than the primordial glop here. Crazy Spirit, a band who share that sort of buggy oddface intensity and rumbling onwards motion with Lumpy and the Dumpers (if Lumpy and the Dumpers are more hardcore and fuller in their punk kills) have a song called Slimey Leech. which is more similar in its evocations of slippery weirdness and gunge, but maybe the real forerunner here thematically is the sneering spoken word of Nomeansno's bass-driven fulminating funk-punk/80s-pop cut-away Everyday I Start to Ooze: "A bold plan drawn up by assholes to screw morons/News at eleven but first/A long serious look at what's seeping from open sore/Perhaps you should STOP PICKING AT IT." where the succession of lop-sided leers, shocknews headscreams and crackling absurdities break out from silly social contracts with 'those personal acts' into a disgorgement of inner bile, black and yellow and bubbling.
The final song on this seven inch is called Too Much Slime, (they're not tiring of their theme, the chorus is "TOO MUCH SLIME! NO SUCH THING!"). It rolls on in this grubby motion, and degrades into these snatches of amplified cockroach clicks, and snaffling breaks, like a tear in the tape eaten by ugly worms. An ode to all that oozes, from tubs of vaseline to the primordial goop we popped from. The second verse suggests slime baptisms as a solution to the problems of Catholic initiation rites. This band wants you down in the muck from conception to end, Joseph Merrick and his secretions isn't some freak to be pitied, but a Lumpy/Dumpy hero whose essential dirty uncensored being was allowed to come out in a way that clean normals would never countenance. This band is about the filth inside, which is not to be confused with the darkness, it's not mental anguish and black godlusts that are spewing forth here, just the natural logistics of flesh, the slippery smelly stuff, honesty of form in the chitterlings and the old shambles. Semi-solid beings playing songs of uncomfortable physicality.
When I saw them in Texas, they played at the end of a long bill (something like 8 or 9 bands), after originally being billed third or fourth, and in a sweltering record store full of hot people who had been standing there for what felt like three days. They tore the place up, the drummer breaking a drumstool and drumming standing up for one song, the singer stalking around sneering, everyone responding positively to those calls to pogo, jumping and skipping about. And everyone in the room was sweat-drenched entirely, clothes clinging tightly with the perspiration, swamp-arsed and feeling icky and loving it. Just the way this band would want.
Available for PWYW download on Bandcamp.
Slop-punk slathered in fatty babble and tweaking on some true weirdone shit, Lumpy and the Dumpers first seven inch begins with Sex Pit. Opening in a trough of noise, Sex Pit has a long slurrylubed slide into a scuffed slobbering riff that kicks, and shines at the edges with pips and guitar squeaks. Screaming about a bacchanalia in filth, a fuck club lithe and squirming in a waste disposal. "I'M IN A POOL OF BUBBLING MUCK WHERE THE FLIES COME AROUND TO WIGGLE AND FUCK!" Transcendence through absolute degradation over "THE ONLY TRUTH IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PILE/NOT HOLY AND WHITE BUT STICKY AND VILE."
"FEELS SO RIGHT TO FUCK ON SLIME! FEELS SO RIGHT TO WASTE MY TIME IN THE SEX PIT!" the choruses blasts as the song wriggles and runs down into its foulness in tight circles with that sort of ripped-zip guitar tone like punk riffs squeezed through the bass grind of Chanes and Invy Da Truth's Loyalty.
Elephant Man opens with the line "LET ME SEE YOU NITWITS POGO!" I'm always a fan of when these sort of braincracked punk nuts employ the language of raging Nicktoons characters, their animosity neutered by content restrictions, but finding a certain specificity of contempt in their puerile attacks. It fits this bands kinda aesthetic, Lumpy and the Dumpers sounding exactly like what you'd imagine Ren & Stimpy's latin-jazz freakout band to be named should they ever get their shit together in that way. Elephant Man features a bunch of ugly incomprehensible screams and blurts from the vocals as Joseph Merrick, this song's protagonist, struggles with his deformity and "CAN'T TAKE A NAP WITHOUT STARTING TO OOZE!", continuing this band's obsession with viscous fluid, like a Dawn of Humans song painted from a five year old's post-Ghostbusters 2 night terrors, making it feel sometimes like they're the prop-guys on a mid-90s kids game show. Mean Jeans have a song called Slime Time but with their pop-punk pull its more like a summertime slip-and-slide than the primordial glop here. Crazy Spirit, a band who share that sort of buggy oddface intensity and rumbling onwards motion with Lumpy and the Dumpers (if Lumpy and the Dumpers are more hardcore and fuller in their punk kills) have a song called Slimey Leech. which is more similar in its evocations of slippery weirdness and gunge, but maybe the real forerunner here thematically is the sneering spoken word of Nomeansno's bass-driven fulminating funk-punk/80s-pop cut-away Everyday I Start to Ooze: "A bold plan drawn up by assholes to screw morons/News at eleven but first/A long serious look at what's seeping from open sore/Perhaps you should STOP PICKING AT IT." where the succession of lop-sided leers, shocknews headscreams and crackling absurdities break out from silly social contracts with 'those personal acts' into a disgorgement of inner bile, black and yellow and bubbling.
The final song on this seven inch is called Too Much Slime, (they're not tiring of their theme, the chorus is "TOO MUCH SLIME! NO SUCH THING!"). It rolls on in this grubby motion, and degrades into these snatches of amplified cockroach clicks, and snaffling breaks, like a tear in the tape eaten by ugly worms. An ode to all that oozes, from tubs of vaseline to the primordial goop we popped from. The second verse suggests slime baptisms as a solution to the problems of Catholic initiation rites. This band wants you down in the muck from conception to end, Joseph Merrick and his secretions isn't some freak to be pitied, but a Lumpy/Dumpy hero whose essential dirty uncensored being was allowed to come out in a way that clean normals would never countenance. This band is about the filth inside, which is not to be confused with the darkness, it's not mental anguish and black godlusts that are spewing forth here, just the natural logistics of flesh, the slippery smelly stuff, honesty of form in the chitterlings and the old shambles. Semi-solid beings playing songs of uncomfortable physicality.
When I saw them in Texas, they played at the end of a long bill (something like 8 or 9 bands), after originally being billed third or fourth, and in a sweltering record store full of hot people who had been standing there for what felt like three days. They tore the place up, the drummer breaking a drumstool and drumming standing up for one song, the singer stalking around sneering, everyone responding positively to those calls to pogo, jumping and skipping about. And everyone in the room was sweat-drenched entirely, clothes clinging tightly with the perspiration, swamp-arsed and feeling icky and loving it. Just the way this band would want.
Available for PWYW download on Bandcamp.
Saturday, 13 July 2013
Una Bestia Incontrolable - Observant Com el Món es Destrueix
"Dusk and the benediction of shadow were coming back, but not for the Erstwhile, who had become too old. When the sun went away, they creaked and cracked, crawling on the forest floor and hanging sloth-like from trees. There was no cave or simple dwelling for them. They did not have the pleasures of men, or the ability to make and change what was around them. They had each forgotten their purpose and the details of their design, how they had come to roam the ancient wood. But they all had longing, and it was attached to the actions of humans." - B.J Catling, The Voorh
Una Bestia Incontrolable are a Catalan-language hardcore band that featuring members of sweet fucking Spanish bands such as Glam, Atentado and Destino Final. Their new album Observant Com el Món es Destrueix (Watching As The World Is Destroyed) starts the same way their 2012 demo 10-11-12 finished, with the peaceful balm of birds twittering, with a slight buzz in the distance. (Both this album and the demo are available for free on their website. You can buy the album from La Vida Es Un Mus in the UK, Not Normal Tapes in the US) Then we get the sound of wood being chopped, this steady slow rural percussion as wobbling bass swells over the top like a threat. A threat realised as the guitar crackles and then and the drums clamber into life. Big chopping riffs like those earlier axe strokes, falling down with repetitive force, like looped animations of smokestacks tumbling. Lyricless, scenesetting, Mar de Lava (Sea of Lava) is a fucking great opener. Every relisten those woodland sounds, the birdsong just getting sweeter as the promise of the riff lingers. This is an always worth-it opener trick and it works perfectly here, like the classic crash-ins on Fly On the Ships/Cry of the Sheeps on Paintbox's Trip, Trance and Travelling or the post-advice wallbuster that throws you writhing into Sweat Loaf on Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers. The first song is called Mar De Lava (Sea of Lava), the cover of the album a peaceful volcano watching over workers in the field, the back cover those people engulfed in flame as the Krakatoan beast is unleashed, watching as the world is destroyed from the art on down, even if its only a small world, for some it is all.
El Cant Dels Ocells (The Singing of Birds) is what follows this mighty wordless stomp, a hardcore punk rumbling with that same relentless energy but sped-up, that gritty dirt-rubbed guitar tone pushing forwards, that weird monotony, not one of boredom, but just one of purpose. This song starts with Hank Wood city crudeness "An urban jungle, a rat's nest. Is where you live, a hole in the middle of the world." before quickly making its escape, tearing out of town with that pounding rhythm, however this is not some trite pastoral yearning, like a cock from Blur who reaches 40 and then fucks off to the counties to make cheese and stare contemplatively at chickens or something, nature, when reached, is unforgiving and cruel in a way that the city's malevolent snatchings can only dream about. "The noise of the river is a daily punishment, the singing of birds a memory of freedom." Like the movie Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi or Without Roof Nor Law, originally) where that idea of freedom and escape, just leads to a tighter shorter path. One with shoes shredding and no respite and spiky rocks all over it.
This album is pretty consistent in its tone but not in its speed, pace changes up, going from El Cant Dels Ocells escape-to-void energy to steady sod flattening buzztrudge of No Hi Ha Esperanca or La Primera Foguera, all held together by the guitar's scratch and scrabble, hardcore with the added muddy noise-rock clatter of something like Pissed Jeans or Kim Phuc or Karp.
La Primera Foguera (The First Bonfire) is about the birth of fire, but that spark painted not as some larcenous Promethean grandeur but as the mechanics of caveman toil, echoing through. "We are the descendants of the survivors who made the first bonfires with sticks and stones" it howls."The signal that indicates we are alive is the first bonfire". These notions of something wheedling its way down through the years, something odd and maybe a bit beyond ken stuck in our hunter-gatherer bones is something the album focuses on a lot but the back half of the album becomes even tighter in its natural focus, the songs pretty much all evoking the forest and some hidden malignant power within it. From The Evil Dead to a million sardonic twistings of the Teddy Bears' Picnic's opening line.
There are screams bursting through on the tear of Vulnerable, getting louder, closer, wilder, the music getting faster, running futilely away from this crazed report. Its only lyrics "Nobody comes for me and an unknown force takes me deep into the forest and makes me feel defenseless and vulnerable" There is Runes, Decadencia's guitar noise a frantic pinnedrat squeak, twitching over the slabs of bass. "Sand in stomach. Blood in Hands. Lead in looks. Ruins, decadence." Vaixell Oblidats (Forgotten Ships) is a calmer intonation, a more measured terror, living with this. The wordless Veri A La Sang (Venom of Blood) squeaks and pops and the album closes with A Las Seves Mans (Into His Hands), another treefell hardcore stomper of abject terror and Berstuk desire lines. "I don't know what I'm scared of but I'll know it soon."
I generally tend to associate noise-rock and hardcore, this albums twin seedlings, with a more urban setting, the only band that immediately springs to mind so concerned with vegetation are So Il and their earthy goofy gardencore, taking the DIY vegan vegetable patch and smashing it into big chunks of crustcore screaming odes to working the land: "my hand are the only thing i need to pull these weeds!/fuck yr shovels, fuck yr trowels! ...stealing gardening books from powell's." so it's interesting to see this mechanical unnatural power worked in service of nature's simple unforgivingness.
This is a genuine comment I once read on anarchistnews.org and saved for posterity because it just the best: "You're the one who's a child if you think that all this infrastructure is necessary (not to mention healthy or humane) to take care of the sick, the hungry, the young, or the old. Have you ever even seen a picture of the woods? If you have, you've probably seen the best hospital, grocery store, and playground EVER." I don't know if that's serious, with the internet Poe's Law lurks sniggering in every comment section but that is one of the stupidest things that I have ever read (and let's assume it's true, because a bunch anarcho-primitivists are also down with the unabomber so it's unlikely they're really put together that well up there). There's a brick-sized Tom Clancy novel where the eco-terrorists who've constructed a massive conspiracy to return the world to a humanless eden (a conspiracy involving ex-Baader Meinhof operatives, superviruses, kidnapped homeless people in New York, a multinational pharmaceutical company and the 2000 Sydney Olympics) get given their wish and sent into the woods to fend for themselves. SPOILERS: they don't make it out.
Romanticise the call of the birds and the simplicity of woodland life all you want, test yourself against nature and nature will usually win, on a longer timeframe it always will, the real creepy-crawlies and stumbling snarling (incontrolable) beasts of woods will always catch up to you. You just ain't built for that shit, who is? We want the comfort of a carpark at the top of hill, we want the warmth of the bonfire and not have to stray too far from it, we walk through the woods in the dappled light in the day, bombing hills on mountainboards, having picnics but once the night comes down each friendly grotto comes alive with blue-black shadows and movements in the corner of your eye get ominous, the susurrus of woodsound in the dark has big warring worrying things behind it.
Forest spirits to take you away and eat your bones, like the memory blackening oppressive force of B.J. Catling's The Voorh. Pernicious smirking forest knifepucks, or a deadfaced stalker, unseen, always pacing behind you with the rustle of brushes, the whip and crack of branches and twigs. An endless evil in the woods, deeper than the roots of the biggest fuck-off trees. Fuck the communion with nature, fuck the Growth of the Soil, don't trust the earth. This album is the sound of cold streams, mini-eschatons, phobias of the dark that stretch back further than childhood, stretch back right into some deeper human dread, primal terror, shadowy places that have existed for a long-ass time. It's an album of fire, winds and flamewhips. Echoes. Shit. Crepitations. Threat. Pounding rocks, nasty fucknoise built into looming boulders and packed into mud since the coalescence of the earth. Violence until now. Let us in. Let us out. We were right to be afraid.
"What's funny about myths is that they start someplace, and end up bringing the whole thing back with them: You don't want your kids to go out in the woods at night, for example, because they'll come home dead or eaten or injured. So you tell them a story about the woods at night, that basically is meant to make them afraid of the woods at night. But on the inside of your head, where you actually live, the woods at night already mean something else scary: your woods, your night. Gods thrive on belief, but that's not where they come from. So the story takes on a power of its own -- something Out There gets all the blame, all the credit -- and before you know it you're avoiding the woods at night not because of injury or attack, but so you don't piss off the woods." - Jacob Clifton
Una Bestia Incontrolable are a Catalan-language hardcore band that featuring members of sweet fucking Spanish bands such as Glam, Atentado and Destino Final. Their new album Observant Com el Món es Destrueix (Watching As The World Is Destroyed) starts the same way their 2012 demo 10-11-12 finished, with the peaceful balm of birds twittering, with a slight buzz in the distance. (Both this album and the demo are available for free on their website. You can buy the album from La Vida Es Un Mus in the UK, Not Normal Tapes in the US) Then we get the sound of wood being chopped, this steady slow rural percussion as wobbling bass swells over the top like a threat. A threat realised as the guitar crackles and then and the drums clamber into life. Big chopping riffs like those earlier axe strokes, falling down with repetitive force, like looped animations of smokestacks tumbling. Lyricless, scenesetting, Mar de Lava (Sea of Lava) is a fucking great opener. Every relisten those woodland sounds, the birdsong just getting sweeter as the promise of the riff lingers. This is an always worth-it opener trick and it works perfectly here, like the classic crash-ins on Fly On the Ships/Cry of the Sheeps on Paintbox's Trip, Trance and Travelling or the post-advice wallbuster that throws you writhing into Sweat Loaf on Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers. The first song is called Mar De Lava (Sea of Lava), the cover of the album a peaceful volcano watching over workers in the field, the back cover those people engulfed in flame as the Krakatoan beast is unleashed, watching as the world is destroyed from the art on down, even if its only a small world, for some it is all.
El Cant Dels Ocells (The Singing of Birds) is what follows this mighty wordless stomp, a hardcore punk rumbling with that same relentless energy but sped-up, that gritty dirt-rubbed guitar tone pushing forwards, that weird monotony, not one of boredom, but just one of purpose. This song starts with Hank Wood city crudeness "An urban jungle, a rat's nest. Is where you live, a hole in the middle of the world." before quickly making its escape, tearing out of town with that pounding rhythm, however this is not some trite pastoral yearning, like a cock from Blur who reaches 40 and then fucks off to the counties to make cheese and stare contemplatively at chickens or something, nature, when reached, is unforgiving and cruel in a way that the city's malevolent snatchings can only dream about. "The noise of the river is a daily punishment, the singing of birds a memory of freedom." Like the movie Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi or Without Roof Nor Law, originally) where that idea of freedom and escape, just leads to a tighter shorter path. One with shoes shredding and no respite and spiky rocks all over it.
This album is pretty consistent in its tone but not in its speed, pace changes up, going from El Cant Dels Ocells escape-to-void energy to steady sod flattening buzztrudge of No Hi Ha Esperanca or La Primera Foguera, all held together by the guitar's scratch and scrabble, hardcore with the added muddy noise-rock clatter of something like Pissed Jeans or Kim Phuc or Karp.
La Primera Foguera (The First Bonfire) is about the birth of fire, but that spark painted not as some larcenous Promethean grandeur but as the mechanics of caveman toil, echoing through. "We are the descendants of the survivors who made the first bonfires with sticks and stones" it howls."The signal that indicates we are alive is the first bonfire". These notions of something wheedling its way down through the years, something odd and maybe a bit beyond ken stuck in our hunter-gatherer bones is something the album focuses on a lot but the back half of the album becomes even tighter in its natural focus, the songs pretty much all evoking the forest and some hidden malignant power within it. From The Evil Dead to a million sardonic twistings of the Teddy Bears' Picnic's opening line.
There are screams bursting through on the tear of Vulnerable, getting louder, closer, wilder, the music getting faster, running futilely away from this crazed report. Its only lyrics "Nobody comes for me and an unknown force takes me deep into the forest and makes me feel defenseless and vulnerable" There is Runes, Decadencia's guitar noise a frantic pinnedrat squeak, twitching over the slabs of bass. "Sand in stomach. Blood in Hands. Lead in looks. Ruins, decadence." Vaixell Oblidats (Forgotten Ships) is a calmer intonation, a more measured terror, living with this. The wordless Veri A La Sang (Venom of Blood) squeaks and pops and the album closes with A Las Seves Mans (Into His Hands), another treefell hardcore stomper of abject terror and Berstuk desire lines. "I don't know what I'm scared of but I'll know it soon."
I generally tend to associate noise-rock and hardcore, this albums twin seedlings, with a more urban setting, the only band that immediately springs to mind so concerned with vegetation are So Il and their earthy goofy gardencore, taking the DIY vegan vegetable patch and smashing it into big chunks of crustcore screaming odes to working the land: "my hand are the only thing i need to pull these weeds!/fuck yr shovels, fuck yr trowels! ...stealing gardening books from powell's." so it's interesting to see this mechanical unnatural power worked in service of nature's simple unforgivingness.
This is a genuine comment I once read on anarchistnews.org and saved for posterity because it just the best: "You're the one who's a child if you think that all this infrastructure is necessary (not to mention healthy or humane) to take care of the sick, the hungry, the young, or the old. Have you ever even seen a picture of the woods? If you have, you've probably seen the best hospital, grocery store, and playground EVER." I don't know if that's serious, with the internet Poe's Law lurks sniggering in every comment section but that is one of the stupidest things that I have ever read (and let's assume it's true, because a bunch anarcho-primitivists are also down with the unabomber so it's unlikely they're really put together that well up there). There's a brick-sized Tom Clancy novel where the eco-terrorists who've constructed a massive conspiracy to return the world to a humanless eden (a conspiracy involving ex-Baader Meinhof operatives, superviruses, kidnapped homeless people in New York, a multinational pharmaceutical company and the 2000 Sydney Olympics) get given their wish and sent into the woods to fend for themselves. SPOILERS: they don't make it out.
Romanticise the call of the birds and the simplicity of woodland life all you want, test yourself against nature and nature will usually win, on a longer timeframe it always will, the real creepy-crawlies and stumbling snarling (incontrolable) beasts of woods will always catch up to you. You just ain't built for that shit, who is? We want the comfort of a carpark at the top of hill, we want the warmth of the bonfire and not have to stray too far from it, we walk through the woods in the dappled light in the day, bombing hills on mountainboards, having picnics but once the night comes down each friendly grotto comes alive with blue-black shadows and movements in the corner of your eye get ominous, the susurrus of woodsound in the dark has big warring worrying things behind it.
Forest spirits to take you away and eat your bones, like the memory blackening oppressive force of B.J. Catling's The Voorh. Pernicious smirking forest knifepucks, or a deadfaced stalker, unseen, always pacing behind you with the rustle of brushes, the whip and crack of branches and twigs. An endless evil in the woods, deeper than the roots of the biggest fuck-off trees. Fuck the communion with nature, fuck the Growth of the Soil, don't trust the earth. This album is the sound of cold streams, mini-eschatons, phobias of the dark that stretch back further than childhood, stretch back right into some deeper human dread, primal terror, shadowy places that have existed for a long-ass time. It's an album of fire, winds and flamewhips. Echoes. Shit. Crepitations. Threat. Pounding rocks, nasty fucknoise built into looming boulders and packed into mud since the coalescence of the earth. Violence until now. Let us in. Let us out. We were right to be afraid.
"What's funny about myths is that they start someplace, and end up bringing the whole thing back with them: You don't want your kids to go out in the woods at night, for example, because they'll come home dead or eaten or injured. So you tell them a story about the woods at night, that basically is meant to make them afraid of the woods at night. But on the inside of your head, where you actually live, the woods at night already mean something else scary: your woods, your night. Gods thrive on belief, but that's not where they come from. So the story takes on a power of its own -- something Out There gets all the blame, all the credit -- and before you know it you're avoiding the woods at night not because of injury or attack, but so you don't piss off the woods." - Jacob Clifton
Friday, 15 March 2013
Off With Their Heads - Home
Off With Their Heads have been making great gruff punk rock that combines the horrifying despair that builds and corrodes inside too many of us with the explosion of pop-punk joy for a while now. They've always thrived on that dissonance, the gap, (the beauty between?), the sense of brokenness you feel a lot of the time splitting open into a big soaring chorus of Oi!-caught pain where the anguish is ameliorated not by any particular positive step, but merely by the fact that for this second the loneliness and isolation has been collectivised into a fists-in-air sweatsoaked pit singalongs, shit-off-your-shoulder catharsis.
Home does offer more of the same screaming-in-the-dark for a bunch of it, but it also has some stuff which is straight-up fucking inspirational, Focus on Your Own Family is like a miniature SELF-HELP book bolted to a Rivethead or Banner Pilot or Manix song where all advice starts with "FUCK EM ALL!" and continues "DON'T EVER LISTEN! DON'T EVER COMPLY! NEVER BE SCARED! NEVER BE FRIGHTENED! HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!" and the bits of the album with this tone are reminiscent of the sharp edges where Henry Rollins' stuff goes from that tight twitching wireball of brokenbone angst to the nuclear-powered punch-a-mountain-in-the-face fightspiration of a line like "I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become." ( I was looking for a particular Rollins line to illustrate my point but I couldn't find it but it didn't really matter as EVERY SINGLE QUOTE IS LIKE THAT!) And that jump out of the tormented blue mess of hard drugs and hospitals and hate songs to that kinda (yeah maybe a little) cheesy yeah-I'm-gonna-live-this-life-and-you-are-too swerve is all the more powerful from coming for a band that's worn suicide in its lyrics like a studdedpunkvest armour.
That is not to say the screaming in the dark, which still happens on this album, is not a useless thing, not an unimportant thing to do, not fucking relevant.
When I was 18 and living in college accommodation depressed I played Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains incessantly, a band whose entire oeuvre was about self-destruction and self-hatred, all the sorts tales of brokendown squatparty awfulness that just in their very existence made me feel less alone because of the way they articulated a bunch of the shit I was stuck on, stuck in, and I carved the chorus to Harmony Parking Lot into the back of my bass-guitar with a penknife and made a typo which I was unreasonably annoyed with myself about. I even loved the almost unlistenable early demo stuff with drum-machines, feeling like shit all the time, it made me feel a little better to know that someone else was feeling like shit all the time too, so when the songwriter Pat the Bunny disbanded the band and tried a more positive tack with his next project Wingnut Dishwasher's Union first came out I was not as into it as it was trying to be more hopeful and I didn’t want to be more hopeful, I just wanted to be miserable and nihilistic with someone else so I didn’t really listen to them that much so maybe Focus On Your Own Family could really run cold with some people, come across as too corny, but the interesting thing about Focus On Your Own Family is that it's soaraway believe in yourself mantra is tucked right in the middle of the album. A less confident band would stick the positivity, the rising empowerment anthem at the end and leave the listener on the upwards finish, throwing you back out with a sense of purpose, but that would be triter and less interesting that what OWTH do, which is constantly switch up in their writhing pain, yeah that'd be to cheapen and diminish the documents of impossible/everyday struggle that populate the rest of this album. Cos there isn't a snap-out-of-it moment with bleak shit like that, there are ups and downs and boy are there downs.
Also, the despair and self-loathing that OWTH have dealt with has usually focused on its application, the loneliness and ache that and the ruined relationships and long scorched-earth nights that result from living in a way where some of the time, or a lot of the time, you feel like you'd got something closer to a spikey rebarred concrete lump for a heart, that if a surgeon opened you up they'd find something closer to the grey-green of the Antikythera mechanism than anything resembling a functional muscle that can sustain life, that could ever be used as a metaphor for love or strength or forbearance by even the most optimistic poet you could find.
And here there is that, of course. There is angry disassociation on SHIRTS: "I don't feel like me/whoever that's supposed to me." There is failure and hopelessness in Nightlife "I know I’m sick and I’m not right. I’m so fucking tired of living this life, I made for myself, I’m sorry that I cannot get past what keeps me away from the light." There is a scary sense of a malicious otherness squatting parasitically inside you, pulling you away from life as it seems to run for other people, drawing a borderline between you and what you might call normal or you might , if one was taking it from one particularly seductive sort of angle, you might call 'good' on Always Alone: "Something inside, you'll never know, keeps me from feeling the things that are so/standard for most but not for me". Resignation on the fading buzz of Stolen Away: "I'm not gonna change after everything I've been through." There is a whole lot of discomfort punk thrust into anthems, rock and roll lovesongs terrified that this love is not enough, and half-crooned bummer numbers (stuff along the lines of their Don't Laugh, I'm Totally Serious from All Things Move Towards Their End) all packed to disintegration with the raw squirming honesty of a teary-eyed teenage livejournal post. Hearts sewn to sleeves with dental floss and circled like an A with Snuggle lyrics.
But as well as those moments when it's just hitting those same present painspots, screaming in the alltime dark, and as well as those moments when it's trying to move up and onwards, attempting to light a way forward, there is another way it moves, there's a digging for the root, a coming together of an expose of the cause of this ugly wonk shit that lives and gurgles, something they've hinted at that before on songs like Janie, which is rerecorded here, ("This is why I cannot tell you what you deserve to know.").
Here it does take that ("I need to find my way back to where I began. Retrace my steps and start again." on Come Find Me, also a song about not doing it alone, asking for help) and as a result of that backwards interrogation it sometimes it feels tonally close to the harrowing beauty of The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree and its searching for some source of the torment and depictions of the intense trauma of growing up in a place where kids should never be made to grow up. It's looking for where this hate and woe got its big break
And in that case here that blame is generally lain at the big-ass wooden door of the church.
Altar Boy Blues probably does it clearest: ("There's only one time around and I choose not to blindly follow the same people that abuse. And I've seen it first hand, they tried to cover it up, I was confused.") but then there's the aforementioned Focus On Your Own Family which is a dig at the nauseating bigots at Focus On the Family, but it's not a scathing attack like something like DK's Moral Majority ("God must be dead if you're alive!") or Amebix's The Church is For Sinners ("The church holds out a bloodstained hand to pass around the hat"), in fact it really doesn't mention those bloviating christknackers at all, just the titular shot, it's a best-revenge-is-living-well kinda deal.
Something of blackhearted pop-punk heathen jolt of Crusades, attacking the consequences most, it's that antireligious spirit free of the smug punchability of people who post Richard Dawkins quotes and Amazing Atheist links on their tumblr (cos while I might agree with Hitchens and his ilk on the basic proposition "There is no god." I'm not down with their addendum "And you have to be a smirking cunt about it."). Attacks on the church not as a point of pride, but as a beatendog biteback at the damage caused, a hate fucking earned, a vicious stab, maybe not so much with personal faith, but with the atrocities it causes and conceals with its structures, when it is codified and socialised, the righteousness that blinds its wearer, convinces them of their goodness as they muck about in some obliterative evil works. I'm writing this as white smoke rises from the vatican and my twitter feed clogs up with pope jokes and my Rudimentary Peni patch burns hot against my punx jacket, so you could say that they're incredibly timely in this, but the truth is, the Catholic church is such an endless procession of vile conceited ignorance and venal hate-garbed boogie-dicks that attacks on their colossal hypocracies have been timely for roughly the last 2000 years.
And not just in the well documented self-serving cover-ups, right in the fucking giddy heart of Catholic doctrine is the weirdo notion of original sin, I mean what sort of fucking person looks at a baby and sees them inherently infected with the badness of the world? I don't believe in heaven but if I did there wouldn't be any sort of equivocation over whether a fucking newborn baby that dies is gonna go there, some shit that the Catholic Church only got done with in two-thousand-and-shitting-seven. I mean, jesus christ. That's the sort of just straight-up view-gnarling philosophy that should be kept the hell away from a developing brain and soul. This album screams "You want a fucking confession?" as Ryan Young's voice snarls and groans and aches as the songs, which are maybe a little cleaner, a little slower, and the songs constructed in a different kinda way to their earliest fucking classics like Die Young or SOS or Sleeping in Carrie's Car, where they just stick to build-up/race-downhill, crack onwards consistently and punkspeed or chunter determinedly or just scrape painfully down the route like a dying man.
Because above anything else, this is an album which constantly goes against itself, sometimes an atmosphere breaking rocketship love, sometimes a trudge onwards, some, sometimes a nasty little shitwicket moaning alone and uncomfortable and twirling up into itself in misery spirals, sometimes reaching out pleadingly for any sort of help offered. It's sometimes self-immolation, sometimes an immutable fuck-you punched into brick and poetry. It's not simple. Our moods and convictions don't flow in one direction, don't get simply placed into templates or regular orbits, depression ain't a Freytag Arc, redemption is not a problem to be solved. The only constant on this album, it seems, is movement. Away from something, towards something, escape, return. Always searching. Ever ticking over with the struggles and distance "Always upstream/always against the grain" on Shirts, "Gonna be a rough road/gonna take some time" on Focus On Your Own Family.
"It's a long way back to be anything that anyone could love." is how it's set out on the opener Start Walking. This is an album that gives no clue of when, or if anyone will manage to stop, There's less of a wallow, more of a sense of purpose buts it's a tidal ebb 3 steps forward 2 steps back kinda shuffle as this punk rock tears and rumbles on.
It's a fucking life. Is the home of the title a destination, a place to escape from, or the place we're going towards now? The album can't decide. "Please don't make me go home. I'm wanted less than I'm wanted here." on Don't Make Me Go. "Help me find a home" and those big beautiful whoa-oh-ohs that close out the album on Take Me Out. Maybe it's all those things. "Home" is a odd word in English, it's often a tricky thing to get a student learning the language to remember that you can't 'go to home' (that's what I do in my day job), because when you say "I'm going home" home is an adverb, it's not a place, it's a direction, a qualifier to the action.
Probably the Home Off With Their Heads are running with here is something like Pat the Bunny singing an acknowledgement of confusion on Johnny Hobo's Fuck Cops: "I don't know where home is, but I know that I'm not there now." and once when I was I was 18 and all wrapped up way too tight and deep in these sort of Off With Their Heads topics, those particular Freight Trains songs, my mum earnestly asked me if I was doing okay and all I could really hear was that line so I mentioned it and she kinda cried and I felt weird and ashamed and I needed to listen to punk rock because that's how I dealt. How I deal, when shit gets a bit too sharply human. With punk rock like this. As a companion for the journey, a whisper on the way.
“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster.
Home does offer more of the same screaming-in-the-dark for a bunch of it, but it also has some stuff which is straight-up fucking inspirational, Focus on Your Own Family is like a miniature SELF-HELP book bolted to a Rivethead or Banner Pilot or Manix song where all advice starts with "FUCK EM ALL!" and continues "DON'T EVER LISTEN! DON'T EVER COMPLY! NEVER BE SCARED! NEVER BE FRIGHTENED! HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!" and the bits of the album with this tone are reminiscent of the sharp edges where Henry Rollins' stuff goes from that tight twitching wireball of brokenbone angst to the nuclear-powered punch-a-mountain-in-the-face fightspiration of a line like "I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become." ( I was looking for a particular Rollins line to illustrate my point but I couldn't find it but it didn't really matter as EVERY SINGLE QUOTE IS LIKE THAT!) And that jump out of the tormented blue mess of hard drugs and hospitals and hate songs to that kinda (yeah maybe a little) cheesy yeah-I'm-gonna-live-this-life-and-you-are-too swerve is all the more powerful from coming for a band that's worn suicide in its lyrics like a studdedpunkvest armour.
That is not to say the screaming in the dark, which still happens on this album, is not a useless thing, not an unimportant thing to do, not fucking relevant.
When I was 18 and living in college accommodation depressed I played Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains incessantly, a band whose entire oeuvre was about self-destruction and self-hatred, all the sorts tales of brokendown squatparty awfulness that just in their very existence made me feel less alone because of the way they articulated a bunch of the shit I was stuck on, stuck in, and I carved the chorus to Harmony Parking Lot into the back of my bass-guitar with a penknife and made a typo which I was unreasonably annoyed with myself about. I even loved the almost unlistenable early demo stuff with drum-machines, feeling like shit all the time, it made me feel a little better to know that someone else was feeling like shit all the time too, so when the songwriter Pat the Bunny disbanded the band and tried a more positive tack with his next project Wingnut Dishwasher's Union first came out I was not as into it as it was trying to be more hopeful and I didn’t want to be more hopeful, I just wanted to be miserable and nihilistic with someone else so I didn’t really listen to them that much so maybe Focus On Your Own Family could really run cold with some people, come across as too corny, but the interesting thing about Focus On Your Own Family is that it's soaraway believe in yourself mantra is tucked right in the middle of the album. A less confident band would stick the positivity, the rising empowerment anthem at the end and leave the listener on the upwards finish, throwing you back out with a sense of purpose, but that would be triter and less interesting that what OWTH do, which is constantly switch up in their writhing pain, yeah that'd be to cheapen and diminish the documents of impossible/everyday struggle that populate the rest of this album. Cos there isn't a snap-out-of-it moment with bleak shit like that, there are ups and downs and boy are there downs.
Also, the despair and self-loathing that OWTH have dealt with has usually focused on its application, the loneliness and ache that and the ruined relationships and long scorched-earth nights that result from living in a way where some of the time, or a lot of the time, you feel like you'd got something closer to a spikey rebarred concrete lump for a heart, that if a surgeon opened you up they'd find something closer to the grey-green of the Antikythera mechanism than anything resembling a functional muscle that can sustain life, that could ever be used as a metaphor for love or strength or forbearance by even the most optimistic poet you could find.
And here there is that, of course. There is angry disassociation on SHIRTS: "I don't feel like me/whoever that's supposed to me." There is failure and hopelessness in Nightlife "I know I’m sick and I’m not right. I’m so fucking tired of living this life, I made for myself, I’m sorry that I cannot get past what keeps me away from the light." There is a scary sense of a malicious otherness squatting parasitically inside you, pulling you away from life as it seems to run for other people, drawing a borderline between you and what you might call normal or you might , if one was taking it from one particularly seductive sort of angle, you might call 'good' on Always Alone: "Something inside, you'll never know, keeps me from feeling the things that are so/standard for most but not for me". Resignation on the fading buzz of Stolen Away: "I'm not gonna change after everything I've been through." There is a whole lot of discomfort punk thrust into anthems, rock and roll lovesongs terrified that this love is not enough, and half-crooned bummer numbers (stuff along the lines of their Don't Laugh, I'm Totally Serious from All Things Move Towards Their End) all packed to disintegration with the raw squirming honesty of a teary-eyed teenage livejournal post. Hearts sewn to sleeves with dental floss and circled like an A with Snuggle lyrics.
But as well as those moments when it's just hitting those same present painspots, screaming in the alltime dark, and as well as those moments when it's trying to move up and onwards, attempting to light a way forward, there is another way it moves, there's a digging for the root, a coming together of an expose of the cause of this ugly wonk shit that lives and gurgles, something they've hinted at that before on songs like Janie, which is rerecorded here, ("This is why I cannot tell you what you deserve to know.").
And in that case here that blame is generally lain at the big-ass wooden door of the church.
Altar Boy Blues probably does it clearest: ("There's only one time around and I choose not to blindly follow the same people that abuse. And I've seen it first hand, they tried to cover it up, I was confused.") but then there's the aforementioned Focus On Your Own Family which is a dig at the nauseating bigots at Focus On the Family, but it's not a scathing attack like something like DK's Moral Majority ("God must be dead if you're alive!") or Amebix's The Church is For Sinners ("The church holds out a bloodstained hand to pass around the hat"), in fact it really doesn't mention those bloviating christknackers at all, just the titular shot, it's a best-revenge-is-living-well kinda deal.
Something of blackhearted pop-punk heathen jolt of Crusades, attacking the consequences most, it's that antireligious spirit free of the smug punchability of people who post Richard Dawkins quotes and Amazing Atheist links on their tumblr (cos while I might agree with Hitchens and his ilk on the basic proposition "There is no god." I'm not down with their addendum "And you have to be a smirking cunt about it."). Attacks on the church not as a point of pride, but as a beatendog biteback at the damage caused, a hate fucking earned, a vicious stab, maybe not so much with personal faith, but with the atrocities it causes and conceals with its structures, when it is codified and socialised, the righteousness that blinds its wearer, convinces them of their goodness as they muck about in some obliterative evil works. I'm writing this as white smoke rises from the vatican and my twitter feed clogs up with pope jokes and my Rudimentary Peni patch burns hot against my punx jacket, so you could say that they're incredibly timely in this, but the truth is, the Catholic church is such an endless procession of vile conceited ignorance and venal hate-garbed boogie-dicks that attacks on their colossal hypocracies have been timely for roughly the last 2000 years.
And not just in the well documented self-serving cover-ups, right in the fucking giddy heart of Catholic doctrine is the weirdo notion of original sin, I mean what sort of fucking person looks at a baby and sees them inherently infected with the badness of the world? I don't believe in heaven but if I did there wouldn't be any sort of equivocation over whether a fucking newborn baby that dies is gonna go there, some shit that the Catholic Church only got done with in two-thousand-and-shitting-seven. I mean, jesus christ. That's the sort of just straight-up view-gnarling philosophy that should be kept the hell away from a developing brain and soul. This album screams "You want a fucking confession?" as Ryan Young's voice snarls and groans and aches as the songs, which are maybe a little cleaner, a little slower, and the songs constructed in a different kinda way to their earliest fucking classics like Die Young or SOS or Sleeping in Carrie's Car, where they just stick to build-up/race-downhill, crack onwards consistently and punkspeed or chunter determinedly or just scrape painfully down the route like a dying man.
Because above anything else, this is an album which constantly goes against itself, sometimes an atmosphere breaking rocketship love, sometimes a trudge onwards, some, sometimes a nasty little shitwicket moaning alone and uncomfortable and twirling up into itself in misery spirals, sometimes reaching out pleadingly for any sort of help offered. It's sometimes self-immolation, sometimes an immutable fuck-you punched into brick and poetry. It's not simple. Our moods and convictions don't flow in one direction, don't get simply placed into templates or regular orbits, depression ain't a Freytag Arc, redemption is not a problem to be solved. The only constant on this album, it seems, is movement. Away from something, towards something, escape, return. Always searching. Ever ticking over with the struggles and distance "Always upstream/always against the grain" on Shirts, "Gonna be a rough road/gonna take some time" on Focus On Your Own Family.
"It's a long way back to be anything that anyone could love." is how it's set out on the opener Start Walking. This is an album that gives no clue of when, or if anyone will manage to stop, There's less of a wallow, more of a sense of purpose buts it's a tidal ebb 3 steps forward 2 steps back kinda shuffle as this punk rock tears and rumbles on.
It's a fucking life. Is the home of the title a destination, a place to escape from, or the place we're going towards now? The album can't decide. "Please don't make me go home. I'm wanted less than I'm wanted here." on Don't Make Me Go. "Help me find a home" and those big beautiful whoa-oh-ohs that close out the album on Take Me Out. Maybe it's all those things. "Home" is a odd word in English, it's often a tricky thing to get a student learning the language to remember that you can't 'go to home' (that's what I do in my day job), because when you say "I'm going home" home is an adverb, it's not a place, it's a direction, a qualifier to the action.
“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster.
Monday, 23 May 2011
Culturcide - Tacky Souvenirs from a Pre-Revolutionary America
"Oh, say can you see in the blinkless electron-gun eye of the mainstream media mirage that what we hail are the hallucinations of authority and progress and righteousness whose sweet and stern voices have captivated and conditioned millions of human creatures, stimulating in them a passive acceptance of technological disruption and destruction of environment, of history, of possibility of alternative ways of being? Whose seven stripes are broken swastikas, whose fifty stars are black holes sucking 200 million atomized existences into the daily routine of the human herd, of hamsters rolling the great wheels of death machine, squeaking at the shocks and nibbling the cheese and reciting and discussing and delighting in their shared programming history, in their stupid lives, in their cancers, their deaths, their TV shows, their jobs, their ignorance, their endless, pointless, forward creeping, their glorious, blithe nose-dive into their pay-check's pleasures, into an ecstatic emptiness: a glowing incinerator: a parking-lot full of business-men conspiring and colluding on the big lie, the big dream, the big nauseating screaming sweating nightmare of Business America/Consumer America/Corporate America/Media America/FASCIST AMERICA...." - Culturcide, Star-Spangled Banner
No-one likes feeling like their essential culture that they love and respect and have invested themselves in is being co-opted by forces who are just seeking to capitalise on the saleabilty of some trite simplication of germinal notions of otherness and rebellion contained within that culture and do so without any of the effort and alienation and history really required to understand those concepts and their pained births. I have read some incredibly awesome angry diatribes on the idea of the 'hipster headdress'. I once stumbled across a discussion on the racist implications of the failure to explain the concepts of east-Asian wisdom in Hong Kong Phooey. Just yesterday (though it doesn't exist on the same societal level in any way, obviously) I walked past an immaculately coiffured bro wearing a yellow and pink Never Mind the Bollocks t-shirt and though I was never particularly into the Pistols, it still sort of pissed me off a bit, but it's pretty much always been this way. How else could the proto-anarchist teachings of compassion espoused by Jesus Christ exist as a central tenet of the unashamedly capitalist authoritarian-right packed to the gills with hate preachers greasing the shadowy machinations of big-business motherfuckers.
They co-opt. We reclaim. They defang and sanitise. We remix, sample, recontextualise and subvert. With spraypaint and stencils, literary theory, rogue codes and a soldering gun. We take this fucker apart from the inside out and rebuild it in a distorted cubist rendition that fits our fragmented view of ourselves and our fucked-out, romantically fuzzed and slickly-shitted aesthetic. We find our icons in odd places. We change the meaning of words and symbols. Scrape them down to the etymological base or pull them out of their hateful past. Altering and dragging up the rough edges hidden by airbrushed perfection, ridiculing the robotic distortion of the flawed human form that is everpresent in the shiny mass media realm. Humanising the inhuman, both in bringing to light the sparks of beauty in the disgraced and in highlighting the ridiculous folly of pitch-perfect PR-managed pop stars and movie stars and politicians who march in meticulous rhythm under the shaming destructive banner of THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE.
It's great to exist on a planet where Luther Blissett, a 1980s Watford striker who by any stretch of the imagination should be remembered solely in wistful pub discussions in centre sections of Hertfordshire, is known by most people as an anonymous anarchist icon. When you walk past a telephone box in Farringdon and notice someone has replaced the text reading TELEPHONE at the top of it with WRAP UP WARM and CALL YOUR MUM it gives you the sense we're living in a slightly nicer world. It's fun to laugh whenever we hear the name 'Santorum'. This happens, not just through collective and individual effort, but almost by happy accident nowadays. We live in a world where you can wake up one morning and find that the playful hands of history have turned a silly Bangles karaoke classic into a revolutionary call-to-arms. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world (in Joey Vindictive's voice).
This is the internet era. Memetic mutations are the norm. Culture jamming is the culture. Reappropriation is an appropriate response. How many jokes have you read in the last few days that have equated the sad death of a now mostly-past it 80s professional wrestling legend with the ridiculously overhyped moronic end-of-the-world ravings of some sad little cultists locked in their homes and even further locked in their denial and turned this coincidence into something that's both an honest celebration of a childhood icon and a bygone era and further gleeful gloating over the idiocy of blind moralistic ranting and taking apocalyptica seriously. This is how we do things. Situationism is the situation.
Culturcide are one the many many precursors to this rearrange-the-world-in-your-bedroom ethic which fills up the culture today, where we determinedly curate and defend what we love and the same time as we repurpose, mock and mutate what we hate. Except Culturcide don't really love a lot. Or anything here. Including the concept of love. Apart from the opener, their 1986 album Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America consists of pop songs with sloppily overdubbed scathing lyrics, radio reports and adverts cut in and bursts of industrial noise dotted about to spice up the proceedings.
Here is a selections of the messages I got from Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America: Love sucks. Heroes suck. The media sucks. Punk rockers suck. The music industry sucks. Corporations suck. Pathetic fanboys suck. Critics suck. New York sucks. LA sucks. Cops suck. Trite humanitarian platitudes from multi-millionaire rock stars really really fucking suck. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. This is a screaming joke. A culture war where weapons are sharp. Pikes, maces and nerve gas and everyone is already wounded. This is a pitched battle on a fast-food forecourt. This is a riot. A fucking giggle.
The first song is an deadpan intonation of the speech at the top of the page over a wall of noise and the faint strains of the Star Spangled Banner in the background. It really reminds me of the opening and closing monologues of the Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters. The whole tone of this album is pretty similar to Jello's searing scattershot satirical tone, with less of the silly horror songs that DK used in I Kill Children and Funland at the Beach. Maybe Culturcide feel there is enough inherent disturbing horror in the song We Are the World without having to further establish their credentials as unflinching romeos to the void.
There are some shit artists parodied on here (Grand Funk's American Band is blown apart as Industrial Band). There are some great artists (Bowie and Springsteen). There are some things I just could not give a fuck about (Was there ever a band as bland as Huey Lewis and the News? And Ebony and Ivory, anyone? The song which I have an odd personal relationship with as having it sung at me and my girlfriend by a couple of pricks outside a bar but for most people is notable only for somehow being an even more vapid plea for racial equality than Blue Mink's Melting Pot and its hilariously misguided non-PC lyrics of "Curly latin kinkies, mix with yellow chinkies). But whatever the state of the song being parodied, everything is approached with the same juvenile sense of outrage and nihilistic philosophical certainty, the same kick of dizzy anger.
I like Bruce Springsteen a lot. I think at his best he's something approaching genius in the way he can synthesise all the human ache of the shortcomings of the American endeavour and the slippery moments when life coalesces into a flashing second of hope and warmth, where you sit behind the wheel of the car and can feel the whole world's blacktop under the tires, where you walk down the road with such a bounce in your step you're afraid to jump for the fear you'll take off for outer space, waving at airplanes and patting weather balloons on their flank as you pass them by. I think the lyric "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" on No Surrender is one of the quintessential rock and roll lines. I do like the way a bunch of current punk bands have taking the best parts of Springsteen's unashamedly romantic posturing and combined it with the drive of punk rock, I think the first three Gaslight Anthem releases are really great music, Senor and the Queen especially. Despite all this, I still fucking love it when Culturcide fill Dancing in the Dark with a load of extraneous feedback noise and sneer over the top of Bruce's earnest singing and big synth-lines: "We sit around gettin' older, listening to Bruce's new LP. Dig the glorification of our own passivitity. Cos on the streets of this town, everybody's given up the fight. You're hungry for entertainment, Let's play the new Springsteen album tonight!"
Wichita Lineman is a classic, but it's still thrilling to hear it as Houston Lawman, with a long news report about the use of 'throwdown guns' by the Houston PD and their tendency to plant weapons on unarmed suspects they got trigger-happy with. It does have a couple of bonus tracks from a Christmas single, which exist in the long tradition of bonus tracks that are kind of interesting but do fuck with the rhythm of the album which finished fucking strong on a cover of Chicago's Colour My World entitled Colour My World With Pigs which is the only song on the album that they just straight-up parody without any grinding clamor or silly voices thrown into the mix.
It's a heroically single-minded shrieking vision of a inexorable slide into beige despair and oppressive social order that paints the group as the sole inheritors of the tradition of intellectual and social validity. Or maybe as the fresh new lords of an ironclad renegade morality, without any precedence whatsoever. It's pretty fucking stupid. You know that there's no way they're not tainted too, that they're not as sucked in my the whole neon human quagmire as the lazy punks they excoriate on They Wish They All Could Be California Punks. You know they can't really consistently believe that love is just another form of control because that sort of nihilistic totality cannot sustain itself. But that's kind of the point, this album is not really supposed to offer solutions or effect a positive change, it's a SHIT OFF! like a clarion call. A teenage fuck-the-world without refuge. No 'Fuck the World, I'm Hanging Out With You', more like 'Fuck the world! I'm fucking the fucking world!', 'Fuck the world til it fucks you back! It's a shout of NO GODS BUT TRICKSTER GODS! NO MASTERS BUT YOU BETTER FUCKING MASTER YOUR DESTINY, MOTHERFUCKER! NO COMPROMISE!
This gives the album more of a fun feel than anything, which could be taken as undermining their own message, but really just gives a vision of that disgusting lonely arrogant second where you feel like you're the only person who gets it, who sees past the curtain. You know really that there are dozens of valid ways of looking at the world, but right now you want to call bullshit through a hundred megaphones strapped together. And there is a little bit of hope dug deep down in there, evident in the forward looking title and bits of They Aren't the World. It's a great artifact but not just that, much of its anger and sophomoric cynicism needs to be appreciated for how relevant it remains. It's not the smartest approach, but its a tentpole of blunt truth for us to circle, lean against and futz around with. It challenges us to build on the slogans. To develop our mockery into methods of resistance. And it's fucking illegal as anything. Fuck tha police!
Somehow we get by without ever learning, somehow no matter what the world keeps detourning.
No-one likes feeling like their essential culture that they love and respect and have invested themselves in is being co-opted by forces who are just seeking to capitalise on the saleabilty of some trite simplication of germinal notions of otherness and rebellion contained within that culture and do so without any of the effort and alienation and history really required to understand those concepts and their pained births. I have read some incredibly awesome angry diatribes on the idea of the 'hipster headdress'. I once stumbled across a discussion on the racist implications of the failure to explain the concepts of east-Asian wisdom in Hong Kong Phooey. Just yesterday (though it doesn't exist on the same societal level in any way, obviously) I walked past an immaculately coiffured bro wearing a yellow and pink Never Mind the Bollocks t-shirt and though I was never particularly into the Pistols, it still sort of pissed me off a bit, but it's pretty much always been this way. How else could the proto-anarchist teachings of compassion espoused by Jesus Christ exist as a central tenet of the unashamedly capitalist authoritarian-right packed to the gills with hate preachers greasing the shadowy machinations of big-business motherfuckers.
They co-opt. We reclaim. They defang and sanitise. We remix, sample, recontextualise and subvert. With spraypaint and stencils, literary theory, rogue codes and a soldering gun. We take this fucker apart from the inside out and rebuild it in a distorted cubist rendition that fits our fragmented view of ourselves and our fucked-out, romantically fuzzed and slickly-shitted aesthetic. We find our icons in odd places. We change the meaning of words and symbols. Scrape them down to the etymological base or pull them out of their hateful past. Altering and dragging up the rough edges hidden by airbrushed perfection, ridiculing the robotic distortion of the flawed human form that is everpresent in the shiny mass media realm. Humanising the inhuman, both in bringing to light the sparks of beauty in the disgraced and in highlighting the ridiculous folly of pitch-perfect PR-managed pop stars and movie stars and politicians who march in meticulous rhythm under the shaming destructive banner of THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE.
It's great to exist on a planet where Luther Blissett, a 1980s Watford striker who by any stretch of the imagination should be remembered solely in wistful pub discussions in centre sections of Hertfordshire, is known by most people as an anonymous anarchist icon. When you walk past a telephone box in Farringdon and notice someone has replaced the text reading TELEPHONE at the top of it with WRAP UP WARM and CALL YOUR MUM it gives you the sense we're living in a slightly nicer world. It's fun to laugh whenever we hear the name 'Santorum'. This happens, not just through collective and individual effort, but almost by happy accident nowadays. We live in a world where you can wake up one morning and find that the playful hands of history have turned a silly Bangles karaoke classic into a revolutionary call-to-arms. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world (in Joey Vindictive's voice).
This is the internet era. Memetic mutations are the norm. Culture jamming is the culture. Reappropriation is an appropriate response. How many jokes have you read in the last few days that have equated the sad death of a now mostly-past it 80s professional wrestling legend with the ridiculously overhyped moronic end-of-the-world ravings of some sad little cultists locked in their homes and even further locked in their denial and turned this coincidence into something that's both an honest celebration of a childhood icon and a bygone era and further gleeful gloating over the idiocy of blind moralistic ranting and taking apocalyptica seriously. This is how we do things. Situationism is the situation.
Culturcide are one the many many precursors to this rearrange-the-world-in-your-bedroom ethic which fills up the culture today, where we determinedly curate and defend what we love and the same time as we repurpose, mock and mutate what we hate. Except Culturcide don't really love a lot. Or anything here. Including the concept of love. Apart from the opener, their 1986 album Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America consists of pop songs with sloppily overdubbed scathing lyrics, radio reports and adverts cut in and bursts of industrial noise dotted about to spice up the proceedings.
Here is a selections of the messages I got from Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America: Love sucks. Heroes suck. The media sucks. Punk rockers suck. The music industry sucks. Corporations suck. Pathetic fanboys suck. Critics suck. New York sucks. LA sucks. Cops suck. Trite humanitarian platitudes from multi-millionaire rock stars really really fucking suck. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. This is a screaming joke. A culture war where weapons are sharp. Pikes, maces and nerve gas and everyone is already wounded. This is a pitched battle on a fast-food forecourt. This is a riot. A fucking giggle.
The first song is an deadpan intonation of the speech at the top of the page over a wall of noise and the faint strains of the Star Spangled Banner in the background. It really reminds me of the opening and closing monologues of the Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters. The whole tone of this album is pretty similar to Jello's searing scattershot satirical tone, with less of the silly horror songs that DK used in I Kill Children and Funland at the Beach. Maybe Culturcide feel there is enough inherent disturbing horror in the song We Are the World without having to further establish their credentials as unflinching romeos to the void.
There are some shit artists parodied on here (Grand Funk's American Band is blown apart as Industrial Band). There are some great artists (Bowie and Springsteen). There are some things I just could not give a fuck about (Was there ever a band as bland as Huey Lewis and the News? And Ebony and Ivory, anyone? The song which I have an odd personal relationship with as having it sung at me and my girlfriend by a couple of pricks outside a bar but for most people is notable only for somehow being an even more vapid plea for racial equality than Blue Mink's Melting Pot and its hilariously misguided non-PC lyrics of "Curly latin kinkies, mix with yellow chinkies). But whatever the state of the song being parodied, everything is approached with the same juvenile sense of outrage and nihilistic philosophical certainty, the same kick of dizzy anger.
I like Bruce Springsteen a lot. I think at his best he's something approaching genius in the way he can synthesise all the human ache of the shortcomings of the American endeavour and the slippery moments when life coalesces into a flashing second of hope and warmth, where you sit behind the wheel of the car and can feel the whole world's blacktop under the tires, where you walk down the road with such a bounce in your step you're afraid to jump for the fear you'll take off for outer space, waving at airplanes and patting weather balloons on their flank as you pass them by. I think the lyric "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" on No Surrender is one of the quintessential rock and roll lines. I do like the way a bunch of current punk bands have taking the best parts of Springsteen's unashamedly romantic posturing and combined it with the drive of punk rock, I think the first three Gaslight Anthem releases are really great music, Senor and the Queen especially. Despite all this, I still fucking love it when Culturcide fill Dancing in the Dark with a load of extraneous feedback noise and sneer over the top of Bruce's earnest singing and big synth-lines: "We sit around gettin' older, listening to Bruce's new LP. Dig the glorification of our own passivitity. Cos on the streets of this town, everybody's given up the fight. You're hungry for entertainment, Let's play the new Springsteen album tonight!"
Wichita Lineman is a classic, but it's still thrilling to hear it as Houston Lawman, with a long news report about the use of 'throwdown guns' by the Houston PD and their tendency to plant weapons on unarmed suspects they got trigger-happy with. It does have a couple of bonus tracks from a Christmas single, which exist in the long tradition of bonus tracks that are kind of interesting but do fuck with the rhythm of the album which finished fucking strong on a cover of Chicago's Colour My World entitled Colour My World With Pigs which is the only song on the album that they just straight-up parody without any grinding clamor or silly voices thrown into the mix.
It's a heroically single-minded shrieking vision of a inexorable slide into beige despair and oppressive social order that paints the group as the sole inheritors of the tradition of intellectual and social validity. Or maybe as the fresh new lords of an ironclad renegade morality, without any precedence whatsoever. It's pretty fucking stupid. You know that there's no way they're not tainted too, that they're not as sucked in my the whole neon human quagmire as the lazy punks they excoriate on They Wish They All Could Be California Punks. You know they can't really consistently believe that love is just another form of control because that sort of nihilistic totality cannot sustain itself. But that's kind of the point, this album is not really supposed to offer solutions or effect a positive change, it's a SHIT OFF! like a clarion call. A teenage fuck-the-world without refuge. No 'Fuck the World, I'm Hanging Out With You', more like 'Fuck the world! I'm fucking the fucking world!', 'Fuck the world til it fucks you back! It's a shout of NO GODS BUT TRICKSTER GODS! NO MASTERS BUT YOU BETTER FUCKING MASTER YOUR DESTINY, MOTHERFUCKER! NO COMPROMISE!
This gives the album more of a fun feel than anything, which could be taken as undermining their own message, but really just gives a vision of that disgusting lonely arrogant second where you feel like you're the only person who gets it, who sees past the curtain. You know really that there are dozens of valid ways of looking at the world, but right now you want to call bullshit through a hundred megaphones strapped together. And there is a little bit of hope dug deep down in there, evident in the forward looking title and bits of They Aren't the World. It's a great artifact but not just that, much of its anger and sophomoric cynicism needs to be appreciated for how relevant it remains. It's not the smartest approach, but its a tentpole of blunt truth for us to circle, lean against and futz around with. It challenges us to build on the slogans. To develop our mockery into methods of resistance. And it's fucking illegal as anything. Fuck tha police!
Somehow we get by without ever learning, somehow no matter what the world keeps detourning.
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Hounds - Demo
So my friend Scott asked me to review his band's demo tape and I said yes, because journalistic integrity is apparently not even for journalists anymore. So here we go. This could be the end of a beautiful friendship. Scott is, unimaginatively, from Scotland. As such, he enjoys heart disease, depressing stories about homeless animals, horrendous sectarian violence and badly cut opiates (the rat poison gives it a 'right wee kick' apparently.)
The first song called Old Dog. Presumably named so in dedication to all Scottish women. Boom. Sorry, it's actually about Greyfriar's Bobby. Possibly. There might be some weird social contract in Scotland where all creative endeavours must be laced with the message "Our animals are more depressingly loyal than yours, you cunt." There is a song called Rainmachine, with the chorus "SHUT OFF THE RAIN MACHINE!" which speaking from my experience of Scotland, is actually called 'the sky' by most people, and Young Heart, Old Soul, about the battle between a proddie greasy spoon and a papist chippie. Probably not.
The first song called Old Dog. Presumably named so in dedication to all Scottish women. Boom. Sorry, it's actually about Greyfriar's Bobby. Possibly. There might be some weird social contract in Scotland where all creative endeavours must be laced with the message "Our animals are more depressingly loyal than yours, you cunt." There is a song called Rainmachine, with the chorus "SHUT OFF THE RAIN MACHINE!" which speaking from my experience of Scotland, is actually called 'the sky' by most people, and Young Heart, Old Soul, about the battle between a proddie greasy spoon and a papist chippie. Probably not.
Alright, enough with the lame jokes. Let's get serious. There are lots of different little sounds stuck in here, like offal into a cow's stomach (that was the last one). There are bits of the spindly/shouty Latterman sound (which is becoming so popular we're going to have to come up with a proper name for it: Lattercore? Long Island pop-punk? Riot Grrrwl?), hardcore, mid-90s emo, punk rock and a few other things. There's a bunch of surprisingly acceptable straight heavy rock in Old Dog, for example. It doesn't always gel convincingly, but it's a first demo, so maybe that's to be expected. The transitions between sections of songs are a bit clumsy and stop-start sometimes and the solo at the end of Young Heart, Old Soul is a nice solo but the guitar tone on it doesn't really fit the song so it feels like it's sitting on top of the other music, rather than rolling with it.
The vocals are pleasingly strained and tortured, but not to the point where they're completely indecipherable. Though there is some confusion at times. I'm not sure if one particular line on Rainmachine is "I'm not journeying home", "I'm not jogging hard" or "I'm not Johnny Ramone". I don't have the lyrics at hand, so I can't really judge them on that, but they're yelled with enough conviction that I'm fairly sure it doesn't matter too much. I still enjoyed it.
I enjoyed these three songs. They're not completely fully formed, but it's promising, maybe sometimes they could do with sticking a bit longer with one of the really solid punk riffs they occasionally lock into, rather than jumping about quite so much, but that's really just my personal taste. If you like screamy mildly-gloomy punk rock that draws equally from three decades of punk rock, then this could be for you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)