Criaturas - Espiritu De Libertad

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

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

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

The Secret Prostitutes - Welcome to Punk… Viva la Evolución… We Can Do Whatever We Want

Houston's Secret Prostitutes favour the unwieldy forthright title, on their first album they proclaimed Nevermind the KBD, This is A.D.D., seeking to take the already wildhouse spirit of that early 80s teensplat worldpunk, and fracture it further, manic and carefree, on their new album they sum up their fermentative steal-from-the-past/spit-at-the-future spirit, Welcome to Punk… Viva la Evolución… We Can Do Whatever We Want, which slipped out at the tail end of 2013 on Paha Tukka Elämä in Europe, Base Records in Japan and Torture Garden Picture Company in the US. I guess when you sing most of the time in a language (Indonesian) that most of the people who come to your shows don't speak and don't include lyrics sheets with your LP you've gotta stick the key to your noise right up their at the front, state the game and state your aims.

They continue their splattered palate of KBD-influenced punk rock, evoking that feeling of underground disconnected (in head and body) punk bands spraying haphazardly out in hundreds of bent and re-bent attacks at the Pistols/Clash/Damned/Ramones framework, dirtied up and individually weirdstrung from France's Gasoline to Denmark's Lost Kids to Italy's Hitler SS to California's Insults and countless other low-rent idiot punx dreamers and/or dickheads. This evocation feeling sometimes like the way Fucked Up explicitly created this false explosion of early 80s British music on their companion piece to David Comes to Life, David's Town, there there was a wider spread of sounds, but a more unified theme, that one city, one time, the Secret Prostitutes, with their flip from sharp sneerer, to scrappy slapper, desperate yelp to punk-pop pounce, run gleefully and tinnily around the world, mixing up their Indonesian with bits of Spanish, Italian, German and English (and some other languages, I think) They draw on the easy globeskipping sway of 80s Italo commie-artpunx CCCP De Fedeli Alla Linea (USSR Faithful to the Line) and their song Live in Pankow, covered here, running off "Live in Moscow, live in Budapest, live in Varsavia, live in Sofia, live in Prague, live in Pankow!". That red heart is shined and shown off too in songs like Manifesto Komunis and Partai Komunis Indonesia.


Shot and pulled together by the yappy vocals, both male and female, sometimes intercutting, sometimes not, The Secret Prostitutes live in a careless frailty as they jounce through 25 songs in under 30 minutes, getting instantly bored with songs, styles, modes of expression and dropping them, abrupt and without notice or regret. Übermensch employs dark deep German shoutings, guttural growls and melodramatic calls, repetitive dug-in riffs, slipping out of the sturdy thudding into backmasked snips drawn as feverish tongues. There's drawn out silliness of the extended overbearing count-in on Partai Komunis Indonesia and its idiot-Oi! broken off quickly, before the even the second chorus. Those blokey choral vox pop-up again on the scratch punk tickler of I Don't Need You, the urgent stamp of Asuranis Jiwa.


There are even odder, freer, moments, like Galaxie's gentle trills, soft disco-pop burblings like a watery dawn rising on the slowing dancers, breaking up the often breathless tempo of the album. And then there's the closer, The Secret Prostitutes Theme, a herky jerky tumbling of a chippy beat reminiscent of the chaotic pain-earnt joy of The Genuines' Die Struggle, horns swoops and whips, rattles, teasing guitar, soothing bass gives. And then, like much of the rest of the album, it just snaps off.

All that was laid out and lunged at in that title is achieved, the openness and delight, the changing, the revolution, the liberty. "I got friends down in Costa Rica/See guerilla wanna rock 'n' roll/I got a friend or two Tanzania/Communist Radio!" sang The Eat on their classic 7" Communist Radio, also found on (what else?) the second Killed By Death comp and that's the language that The Secret Prostitutes speak in Welcome to Punk..., whatever the grammars or lexicons slung this way and that. That of a world made small by the scamperpunk shivers and garage shakes, jabbing and moving quickly away from the counterpunch, ripping, hopping and devil-may-care the planet over, dancing on hot coals and getting away clean.

Wiccans - Field II

Cutting seamlessly between powerful hardcore and run-you-down garage-punk, Wiccans second album keeps you guessing. One second it'll you'll be snarling in that sort of bodily neanderthal regression caught-up in the chugging threat of a hardcore song and the next the song will have shifted into a tight Marked-Men  up-and-at-them poppy punk number, all tied together by those thick meaty vocals. It reminds me slightly in its fluctuations of I Farm's pop-punk/hardcore indecision, but the switches between the styles are handled in a much smoother manner. Just one song, Panthers in Wonder, runs from squirrelly noise and a Boys powerpop air into lo-fi Carbonas punk spikes fading and slowing into a weird ambient drone complete with unsettling spacey reverberations, before crashing back into a big mean fuck-you hardcore drawl, and then running out on relentless drums that go on for just a second too long for things to feel normal. That's just one song, and all the songs on the album have that restless urgency to them, rising and falling, slowing down into depressing stutters, speeding up again into squealing torrents of DRI/crossover guitar shredding, finding mid-tempo grooves to work and pick at for a little while before jumping off again and sprinting back into the noise or finding Jay Reatard synth-pop rhythms to cling to and nutty jazz-drum solos to ache with for 45 seconds or so on Psychic Mirrors, ending with its ultimate statement, the seven-minute long title track which vacillates between hard-rock and angry weird noise, then throws the two together and adds some folky acoustic strumming somewhere underneath, in a psyche-y stoner freakout that winds down into a spooky whisper that slides off into the background noise and darkness.