Cianuro - demo CS

Showcasing more of London's current vibrant and heaving punk scene, a tape of stabbing midtempo Spanish-invasion punx featuring members of Frau/No/Retrofuture, a venomous razorwire shimmying, shaking with rage, stomping with life, deepened and coarsened by the brokenglass vocals. The spasmodic scratchings of the guitar, the rumbling sway of the bass, the pop and kick of the drums. Cancion De Amor particularly is a vicious mover, at once a dancefloor filler, a fierce bomb. Scraped together and vindictive, cutthroat and catchy.
 

Tropical Nightmare - demo CS

Throbbing psychedelic hardcore from Brazil by way of London at their best on tracks like O Prazer De ser Asceta when they strike a dirty vein of punk grooverush, the bass upfront and packed with crustgrit, the vocals dry barks of rage, the guitar cut free dancing flickersharp and wild over the top like a spirit of trickster noise. The whole compelling drive dragged out of the empty ambient wastes that open Prego Na Areia, busy and loaded with fleeting images of pain, moral rebellion, apocalyptic cities, uncomfortable headspaces. Tropical Nightmare move like the snared ghost of the pulsing rhythms of anger rippling out of you.

The Lowest Form - Negative Ecstasy LP

Knockdown dragout noiserock/hardcore, built of thump and growl. Crashing out of skinitch blackmetal warbles, rolling into thick gritty thuds. There's the off-face downward spirals of Droppin' Bad Boys and Comin' Down Ruff, two sides of a seething desire for complete escapism, "ALL I WANNA DO IS GET OUT OF MY HEAD" vs "I'VE DONE A BAD BOMB/I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS." There's the hovering heated panics of Some Horrible Bug "I START TO ITCH/I'M BURNING UP" and Wrong Decision, the bloodily-excised suicidal ideation of Telepathy or Exhaustion "NO TIME TO BREATHE/KILL ME NOW/NO CHOICE IN LIFE/KILL ME NOW". The Lowest Form operate in interior badlands, a mind to break and the devil to pay. Negative Ecstasy rolls it all up with a long terror, churning and wriggling, excoriating vocals, coiling guitar scritches, chugging bass, unrelenting pogo-punch drums, one more crimped nervous breakdown, one more bad bomb, one more horrible bug.  The Lowest Form can stick a rumbling groove, a swinging moshy rip-and-roll, or smash apart with a sudden shattering blow. Negative Ecstasy is a chainsaw surgery, replete with harsh buzz and flailing screams, a private world on the edge and exposed, real and deadly.

No Form - s/t 12"

Capturing a liveshow as barbed and intense as No Form's regular stage-destructions is an almost futile task. I missed their first London show as they were playing on a Monday night and I was knackered from a real heavy weekend, only to wake up to a barrage of tweets and statuses from all my mates proclaiming them the best live band in the UK. Luckily I didn't have to wait long to catch them and see that the hype was real. I've seen them several times since then and they have always utterly owned the space, filling any room with tortured noise, confrontational theatrics, performance art precision and hardcore fire.

Their first vinyl release, a 12" on Muscle Horse Records, inevitably falls short of those ferocious and captivating sets, but that's no criticism. A band always should be better live than recorded, should always thrive more readily in the whirr and spirit of stagework and affray. For anyone who has not had the luck to see No Form in the flesh, this is a more than adequate primer. Five tracks of acute bitterness, flayed hardcore noise, a grisly clatter pitched somewhere in the barren abrasion/power hinterlands between Harry Pussy and Mecht Mensch, but wholly its own, screeching and keening, pulsing and slamming, writhing and roaring. Freakout upon freakout, scarifying glares and feedback flues. Goddess of Fire, Barrier and Meander are all wild ones, utterly unhinged, paroxysms of buzz and blood, screaming with pain, pounding with ravaged zeal. "Plasmatic ooze penetrates the brain/The liquid becomes the acrid rain" tears Barrier. "Abyss of skin and muscle covered shit. I may be inhibited by a cretinous cancer but at least it means there is something inside" rages Meander.

The Untitled track on side A and the long jam that eats up the whole of side B are dangerous throbs, building out of bassline in the manner of less-spiritual, more-fucked-off Les Rallizes Denudes, hanging the flaying chaos around a simple axial point. Whereas I've always found the rhythm-rooted noiseswirls of Les Rallizes Denudes enormously calming, something that brings me down from heights of anxiety, letting you focus on something central and uncomplicated as the sheaves of guitardiscord slip off and you emerge more focused, less frazzled. No Form allow no such dive into the noise-serene, living more like a wartrudge, beset by demons and lithe scuttling terrors, a monotonous process of bloodied bruised determination, a caustic drag through a mephitic bog. No release, no escape, no compromise, No Form. See them live.

Detergents - No Salvation 7"

UK15 punk with dark angry hearts and quickshuffle dancing feet, three tunes of Crisis-sharp bouncing basslines, chunky cutting riffs, singalong Court Martial streetpunk choruses. Gouging back through all the years of punk's constant mutations, noise-tributaries, pop-offshoots, the stylistic accretions and sub-subgenre codifications that have splintered out in the last 25-odd years, to some pure '77 simplicity, stripped-down rough-hewn pissed-off bangers. No Salvation's apocalypse ditty "It's nuclear at attack!/Your eyes will burn/Your skin will crack!", Turn Off Your TV's media-maddened call-to-arms, Dark Days rocking with the frustration of watching this shithole country been pushed gleefully further into the morass of profit and fear. As depressingly apt in 2015 as it was in 1980.

On Quality Control HQ.

Frau - Punk is My Boyfriend 7"

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

Arms Race - Gotta Get Out EP

Meanmugging rough London hardcore bursting with hoarse fury and Oi!-toughened conviction. 6 tracks of storming anger, packed with righteous violence, simplistic solutions for pederast politicians and corrupt cops. Hang the Scum, Kill the Bill, no words minced, just fury in scything guitars, stomps and leers, aggression unbound. Bastard a tear of online alienation, dropping into a muddy half-singsong trudge. Gotta Get Out thumping in like a terrace chant, ripping apart a life with fucked-off spit "HATE MY JOB/HATE MY LIFE", aware of it's own futility but also cognizant of the fact that that doesn't really mean shit when you're living in a blank hole of depression and drudgery, like a half-asphyxiated mutant digging out of the old Animals song. "SAME OLD STORIES YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD/IT'S TIRED, IT'S RECYCLED BUT IT'S FUCKING TRUE." On My Face showing up rage as a wild unhinged form of vulnerability, cos that level of guttural rage comes from a deep dark place, one usually sublimated in the day-to-day mechanics of survival, it gathers together the angers, personal and political and bites them off one by one. "IT'S ONE LAW FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US/AND THERE AIN'T A CUNT ON THE STREETS THAT I CAN TRUST/GIMME A PEOPLE THAT CAN FUCKING FEEL/SHOW A CITY THAT'S FUCKING REAL."

What really pulls the songs here together though is the final track, Mongrel Crew, and its flailing leviathan of a fucking singalong, one of those huge gang-lore screamers that gets right down into your bones with its hooligan bundling, laying waste to the stress and shite drawn on the other songs just through the sheer obliterating power of that punk/hardcore communal violence, packed with self-mythologising, the city geography so loathed on On My Face marked as territory, a couple punk nods to past and present (Conflict's The Ungovernable Force, the band's own label Quality Control). A chorus that makes the personal anguish of Gotta Get Out and On My Face slip away, the societal wrongs-rightings of Hang the Scum and Kill the Bill be just a swing of a fist away, a tangible arm-in-arm possibility. "OI! OI! MONGREL CREW/WE'RE MONGREL ARMY AND WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!" While most of the songs here make you wanna break the world, rearrange it with kicks and glassings, 45 seconds into Mongrel Crew and you fucking can.

 

Good Throb - Fuck Off LP

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

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

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

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

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

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

DiE - Vexed EP

"Because what did it mean to say that something represented a cross between primitive insensitivity and chillingly inane emptiness in a bottomless pit of unbridled dark?!" - Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango

Concrete cunt UK hardcore following up one of last years best seven inches. Eight tracks of grimworld negativity, enacted in tenebrous churning punk perfection, drawing on hardcore's many curdled corners. Monotony thrumming with Discharge fire, Exterminate wailing Pig Champion surly, throughout there are deep veins of Chaos UK bluntness, SSD waste-laying. A seemless melding of hardcore's hate-heavy highlights, its darkest distillations, all utilised to construct a EP of heady desolation, almost rejuvenating in its relentless punch, its unmitigated bleakness, a holistic disgust. Pressure all expiring gasps and claustrophobic panic, BTK searing with serial killer malevolence, Exterminate bitter and murderous, a brief existence of where "DEAD-EYED DEMONS PREY UPON THE WEAK" in Dark, "MIND IS MANACLED/BRAIN IS CHAINED" on Life Sentence, "NO LIFE'S WORTH LIVING WHERE MONOTONY REIGNS" on Monotony, just your purest nihilistic affectations made flesh, indulgent hate, all laid out together, the temporary joys of life blotted out by Life Sentence's knife-edge guitar flails, Pressure's hostile thump, your brow furrows, your lip curls into a sneer, your voice drops into a threatchoked deadness, your movements restricted into brutal simplistic bluster and temporarily become one with the gloom, living long minutes in that mean tough shell, ready to bite heads off, Ready to Rot.

That kind of unremitting dejection is unsustainable, but it's a place that a lot of us have lived in at times, have got drunk and dirty on in the worst moments, the panic attacks, the depressive episodes, the enduring anxiety and pummeling hopeless funks, and the tools used to deal with the shit, that abjection of self, that self-transformation into a self-named bastard, that concomitant desire to just listen to 80s hardcore bands singing about dead soldiers and suicidal ideation, killer cops and cop killers and heroin overdoses, to obsessively play that music from waking up at noon to sleeping at four, those tools call out to you, lie unused and rusting when you do finally move on, find a better place for your head to be at. DiE are built from that energy, they're crafting and carving with those exact tools, and for a ten minutes you can slip freely into that bastard mindset, into that hard cunt animus, roiling in malice and despair in a cathartic engagement with the worst of the world, for that ten minutes you breath the gagging smog, taste the blood on your teeth, scratch with the spite, devolve, swing and turn with the vigor of the falling, the luster of the damned, before you come up for air again, you can abandon that hard-earned hope like a dog-end tossed casually into the gutter, for that Vexed ten minutes you can feel the fucking hate.

The Repossessed - demo CS

Eye-scratching feminist hardcore punk from Sheffield, brief and biting,  bold and blunt, all the waste burnt off. The guitar a garage-raw scrape, the vocals a bitter scream. Shifting from crude thumps into searing choruses. "MAKE YOUR OWN UTOPIA/OR BURN EVERYTHING DOWN!" on Make Your Own Utopia, "TRY! TRY! TRY! OR DIE! DIE! DIE!" on Try "IT KILLS ME, KILLS ME KILLS ME!" on Falling Down. Lyrics reiterating struggles lived and lumped, the inevitability of failure running up into the impossibility of surrender. The Repossessed stamp with the repetitive chickenwire punk of Buck Biloxi and the Fucks, bloodied up with the sore savagery of Neopunkz or other early 80s hardcore cutting hard and fast.

Snob - s/t 7"

Muddied up hardcore punk out of the pulsating current London scene. It's Crazy Spirit/Disorder trashthrash, early-Rudimentary Peni clatter and sputter, a thick guttural bass roll, a skinning guitar skid grouting over the gaps, occasionally slipping up and crashing into weird broken shards. Matter-of-fact vocals laying down tracks that build in spite. Harassed, like Hysterics Leave Me Alone, displays a burning anger stoked and compounded every day, rising from fear "CAN'T COUNT THE TIME/I'VE FELT TERRIFIED" to righteous destruction "RIP THEIR EYES FROM SOCKETS/RIP THEIR TONGUES FROM THEIR MOUTHS." Mother a terrifically dismissive snap sneering at the fuckwitted fedoraed ranks (actually, it's about ethics in games journalism). Piss a panicked primitive shout, the classic hardcore punk trick of sticking a puerile song about bodily fluids in with five furious attacks on shit that matters, like Send in the Mayor, wavering and whispering and darting forward, hanging out to dry every pub bore's favourite post-satirical bumbler. Buzzing with energy, trapped down in its shitty punk hole, kicking dirt into everyone's faces.

Perspex Flesh - s/t LP

Grimey anti-social anti-self hardcore from one of the UK's best bands doing it. Noise from dark places, the filth and pressures that life struggles forward and cracks apart under, all the little annihilations, all the real stones in your shoes, nails in your eyes, bubbles in your blood. It explodes with physical humours and decay, bile and bitterness, body and brain succumbing, betraying you. "CHEST TIGHTENS AND BRAIN BLEEDS BLACK/SKIN STRETCHES UNTIL IT STARTS TO CRACK." on Perspex Flesh. "WELLED INSIDE MY STOMACH CHURNS/A DARK FORCE STARTS TO BURN" on Cancer Black. It reels with streetviolence on Feeding Time, antithetical to a triumphalist hooligan stomp, panicked, bad nights and catastrophic consequences. "GLAZED HOOLIGAN EYES DESTINED TO FIGHT/38 BLOWS TO THE HEAD/LEFT IN THE GUTTER TO DIE."  There's anxiety physicalised as a destructive force, in the choking silence of Tongue-Tied ("WORDS TRAPPED/BITTEN TONGUE/TONGUE-TIED/ACHING LUNGS"), the warping terror of Prison of Glass "MAN AT THE MIRROR/HE DOES NOT SEE/IMAGE OF HIMSELF/PAITNED FEAR COMES FREE." All this pain and paranoia realised in apocalyptic swirl and clamor, shivers and screams, the clank and whistle, crash and convulsions, thumping hardcore assaults, frenzied punk retches, moments when the songs empty out into the drip and whisper of factory echoes, ugly necrotising emotions sucking in lifeforce and breathing out deadening threat. Unnamed things snarlsing and scuttering about in the murk.

Hard Skin - On The Balls & Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?

"Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Think about Oi! Oi! Oi!" - The Crested, Think About Oi
"STOP THINKING! START DRINKING!" - Hard Skin, First Day Angry Song

Like the Formby Channel, Hard Skin are a band that could only have emerged from this sceptred isle. And when I say sceptred, I mean shithole, grey bitter dank sarcastic nimby fading delusional shit-fucking hole-isle. Some real John King spirit imbues these songs, that mixture of soaring terrace community, the kicks and knocks of poverty, a familiarity with violence, a tense heartworn tearing underneath, a faded rug at your nan's with the colour scuffed out of it but the pattern still peeking through, the warmth in the brokenness.

Sure America has OIL! with their pumped up ridiculous violence, cliches stacked high and smashed down, Crucified Hammerskins, Proud of my Pride, Pulling on the Boots, but Hard Skin are cut through with sharper, more poignant silliness, beyond their bluntfuck singalongs, like Beer and Fags's loutish drunken joy in the face of the grim march of history on Hard Nuts and Hard Cunts, drawing on Cock Sparrer's England Belongs to Me, and its investment in the smaller twists of home, Cock Sparrer sang of England looking not at verdant fields and glory, but 'the dirty water in its rivers', the little grotty shit that you hold deep in your heart as signifiers of a private belonging, stake a claim to what you have, no matter how insignificant or crap it is.

Still Fighting Thatcher they roared twenty odd years ago, and she lies six feet deep but her stabbing hate lives on. Council Estate deals, with surprisingly affectingly, with the lasting brutality of her legacy on ordinary people. Dark fucking times when even your comedy Oi! bands are painting bleak landscapes of the grueling slog of austerity. A pained tale steeped psycho-geography, the malign concrete, infecting its residents with a certain hard heart. No jokes just a desperate cry. "EVERYONE DIES! BUT NOT EVERYONE LIVES! I'M SOMEBODY! I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO GIVE!" Real shit right there.

On The Kids Are Innocent that nebulous notion of 'the kids' invoked in that Upstarts, Blitz, Sham, way, they're the kids that you meet, they don't care and if they're united then they'll never be divided. A warm cuff-about-the-ear for scamps and tearaways, embracing the young as just weird fuckabouts, like they are, like we were, it's an idea that fights back against the real youthhate of mid-market tabloids, terror scattered across newspaper pages, feverish whispers of 'feral' and 'inherent criminality' burning with that eugenic tang. The Kids Are Innocent, the homeless are treated with the same warmth on You Still Here? and it's dismissive toss-off of PCSOs, as angry at the fact that it's not a real cop doing the bothering as it is at the fact that a cop's bothering them, and a lot of this album, is anti-nihilistic, a vaguely charming vision of Britain full of salt-of-the-earth cunts stumbling through interesting times, punches and police harassment.

Hard Skin bounce between modes. There's the storming self-mythologising of Another Terrace Anthem, boasting of "Bit of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham/I'm taking it back to where it began!" and cracking apart with purposefully lame jokes. There's the triumphal violence of rougher-uppers The Man Who Ran the Town with skins as avenging angels, puttin in a loan shark's head, and We're Gonna Do Them Cunts, rolling on that terse economy of threat, "I'm gonna do you" carrying more power than any super-specific murderous hyperbole. A take on I, Ludicrous's Preposterous Tales in That's Bollocks, Mate and its pissed-off pissed fuck-off of a mouth-running pub bore. The lonely swaying whisper of The Gipsy Hill, a wander round South London, a litany of a neighbourhood's comforting peculiarities. It all sits together in a cordial crash of streetlights and dogshit, belligerent barroom stompers, sidestreet serenade, flitting between cock-o'-the-walk swagger and softer more morose musings, but all invested with the slap of the pavement, the roots of meandering alleyways, the shortcuts and graffiti of a living city.

And even better, beyond the instant classic of On The Balls, is Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?, the same album, the same songs, but coming from a murderer's row of female vocalists, real punk sneer, relishing that snap of melody and power. The notion of guilty pleasures has been well wrung out to dry as a bullshit concept born of insecurity and snobbery, but if there was one thing I'd classify as that, it's the sheer amount of generic female-fronted streetpunk I can consume without tiring, no-one should have listened to The N.Y. Rel-X as much as I have. And this is far from that, Hard Skin's melodic chops, their songwriting skills, their ability to appropriate those bits of Sparrer, Rejects and Sham with total aplomb, make this play like a whole album of Action Pact's London Bouncers, something like Atlanta's Man's Ruin with better tunes, a beefed-up sweary Gymslips, from Joanna Newsom's (yeah that Joanna Newsom) cackle on the jubilant The Man Who Ran the Town, to Miki Berenyi's ire on You Still Here?, the runaway sting of Liela Moss's Police Car (Chasing You), 2013's second best song about a police car, Debbie Smith's bellow on the innuendo of Sausage Man, it's even better than On the Balls, feeling more chaotic (the cadence of the vocals, which were probably more hastily recorded than On The Balls occasionally slips and clatters up against the forward power of the songs) and more vital, rougher. While both albums are fucking great, I'm picking this one if given the choice every time.

Like Who Killed Spikey Jacket?, like Who's a Punk?, like Fuck You! Get Pumped!, it's a joke than runs deeper, hides truths in the smile behind its mugging and gurning, stiob vs slobs, the communal catharsis of screaming "TWO CHORDS! TWO FINGERS!" or "YOU STILL 'ERE? WE TOLD YOU WHERE TO GO!" is strong no matter how silly it is. I've seen Hard Skin live maybe half a dozen times over the past two years (one of the joys of seeing them in London is the chance that one of the vocalists from Why Do Birds... might pop up and sing a song) and every time I've felt better afterwards, running out into a city of council estates, police cars, two bob cunts; fulfilled, feeling deeper and more cognizant, feeling unbreakable, heartstrong and in possession of some hardy urban truths, at one with the bullshit. "SING LOUD! SING PROUD! LET'S GET AT 'EM! THIS IS ANOTHER TERRACE ANTHEM!"

Family Outing - demo CS

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

The Formby Channel - The Saucy Seaside EP

The latest EP of true British weirdness from Wankys side-project The Formby Channel, combining a hideous noisepunk hiss with the sunny allure of the British seaside. As the name suggests, it's George Formby meets Chaos Channel, a combination no one was really screaming out for, but the banjolele is integrated surprisingly well to the Wankys/Swankys sound, mirroring the bassline bounce with it's choppy charms, catchy, with the fizz like the chatter of overpriced arcades.

Fish Supper is a na-na-na-na-na ode to fish 'n' chips and, predictably, oral sex, done in weird scritchy noise. Last Year's Holiday like a nightmare version of Last Christmas. Kiss Me's banjolele breakdowns and pucker sound ends slipping beneath the breakers of buzz. Top Deck Shandy Lads a cunted carousing. The presence of kazoo and innuendo throughout recalling true British scum The Macc Lads, who lifted their sense of humour from British seaside postcards, which generally feature things like large-breasted women carrying suggestively shaped fruit captioned things like "How about these melons!?" which are giggled at by drunk middle-aged people and children aware that there's something vaguely forbidden about a woman saying something like "I thought the Blackpool tower would be bigger." as her husband blushes in bed beside her.

The British seaside is a fucking weird place, filled with that sort of ooh-er-nudge-nudge-wink-wink bullshit, only really attaining that carefree glow in the brief summer months, transforming the rest of the year into a kind of barren apocalyptic greyscape, take this as someone who spent Christmasses in Cleethorpes as a kid. The Formby Channel are clearly a pisstake, but there's something in this splattered shit-fi vomitof holiday cliches (Seaside Beat busting out of, falling into the classic tribute to the British beaches, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside) that speaks of the shitty misery that underpins behind happy times, happy pictures. The dark economies that lurk in any tourist trap.

The darkness hiding behind the clean clut Cliff Richard Young Ones summer stroll, the Brighton Rock menace. The Formby Channel sneer with the manic energy of Mr Punch, which if you're not familiar, is the lead character of Punch & Judy, a traditional children's seaside puppet show based around the themes of domestic violence and police brutality. This is a Viz cartoon made flesh, intentionally groanworthy lewd puns and obnoxion, silly drunken dances, putting the cunt in Scunthorpe.

Various Artists - Who's A Punk? The Very Best of British Punksploitation LP

"You sold your leather jacket
You sold your DM boots 
Took a ride in to the city
Bought yourself a three-piece suit
PSEUDO PUNK!"
- O-Level - Pseudo Punk

"CD reissues of unknown gems, and the internet-driven mass availability of everything instantly, mean pop culture's past is growing more rapidly than its present. Our sassiest sons and daughters are beyond our command, foraging far from whatever is drip-fed to them by broadcast media, and digging all manner of cross-generational guff." - Stewart Lee

As so many tedious cunts are fond of telling us, in talking head TV shows, in heavy farts of serious proclamations in broadsheet newspapers, bad memoirs: "PUNK CHANGED EVERYTHING!" The call of '77 holds a powerful pull. It gave said tedio-twats a new ground zero to base their reductive turning-point culturual histories on. You can find endless musings on the influence of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Damned, the New York Dolls, thousands upon thousands of words fixating on this point in time, reciting the same anecdotes about the 100 Club, the Bromley Contingent, the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall, the King's Road.

When rock music MEANT SOMETHING, when it thugged itself down to its base impulses, the raw pop, the two-minute scuttle, when it smashed the self-indulgence of prog to shit bits, before it built itself back up into the self-indulgence of cock rock. That brief moment when we were free, bright and colourful in the dingy gloom of the late-70s, before it all became homogenised, safe, stolen. Before punk died.

Ah, fuck off.

Yeah it was big thing, evidently, it was a glorious great fucking thing. But to strip it down to a few choice singles, to dress it up as a clean narrative of Anglo-American whiteboy cool that burnt itself out immediately, is to gussy it up in the most boring way. Killing history, and not in the cool way of killing history like nutcase futurists wanking off over concrete and machines did, but just stuffing the mess into a tidy digestible nugget, to swallow, to file away, to put on a pedestal and forget. Cos there was that, there was the shit everyone and their dog knows about, but there was so much more. In any cultural shift, any explosion of genre, the hanger-ons abound, the squealing wannabes,  the forgotten geniuses too weird or strung out to put it all together for more than one short blast. Swirling about in the cultural detritus of punk rock. Punk rock, with its obsession with fleeting joys, with ineptitude and idiocy, secret histories in limited pressings, ritualistic violence in reclaimed spaces. The perfect genre for the dumb ephemera to gets its due.

Such cultural disposables are what KBD comps are made of, leading to carboot cratediggers flipping through disc after disc, box after box of passable and bog-standard boogies looking for that one special moment, when something, some of that teenage hate, love, talent and idiocy combined and punk rock, in all its stabbing freshness, was played right, if there is any right way for it to be played. And then with those incompetent punx savants, you've got the buzzing bandwagon scramblers try to eke out a few sticky quid from its temporary ubiquitousness, the passing and the past-it trying to latch onto a new sound. The fake punks.

So here's Who's a Punk: The Very Best of British Punksploitation, an unofficial comp LP following on Je Suis Punk: The Very Best of European Punksploitation, which puts together some of the most brazen scampunk, the most on-the-nose parodies, to come burbling up in the fag-end of the first wave of punk. Containing songs like Airship's Gimme a Can of Spraypaint (featuring a dude who wrote Eurovision songs) and Radio Active's Alltime Needletime Loser (released on the BBC's record label making it a state-funded punk banger), weird things, offcuts, the finest collection of cash-ins, pastiches and pisstakes that those wild pre-Thatcherite years had to offer and it's so damn good.

It's a comp where the songs mostly strike with the same coherent tones, seeing as they're all based on these media-nasty perceptions of punk, those outside of the snarling amorphous beast that is punk rock have always had a clearer vision of its purpose that those struggling, invested and uncomfortably heartbound, inside its contradictions, these narrow stereotypes of unhinged evil youth, filled with tabloid bombast and chortling scoffs at the idiot kids and their idiot ways.

Punksploitation endures, of course, as punk does, in recent times we've had Riff Raff's Kokayne (off his new album Neon Icon) or that Kate Nash song Under-Estimate the Girl from a couple years ago. Kokayne negating the likes of FIDLAR's entire existence with the perfect pop of it's high-as-hell sun-scoured beach-punk sleaze. "Look who it is: the white Chris Rock." Kate Nash's Under-Estimate the Girl seeming to come from a genuine appreciation of the noisy renegade slop of Riot Grrl and Riff Raff, well who knows why Riff Raff does what Riff Raff does, Riff Raff moves in mysterious ways, ours is not to reason why. Plus they're clearly not cash-ins, they're genre-exercises maybe, but there's nothing obvious to be gained financially from detouring into the sounds of punk, which is no longer some freshly blooming cultural phenomenon with record companies chucking wads of fifties at it by the day, it's another part of the musical tapestry, which you can draw from in earnest, or just snaffle bits of to slice into your work, indie, metal, pop or rap. There's not much to exploit, but on Who's a Punk there's still the idea that punk is a next big thing, an open field ready to give up its filthy lucre if you just nail down the punk life accurately enough, with the right balance of funny voices and aggression, keeping these songs all on a fairly narrow line.

Similarly, the songs follow similar structures, generally breaking down in to chuntering punk-spattered rock, where, despite some valiant efforts it never succeeds at quite ripping the stripped-down drive of punk totally free from its older, slower, fancier moorings, pubrock/rockandroll parts shining through the obnoxion, in the mid-tempo boogies, the melodic guitar solos, classic rock lyrical stutters, shined-up garage riffs punctuated by horn squawks, in the organ peaks and the vocals too sweet and smooth to be the bark of unclean urchins and glue-sniffin reprobates. The fakepunks behind these cuts, people who can actually play their instruments really incapable of totally committing to the ugly rushing clumsy energy that the trupunx require.

So there are echoes of Chuck Berry in Steve Voice's School Days and The Monks' Johnny B. Rotten, one a croon of adolescent breakout yearning, twitching energy bogged down in the stunting grey grip of education, "READIN'/WRITIN'/BLEEDIN'/FIGHTIN'/LATIN HOMEWORK IT'S TOO HARD FOR YOO-OO-OOU/YOU DON'T WANNA LEARN", the other dancing round Johnny Rotten's day-to-day existence as half-real punk icon, struggling with the pressures of fame and infamy. "They think I'm crazy so I tell 'em I AM!"

Cos the songs here are well-up on that poser sheen, songs by professional musicians, slipping on a cloak of new wave slime in order to thrash out a couple simple chords, snatch at a couple of simple quid, they've got a deep suspicion of all fronting with that bornpunk, all those who really believe, so they come at it with the brickbats and belittling, pointing out all the silly inconsistencies in punk's new and molten noise, poking holes in it like a ripped-up punk tee: "I pogoed into town when I picked up me dole, I buy a new wave t-shirt but the weather's too cold, ent it funny how they're charging more for the ones with the holes?" jeers Septimus's Do You Wanna Touch My Safety Pin?

And maybe they've got the inklings of a point, punk icons are self-made, Joe Strummer, a man with some of the keenest sense of self-mythology you could come across (see him in the Ramones doc recalling the first meeting between the Clash and the Ramones as if he was some nostalgic teen in thrall to '77 legend wistfully describing a punx take on the fabled Beethoven/Mozart meetin, rather than, you know, Joe fucking Strummer, of the fucking Clash, punk icon, the actual bloke who was climbing into the Ramones dressing room through an alley window in this story). Uber-punk, his pronouncements on what was and wasn't punk rock, often treated as some sort of unimpeachable stone-tablet truth amongst his hopeful acolytes, but he did his time in fairly generic outfits like The 101ers, who were passable but unoriginal, and covered dadrock favourites like the Rolling Stones, a far-cry from Strummer screaming about how "PHONY BEATLEMANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST" on London Calling's apocalyptic rumble, and they fall by the wayside in the Stalinist (the Russian prick dude, not the Japanese punk band) revisionism of him as an alpha bornpunk, not Joe Strummer was a pub rocker then-en-en-en-en. Johnny Du Cann was a guy who'd put in hours in Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Thin Lizzy, and here he contributes the defiant fashionpunk Throw Him In Jail, casting the disdain of punk as pure aesthetic jealousy: "THROW HIM IN JAIL BECAUSE IN THE PEOPLE IN THE PARK DON'T LIKE HIM, AND THE PEOPLE IN THE STREET DON'T LIKE THE WAY HE LOOKS/BECAUSE HE ALWAYS LOOKS SO GOOD/THEY THINK THEY LOOK BETTER!". He was one of those older rock guys to whom punk's furious cutdown purity spoke to (like Phil Lynott, like Lemmy) and maybe in an alternate universe in which the 101ers had a bit more time to get established before 1976, The Clash are just some weird cast-off band made up of washed-up try-hards who cracked out a few great violent punk singles, attempts at capturing this new thing, before they disintegrated.

But that doesn't matter, or if it matters it matters in a way that the screams of "POSER!" or "FAKE!" fail to grasp, all The Clash's riotous politics and Ramones-bitin' pigeon-shootin' pissant scrappiness that is just as true as it would've been any other way. What the skepticism of the fakepunks don't get is that the reinvention is the glory of it. Yellow Dog's Down at the Vortex is the tale of the coolest punk girl in town, hardfaced, cool, no-shit-takin. "She'll wait around the bar til you buy her a drink/Then she'll swig it down, spit out and tell you you stink." But then the final verse drops the chugging punk steam and the rock and roll drawl and flips into a twee chatter of typewriters and overly enunciated formalities "But during the day she's a perfect lady of course/She's typing away at the office of her dear old boss", before snapping back into that punk with a blown raspberry. Yeah it's fun to dig in to that trupunx shimmy, to make like D-Clone's raw noisewall Don't Wanna Become Weekend Punk, but so many of us are weekend punx, slipping the vest on on Friday night, changing from work trousers/work shirt into patched-jeans and Infernoh shirts, finding the real joy when we can grab it, saving the freedom for when it's workable. As Yellow Dog puts it "Every night she leaves her office-face behind, she goes down to the club to be with her own kind." They got it there, just as Richard Newman does in the dancefloor transformation of Juvenille City.

The chief creative talent behind Yellow Dog was professional songwriter Kenny Young, the pen behind literally dozens of songs in various genres, most notably: Under the goddamn Boardwalk, a song so timeless even Bruce Willis couldn't fuck it up that much, that sort of professionalism is why the songs on Who's a Punk have hooks for days, earworms that get their silly, safety-pin and spraypaint choruses embedded studprong deep in your skull, get your feet movin' everytime, doin' that trendhop hop. Vortex was co-written by guitarist Herbie Armstrong, who in the last couple years appeared on Britain's Got Talent, continuing his travails from trend to trend, trying to grab that next elusive thing. And not quite getting it. Cos maybe my favourite line in Down at the Vortex is its most egregiously incompetent one, the chorus which proclaims its heroine to be "PUNKIN' AND A-JUNKIN' DOWN AT THE VORTEX!", such a clearly misguided oldfuck stab at what constitutes the language of the young, shot and missed stabs at punk cants and slang, just splaying themselves out goofy and unaware, it tickles a similar spot for me as non-anglophone bands smacking their songs full of untutored English-cool, shattered syntax and garbled grammar, instead here it's fumbled attempts to replicate the yakking and yammering of streetcorner kids. A lot of these songs have those failures, either in their clear tryhard gusto "IT'S A SILLY SILLY LIFE WHEN YER GOBBIN' ON A COP!" as Wozo has it, digging out crunching epenthesis ("GOBBIN ON DA PEOPLE IS A WASTE A SPIT-AH!") in sub-Rotten drawl, Airship's Gimme a Can of Spray Paint and it's brash chant of "I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm really bored and I'm restless!" Many of these songs just don't get it, or they half-get it, they take that shot and they wing it, and in that they illuminate punk from this angle of misapplied, garishly daubed and distorted tropes, the silly voices of Colin Lloyd Bands's Badly Bruised, Slightly Stoned: soft whispers and crossing yelps, the dramatic groan of Horrorcomic's Jesus Crisis "AM I IN HEAVEN OR AM I IN HELL!?" and High Rise Love, by the vilely-monikered Gyppo, the pseudopunk alter-egos of the Gerry Rafferty Band, a piece of selfish vacant cruelty disguised as bleak urban romance, and you can tell it's not realpunk, cos realpunk is bleak urban romance disguised as selfish vacant cruelty, obviously.

FAKE PUNK! Living on the knife-edge of teenage defensiveness and insecurity, an undue amount of time in my life has been spent worrying about being called out as not being punk enough, nervous that someone would call me out for not knowing some Crass lyrics, not being cognizant of a particular classic UK82 record, of thinking the wrong Circle Jerks album was the best, of sneaking into punk rock through the backdoor of Blink-182 and message boards rather than having been born with a clenched fist in the air and I DON'T WANNA BE LEARNED stick and poked across my throat, screaming Black Easter's What the Fuck with my first words.

It didn't happen obviously, because that's way dumb and everyone was probably living through some version of the same silly anxieties, everybody posin' hard like this thing was born in them, because they're scared of how much it means to them, scared of some dim aphasic possibility that it could get snatched away from them, and most of the "YOU'RE NOT PUNK!" finger-pointing probably comes from those just getting out ahead of that. And by the time skinhead did once get angry at me and shout in my face for not singing along at an Off With Their Heads show, that was at a point in my life when I was way past those worries so instead of slinking away mortified I just laughed, the ghost of adolescent terror slipping past easily in the sweat and heat.

I live without those particular anxieties now, but it's a thing, a big thing for a lot of people for a while, patrolling the borders of this particular subcultural hinterland, keen-eyed for intruders, impostors those who will seek to use it for profit, constant arguments and discussions about what really IS punk. Peruse the fake punk tag on tumblr and you'll come across a mix of knowing embraces of these punksploitation highlights, clips of Mexican genre classic Intrepidos Punks and Pain playing on CHiPs, and then seventeen year olds ranting furiously about posers, hipsters, Green Day, Avril Lavigne and the difference between punk and emo. As it should be.

But punk rock is a construct, a construct containing all this beauty, all this crackling, scrabbling life and meaning. A scatty harebrained collision of rebel hells and progressive workings, scathing nihilistic dartings and caustic noise. But it's still a construct, an obviously made-up thing. We're close enough to its birth to remember its very human origins, to still have the bare foundations visible, but far enough away that's properly embedded itself now, in the cultural conscious and in the lives of thousands across this rock.

A relatively new philosopho-musical contraption of roughly codified teenage hate, teenage love, battalions of saints and guerilla incendiary sabotage mutineers, dumb kids disenfranchised, smart kids with a gritty political consciousness aborning, rude kids, lost kids, death wish kids. Vulgarity kids, warrior kids, stomping teenage ignorance, painful teenage knowledge, growing up out of it, growing up deeper into it. Quickly being ordered and reordered, pushed and prodded, struggling against edges and redrawing the boundaries of its own internal limits. You can dig in to the political, the fight, the building of new places, safer places, from which to craft and shape your own community, real and tender, a base to mount the struggle from, to fight against bigotry and militarism and all that fascist blankness. And that is some real good shit, real vital work that makes each show, each song worth it so so much.

But then, there's another way to take it, to blow up the ridiculous aspects of it, to invest in the cartoon and to suck in all the spiky ultraviolence and snotty alienation and play the whole stinking lot for rasping choking laughs. And these discussions go on. And you find yourself jumping from side to side from point to point freely, holding the big twirling mass of contradictions and loving punk for its searing noise, for its DIY ethics, for its endless hope and limitless nihilism at the same time. And I still give something of a fuck about what it is and what it isn't, most of the time, finding myself mildly bemused last week at those (probably more on that tumblr tag) getting heated over the bloke from Iron Maiden saying punks couldn't play their instruments when I was trying to avoid being pissed-off the thumping clickbait cunt from Cerebral Ballzy claiming in the sodding Guardian that punks had to be able to play their instruments to be proper punk.

It's nice to imagine that if you can come at a reconciliation of the two you'd find some secret area where it comes together, the present rage shadowing the theatrical nihilism, and once your embrace this idea of protective artifice, then artificiality rings true and beautiful, the gap in sectioned off parts of lives. Hiding the true parts of resistance in the big snarling shell. So fake punk, rejecting that certain earnestness of only back the right-thinking and right-living, and glorying in the stereotypes, PUNK as first-level bad guys in 2D beat em ups, extras in dystopian b-movies, gimmicky dickhead spite and living off it, in it.

Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias are probably the most well-known band featured on Who's a Punk, the Mancunian comedy-rockers who had been skewering rock's hypocrisies for a couple years by the time punk broke through to give them some more material to work with. Their classic Snuff Rock EP tore apart the Pistols, The Damned and The Clash with numbers such as Gobbin' on Life and Kill. Here's there's the song Fuck You, taken from their Heads Down, No Nonsense, Mindless Boogie EP, which also featured Thank You, exactly the same song but for the chorus. A punk's-dead-long-live-punk stomper, that, despite being an obvious joke, bears a resemblance to Cock Sparrer's Where Are They Now? as much as anything else. Defiant, but self-defeating, living through this great change, this great disappointment, and emerging with fury intact. It's a dumb song, a funny one, cataloguing punk's casualties, building itself up for its epiphany, the grand statement: "I want to be for free, want to be myself. Even though I sound like everybody else. I’ve still got something valid to say, something to tell ya, gonna tell you anyway." then, as you're ready for the revelation, "FUCK YOU!" Man that's such a dumb into-the-wall pay-off (echoes of Life of Brian's long set-up for "I AM THE MESSIAH. NOW FUCK OFF.") but it speaks to something more, times when your idealism and has been submerged in some inarticulate profane rage, you know that you could set the world to rights but instead you can just scream and shout and blast punk music. I feel that. I don't care if this is tearing that feeling apart. This is how it goes, ride a joke out straight and live with it and see what happens.

Though that attitude can't always work, it fails in the face of the true ignorance on show in early parody rap singles, Kenny Everett or Roland Rat or whatever, that sort of fake rap is the worst, partly cos three chords are easier to learn than breath control and flow, and mostly cos those things are heavy with racist overtones and a smug sense of superiority. No redeeming features there, but here, with fake punk, crucially, a tone of cynical detached stupidity just fits punk rock perfectly, you come at punk rock with a derisive sneer and punk will embrace the sneer, lean into the derision, assimilate it, mold it as part of itself on its own race to the bottom, taking itself to pieces before you can do it to it. Punk rock. Fuck you! And if you think there's no punker title than Fuck You! then just take a look at the Wozo song which is just called Punk Rock. ("WOULD YOU BELIEVE WHAT WE GOT!? PUNK ROCK!"). Once you know something's bullshit you can invest anything you want in it and come away clear. Fake punk, true believer.

And this is far from the be-all-and-end-all of the punksploitation sprawl, which continues to suck in many of those record nerds and giggling punx lifers cos how many got into punk through those cartoon versions? In Star Trek IV and on Quincy, those cool lookin' pierced things, seductively evil, annoying and liberated in their pinned and patched clothes. You see that and it's a whole new fork in the road opening up before you. So maybe you get into punk like that, before swerving away from that into a more diligent political sphere, and then dodging back out, keeping, hopefully, the social-awareness, but ready to embrace again the stereotype, ready to make that space between the dress-up and the real business of living conscious in a capital-fucked racist and patriarchal world, or to hold both at once, idiocy and idealism, ready to pogo along to Who's a Punk or Los Punk Rockers' Los Exitos De Los Sex Pistols, another recently reissued piece of complete punk trash, a cash-in record from a Spanish label who couldn't afford to license Nevermind the Bollocks so they just hired a bunch of people to rerecord the entire album, people who sounds like they first picked up an instrument 20 minutes before walking into the studio and have only the most slippery grasp on the rudiments of the English language. It's a glowing shambles, a tinny unlistenable burble, transmitted straight from the shit headphone dimension, a shameless inept profit-pounce that sounds like how you imagined the Sex Pistols sounded when you were just a kid who'd heard vague intimations of loud, scary louts who swore on TV.

On the other side of the globe, Aussie comic Doug Mulray (infamous for having a show so bad it was cancelled mid-broadcast) penned the alltime (needletime?) classic I'm a Punk, thick with many of the tropes here, the chugging keys, the deep wastrel pride, with its chorus of "I TAKE DRUGS AND GET DRUNK/I TAKE DRUGS AND GET DRUNK!" Towards the end of last year I submitted a story to a punk fiction collection featuring a scene where a bunch of dumb punx singalong to its utterly brainless jabber, three months later I found myself in a bar where it got stuck on the stereo and the place went fucking off, dangerously swirling dances, punk singalongs, diving off the bartop. The fiction (the fake) made flesh.

So Who's a Punk? Jumping from the fashioncut of Throw Him in Jail, lookin' good, lookin' mean, the young knowledge of Juvenille City, confident and stark, Do You Wanna Touch My Safety Pin?'s warble of uncertainty. This thing tears punk down completely and to some minds it might expose the house of sand that is punk, a thing so shot through of holes, tatterdemalion and unsteady that it lives swaying, endures with some sort of scurrilous poser grace.

It's indestructible, partly due to its amorphous spinning constant redefinition, partly due to the constant wave of kids stumbling across it, each breathing fresh life into those circling discussions and personal definitions in zines and message boards and early hours halfsickdrunk post show discussions. But it really lives cos no matter how hard you co-opt punk, it lives not in its heroes but in its wayside fallers, not on its stages but in its pits, we'll take the dance no matter where the riff was nicked from, no matter where the song was aimed. It lives still cos no matter how viciously attack it, you're not gonna hate it more than someone that loves it, has been betrayed and disappointed by it, has come to terms with it and then fucked it off all over again, and again and again, so within that roiling chaotic dischord you find a genre of absurd sparks and profound hopes so self-lacerating as to live only as scars. WHO REALLY IS A PUNK? It's not real, in so many ways it's not real, intangible, and it means so so so much, as a badge, a label, a journey, a way forward, a media misconception wielded as a weapon, a line-in-the-sand, a lifeforce. And if you disagree, well shit, gimme a can of spray paint, I'll decorate your bedroom wall, I'll write yer some words to tell you exactly how I feel about you all. Fake punk. Fake as me. FAKE YOU!

"WOULD YOU BELIEVE? HOW CAN THEY SAVE YA? IS IT MAKE BELIEVE!? OR IS IT REAL? IT'S UP TO YOU, MAN! IT'S HOW YOU FEEL!" - Horrorcomic - Jesus Crisis

Crown Court - Trouble From London

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.

Caves - Betterment

This album starts with silence, longer than usual, then you hear it, the sounds of a band walking into a studio and setting themselves up, the little creaks and shuffles before they get stuck in. Then they begin figuring out a riff, this slightly bent and battered thing that they lock down and then mirror in doubletime and the vocals kick in: "I don't care! I don't care! Go fuck yourself." That's this band at their best, casually direct lyrically, soaring vocally, ramshackle and runaway musically.

Caves have that straining, that repetitive distended skid dragged forward by the dynamic bellow of the vox, that slap against the music, rather than playing with them. Everything aches, everything is shot in deep and held just long enough to break upon the fringes of discomfort.

Caves play a bit like a less burnished RVIVR, moving with a similar pop-punk cascade, bits of brightness amongst the dust. Fortunately they avoid the go-nowhere momentum-stealing plodders of the RVIVR album, but they do fall victim to another classic pop-punk misstep: acoustic songs. ACOUSTIC. I've come to see acoustic songs on punk albums the same way as skits on hip-hop albums, sometimes okay, often skippable, colouring the album's aural texture, as a rule more bearable when they're about crime rather than fucking. Here at least it's pleasingly awkward, retaining a certain sharpness, but acoustic songs just feel like a naked play for feeling that this album doesn't need.

Theyre's so much already here, in the fuzzrumble and ghostcalls on <3 Koala or Rubino's nervy tumbledown energy, the vocals intercutting desperate/snotty. The crashing up-ended love song of Build Against, "Sometimes, sometimes leaving is hard." The bluntness of Babyccino ("Feelings, no-one cares about your feelings/No-one cares when you need to make a change") and it's shivering feedback runout. The wallop of Ender, which Belushis its acoustic intro to bits and gets huge. It's an album of messily built music, full of gravelly bass and slippery sweet guitar lines, solidly stated emotions run aground, pain dealt with, softer more perfect moments embraced when they can be, punk rock reaching forward, towards betterment.

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.

  

Hunger - Dying is Ordinary

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


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