One hour of punk rock interspersed with incompetence and mutually antagonistic conversation about the Berlin wall, Motorhead, Kreayshawn's relationship to punk rock, awkward interactions with members of bands and other fun things to make the brain grow. Tracklisting after the break.
PODCAST EPISODE TWO
Monday, 20 February 2012
Friday, 17 February 2012
So Scratched Into Our Souls #11: The Queers - Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You)
"Anyway, while record collector scum fail to understand that the point of accumulating info is to marshal it into an argument, they have their uses as trivia merchants who can be consulted by those who know that facts alone are useless things. There is a huge difference between playing DUMB and being genuinely STOOPID. This explains why I rate the Queers and loathe lumpen-intellectual Britpop wannabes like Blur and Oasis." - Stewart Home, Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock
The Queers are a dumb band. Deliberately so. Because pull it all down, and pop music, punk music, pretty much any music that relies more on verve, heart and snappiness over technical virtuosity relies on, is the raw fuckwitted immediacy of adolescent emotion. And that is some fully dumb shit.
And that's why they wrote the greatest love song of all time in Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You Tonight). Because love is dumb, a beautiful relentless assault on the intellect, a rabbit-punch to Rodin's thinker. It is a well well worn approach to describe it as something which stuns, stupefies, befuddles, discombobulates and turns over the place like a bored puppy. Though this doesn't really say much, because love, in all its snowflake simplicity, is kind of a well-mined subject, a Diavik-hole, dead-earth chasm of artistic and emotional pursuit, twatted-out by every single person who's ever penned any words in anger or desire, or angry desire. Bitter love, unrequited love, joyous love, hopeless love, barbed-wire love, vicious love, viscous love, self-destructive love, anyway you want to play it and every combination. There are no new angles, but fuck it, what else are you gonna write about? The Queers write Love Songs for the Retarded.
Sandwiched on that record between the more direct paean to love-as-idiocy Teenage Bonehead and the fairly self-explanatory ode I Can't Stop Farting, sits Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You) and it is, for me, the greatest ever love song ever primarily for two reasons: 1) my emotional capacity is a fundamentally limited beast best expressed in two minute pop-punk songs 2) this particular two minute pop-punk song perfectly captures the way that a relationship with someone you love is both an internal perpetual motion machine that often doesn't require interaction outside itself and an outward kicking force that does not give a fucking shit whose shit it fucks up.
I called in sick to work today and stayed in bed 'til noon
And now I just don't care what's going on outside this room
Things aren't getting better
My future's not too bright
Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight
Me and you will walk around so pointlessly
Smashing things, jacked up on way too much caffeine
I'm really going no nowhere
I hate this shitty life
Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight
In this song, love isn't a glorious thing, not in the exultant majestic
sense of the word, anyhow. It's not a blanket to envelop everything in a
warm homogeneous glow (fuck hippies yo), it's a twisted tight little
thing that you cultivate in private spaces, in shared glances that crack
the both of you up, all those silly little moments held as cradled
weapons, when everything else in the world might be full of shit, to
fire spitballs at life and all its annoyances from this perfect bundle
of companionship, twitching in rhythm with in each other. It
acknowledges the futility and smallness of these actions, their place as
a because that's always been the fundamental optimist/pessimist
question for me, beyond half-glasses of water, whether the light we find
in our likes and loves, in people and records and moments with these
things, makes the darkness seem all the darker or whether the presence
of that pressing black around us makes the light brighter. Fuck the
World raises that question but never answers it, it tumbles down with
each line, another depressing gripe, another acknowledgement of futility
but then that last shout brings you right back up. Fucking's better
when the two of you are fucking the world at the same time. Does it
bring you back up all the way? Is it enough? Who really knows. Some have
made it enough. Probably more haven't. But it leaves you on that
upwards shot, it's got the hope in the right place. Battle lines drawn,
two vs billions, a war cry, a charge and a smile. Berserker confidence.
Crazy dumb but unstoppable for now and all nows screamed high in the mix
above thens or whens and what-ifs so it's all you can hear.
But a couple months ago, I got to see The Queers with the person I love, the person that I think about when I hear these sort of songs, and I had always sort of thought about that moment. We all project the vision of our worked over slick sung loves that we learnt from these songs and such onto the way we think the future will pan out and maybe all on some level think that there can't help but be a perfect melding of song, story and place. That as the song you love plays and the person you love stands next to you then it'll build into a moment greater than itself, a moment of battle-lines, two vs billions etc. The song will burst itself out onto reality and things will make absolute unholy sense for two minutes or so.
But what actually happened was, we were all physically shattered from three days of drinking and dancing and a night of fitful sleep on a 9-hour bus-ride punctuated by a couple of people in front of us swapping bible trivia as we rolled through little Florida towns in the early hours. Was it everything, was it all that I had imagined when I listened to that song alone and aching years ago and had romance painted for me in those two minutes. No, we were all so dead on our feet that I could barely stand-up and my girlfriend passed out on a bar-stool wearing sugar skull make-up and we left after about four songs, well before they got round to Fuck the World. Ah, well. That's how it works out. Art and music aren't everything, they're a bunch of touchstones and hot water bottles, they're vastly important, but they're not comprehensive documentary nor valid plans. The narratives we construct from them get knocked down, the perfect moments we imagine when the collision of life and art coalesces into a transcendent series of well-soundtracked kisses, that shit just doesn't work out like in the dumb movies, and the dumb songs, and the dumb books. The perfect song isn't always playing on the radio, the perfect movie isn't always on in the background of the bar to teach you some trite life-lesson on your third or fourth drink, to furnish you with a quick manageable epiphany. Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ooooaa.
I don't need the Queers for that, the way I used to, I don't need to hang on to Fuck the World as a promise, a dream, but I still love the song, I'm still gonna listen to them, when I want some simple melody and refreshing snot, when I want a perfect picture of the whirling dervish of punk rock love, but I don't see it as an all-encompassing thing in the way I once got caught up in it, ideal for the sort of people kicked most of their ideals to pieces in exactly the sort of caffeine-jack rushes the song builds itself around. Maybe it's fuck Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You, I'm hanging out with you.
Flyer by Mitch Clem.
I love, and I know that those freewheeling itchy moments this love song so perfectly bottles and kisses exist, but I know that there's so much more to things than that, and that when those perfectly punk rock times present themselves then it's pretty fun to throw yourself into them and roll up in the collision of the various loves of your life, abstract and personal, when the music and life do accidentally fall in step for a few paces then I'm going to appreciate that and sing my fucking lungs red and dry but I don't need it the way I used to need it, I can say Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You without the song, but I'll still spin Love Songs for the Retarded when I want something simple and dumb and great, but I don't need to endlessly romanticise something that I've already got, to moon over a pantheon of bursts of verse and chorus from Cometbus' Punk Rock Love to a dozen cheapskate Thunder Roads and that Act 2, Scene 2, I know life to be better than romanticisation, but The Queers will still have that place in the wispy dreams that have touched me and shaped my stupid head, a spot in the fun of things. And besides, it's not like I'm gonna stop relating to I Can't Stop Farting anytime soon. Pfffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
I started a podcast with a friend of mine.
The name of this podcast is the Fullthrottlelazy podcast, named after the band me and him occasionally play about with, in turn named after a song by the third greatest punk band of all time (after Hickey and Old Skull) Fancy Pants and the Cellphones.
PODCAST EPISODE ONE
PODCAST EPISODE ONE
A non-comprehensive guide to the best music of 2011 according to me
Full lengths:
50. Something I haven't heard yet. No matter how hard I try, every year around February/March I discover or listen to one album from the previous year that completely blows my mind. It might be an album I've been meaning to listen to but haven't (this year I really wanted the Vaginors (ex-Bloodclot Faggots, heard a track or two on youtube and it's amazing) and Peer Precious albums (on Dirtcult and compared to Hickey) but I haven't got round to getting them yet) or more likely something I've never heard of before. So I'll reserve this place on the list for that as yet unlistened to masterpiece.
49. F-Bombers - Pledge Allegiance - Angry white man chants from professional musicians. Except with really strong female vocals. Sort of like that poppy New England street punk (Ducky Boys, Pinkerton Thugs etc). Not gonna tear the world apart but fun. Best songs: Whiskey and Cheap Wine, Working Class, Billy Bad-Ass
48. The Dauntless Elite - More Bloody Bad News - More bloody great songs. Extremely English pop-punk. Best songs: Better Than Nowt, Danson in the Dark, Thinkles
47. Flashlights - I'm Not Alone - Superchunk-style pop-punk. Best songs: Choking, It's Raining
46. The Manix - Neighborhood Wildlife - Singalong midwestern pop-punk. Yeah, that stuff. Just like your grandmother used to make. Provided your grandmother was in Rivethead. Best songs: Fingers Crossed, Red Truck, This Old House
45. Something Fierce - Don't Be So Cruel - Danceable punky indie-pop, or maybe danceable indie pop-punk. Something like that anyway. Best songs: Ghosts of Industry, Dying Young These Days
44. Dead to Me - Moscow Penny Ante - A return to straighter punk rock for one of my favourite punk bands of the last few years. Best songs: The World Gone Mad, The Monarch Hotel
43. Heartsounds - Drifter - Some modern day melodic punk rock combined with 90s skate punk and even a couple of metal solos thrown in for good measure. A compelling fusion of styles. Best songs: Race to the Bottom, You Are Not my Body
42. Girl in a Coma - Exits and All the Rest - Fantastic huge indie-rock tied together by incredible vocals. Best songs: Hope, Knocking at Your Door.
41. OBN IIIs - The One and Only - Saw these guys supporting the New Bomb Turks and it says a lot about their stage presence that they were memorable even when compared to possibly the greatest garage-punk band of all time. The album manages to capture the ferocity and anger of their live show. Pure garage rock. Best songs: If the Shit Fits, New Innocence
40. Omegas - Blasts of Lunacy - Blasts of lunacy. Best songs: Disgusting Fun, FSOM
39. The Copyrights - North Sentinel Island - It's a Copyrights album. The most singalong of singalong bands. This album seemed to have more bummer moments than they usually indulge in though. Best songs: Worn Out Passport, 20 Feet Tall
38. Dead Milkmen- The King In Yellow - Maybe it's just the knowledge of the tragic absence of Dave Blood, but this album really seems to highlight that melancholy tinge that the Dead Milkmen always had bubbling under their goofiness. A great comeback after a long time away. Best songs: The King in Yellow, Or Maybe It Is, Cold Hard Ground
37. Wugazi - 13 Chambers - It's Wu Tang and Fugazi. Perfect combination. Best songs: Ghetto Afterthought, Sleep Rules Everything Around Me, Shame On Blue
36. Elders - Blind Rage - Kind of crusty but well-rooted in classic 80s hardcore sounds and that's why I love it. Best songs: Blood on the Blade, Out of Spite, Philosophy Failures
35. Burmese - Lun Yurn - I listen to a shit-ton of noisy music, which means that I end up finding stuff that most people would consider loud and disruptive to be fairly relaxing. Sludge-metal is my chillout music of choice, but there's no way that you could ever relax while listening to this incredible slab of aggression and noise, it's like a kick in the face from an iron horse. Definitely gonna tear the world apart. Best songs: This isn't really a 'favourite songs' kind of album.
34. The Dwarves - Are Born Again - Here's a weird thing. The opening lines of this album proffer two, some would say contradictory, some would say complimentary, facets of The Dwarves' manifesto: #1 Let's Just Get High and Fuck Some Sluts! #2 A Cure for Cancer and for AIDS. while the first is business as usual for the jizz-punk shock-pop, and their usual miasma of pop-punk, garage and boooooobs, I'm not really sure about the second, I doubt it represents a maturing of these eternal adolescents but the weird thing is that shortly after this album came out I ended up reading two articles about serious advances in the search for cures to AIDS and cancer. This leads me to only one conclusion: The Dwarves have the power to rewrite history, I can only quiver in terror at what the global socio-political consequences of the song Working Class Hole will be. A goofy mix of punk rock snot and pure pop sensibilities.
33. Cobra Skulls - Agitations - Cobra Skulls maintain their usual irrepressible bouncy punk rock with what feels like more of an early-80s hardcore influence at times. Best songs: Solastalgia, Hiding, The Mess
32. Brain F - Sleep Rough - Manages to be sweet and very noisy at the same time. Garage punk/pop. Best songs: Seawall Sea, Sleep Rough, No More/More
31. Star Fucking Hipsters - From the Dumpster to the Grave - A fantastic guest verse from Boots Riley on one song, a really strong They Might Be Giants cover. Some of the strongest songwriting Stza has ever displayed, just, you know, ignore most of the lyrics unless you're 15. Best songs: Ana Ng, War Widows Vietnam, 911 til Infinity
30. Shards - Shards - Deeply dark, fantastically melodic hardcore punk. Best songs: DMT, Breeder Scum, Bleach
29. Mischief Brew - The Stone Operation - The usual compelling punk rock injected with the rebel sounds of a dozen folk-traditions. Best songs: Three-Cord Circus, Pompous Ass Manifesto, On the Sly
28. Pharoahe Monch - W.A.R. - One of the best MCs of all time delivers a timely sweeping political concept album. My favourite verse on this though is probably Jean Grae's turn on Assassins, she also put out a really solid mixtape this year and I can't wait for her album proper next year. Best songs: Assassins, W.A.R., Let My People Go
27. Fucked Up - David's Town - A stylistic exercise that also manages to be lots of fun and includes some incredible songs? Count me in. Best songs: Do You Feed?, Byrdesdale Spa FC
26. Good Luck - Without Hesitation - The first time I heard this album I rated it a lot higher but I got a bit tired of it. It doesn't have anything as simply perfect as Stars Were Exploding/Bringing Them Back to Life on Into Lake Griffy but still some wonderful noodly often melancholic pop-punk. Best songs: Novel Figure, Impossible
25. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life - This album is huge in every sense of the word. Giant in concept, execution and sound. I'll be honest, I didn't really invest in the rock opera aspect of it and taken as a whole it can be a little overwhelming, but there isn't a single bad song on this and for an album well over an hour long that's pretty incredible. Sweeping and triumphant. Best songs: Queen of Hearts, Lights Go Up, Running On Nothing
24. Wiccans - Skullduggery - Like Elders if they incorporated more melodic influences. Best songs: Disorder, Silver Lining
23. Underground Railroad to Candyland - Know Your Sins - Power-pop from one of the most consistent punk rock songwriters of the last 20 years. Best songs: My Number's on the Stall, We Aren't the World, The Wicked Shakes
22. Dude Jams - How to Abuse Everything - A bunch of songs about being fuck-ups who get fucked-up, like that 20 second Rivethead song in album form. Also the best cover art of the year. Best songs: Timebomb
21. Vacation - s/t - Somehow managed to be simultaneously poppier and noisier than their preceding seven inches, I was a little thrown off at first but on repeated listens I'm amazed how they've managed to develop their sound and integrate a bunch of different shit while still keep this a totally cohesive recognisably pop-punk album. Best songs: Cop Knock, Columbus is Not a Hero
20. The Reaganomics - Lower the Bar - The Reaganomics probably hate you and it's a shit-ton of fun. Favourite songs: Ed Hardy, Chireland, The WB
19. Caves - Homeward Bound - Catchier than the singles collection, same great vocals. Best songs: I'm Not Sorry, Homeward Bound
18. Midnight - Satanic Royalty - More metal than a devil horns thrown from the window of an 84 Camaro with flame decals full of long-haired seventeen year olds as they try and catch air from the humpback bridge just outside of town. Best songs: You Can't Stop Steel, Violence on Violence, Holocaustic Deafening
17. The Men - Leave Home - No idea what's going on here. Shoegaze, hardcore, punk rock, post-rock, drone and a bunch of other stuff all plastered together.into a big beautiful mess. Best songs: If You Leave..., Bastille
16. Tenement - Napalm Dream - More scratchy pop-punk. I am such a one-note motherfucker. This has less of that quirky shivering bounce of Future Virgins and more of an insistent rollicking rhythm with a bunch of drawn out WHOOOOOOOOOA backdrops. For an album so up-tempo and singalong a lot of the time it has an oddly downbeat feel, maybe because the singalongs are down more as tender harmonies, soft echoes of the foreground, rather than the shoutalong mania of The Copyrights. Maybe also because the it's one of those albums where the guitars, bass and drum don't really stand out for the most part but instead coalesce into a solid yawning base a lot of the time, they feel like an almost anonymous bedrock, an insistent engine grumble. They have spikier slower numbers like Dreaming Out Loud and When Time Caught Up which trip and squawk a bit. My favourite moment is the opener when it all drops out into fuzzy bass and the builds into a singalong that pushes out past the music at the end of the song. Best songs: Stupid Werld, A Death in the Family
15. High Tension Wires - Welcome New Machine - Supremely catchy speedy power-pop jams. Best songs: Lose Face, Incorporeal, The Secret of the Hydrogen Bomb
14. Red City Radio - Dangers of Standing Still - I kind of wrote this off the first time I listened to it, I've got a bit burnt out on that big-sounding anthemic post-Gaslight punk rock that bands like Banquets play, but I gave this another listen a few months later and it's all so well put together that it made me remember why I liked this particular style of music in the first place. Every whoa-oh and riff is perfectly timed, but never cynically so, it all feel likes a natural progression in order to get you through to the next glorioussingalong. Perfectly executed punk rock. Can't wait to see them. Best songs: Spinning in Circles is a Gateway Drug, Drinking Ourselves Into the Future
13. Criaturas - Oscuridad Eterna - Ex-Deskonicidos. Female vocals. Spanish lyrics. Catchy as shit hardcore punk. Pulls in a bunch of Japanese burning spirits hardcore influences in the guitar work. Best songs: Criaturas, Nunca Va a Cambiar, Esperanza
12. The World/Inferno Friendship Society - The Anarchy and the Ecstasy - Another fine collection of cabaret-punk stompers and beautiful slower quieter numbers. This time round they eschew the conceptual topics of Addicted to Bad Ideas and instead focus the most part on songs about shitty deadend jobs, drunken parties, stealing cars from members of well-known street-punk bands, the same sort of things that most of these noisy snotty bands sing about, but enshrined in swing and ragtime these topics feel altogether more mythic. Best songs: I am Sick of People Being Sick of my Shit, The Politics of Passing Out, The Disarming Smile
11. Turkish Techno - Past Due - Nothing on this is quite as perfect as the song Meth Not Meat but it's still a collection of ridiculously fun snotty pop-punk that I can't stop listening to. Best songs: A Letter to Mike xVx, Breakfast of Champions, Little Lies,
10. Ramshackle Glory - Live the Dream - It's been a long journey for Pat the Bunny but he seems like he's doing alright now. Around this album the dreaded 'm' word flutters and makes itself insistent, yes this is an album more mature than the teenage fuck yous of Johnny Hobo but he's retained the energy, talent and way with a catchy phrase. It's definitely not mellowed out either, sometimes that pissy seventeen year old screech still breaks out and it manages to deftly incorporate that overdriven guitar that you can hear on the earliest Johnny Hobo demos. It's great to hear someone coming to terms with themselves in a constructive artistic way and making great music from that transition. Ben Weasel, this ain't. Best songs: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Vampires are Poseurs
9. Crusades - Sun is Down and the Night is Riding In - Existing in an odd warm spot between Agent Orange and Samiam, Crusades play a melodic yet sinister brand of pop-punk. And they hate god. Fuck yeah. Best songs: Beacons, Dreamers, Driven
8. Future Virgins - Western Problems - Future Virgins are a pop-punk band from Chattanooga, Tennessee, a town I know nothing about apart from the fact that it has a name that's really fun to say and seems to excel at producing bands aimed solely aimed with pinpoint precision at my eardrums, sloppy scratchy pop-punk like ADD/C and The Jack Palance Band (they might share members with those bands but I'm not sure). In contrast to the three stunningly good seven inches the band put out before this full-length, they've incorporated some more Jammy bouncy power-pop stuff reminiscent of Used Kids and Tranzmitors. It's all a bit more smoothed down than the EPs and at first I wasn't into that but with repeated listens I've come around. They've got a bit of the twinkle of Good Luck to their guitars which I don't recall hearing before and the singing occasionally slips into more of a croon whereas before it yelped and bit more. It even has a few rolling melancholy stretches nestled on the likes of None of Them in between all it's spiky miniature upstart rock and roll. I think I'm still more into the rougher scrapes of the seven inches but this is still great. Best songs: Ruin Me, Bitter Eyes, Troubled Heart
7. Burning Sensation - s/t - What Night Birds are to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, this band are to Husker Du's Land Speed Record. Furious and melodic. Erratic and brilliant. There's a song called I Fear Erections. Best songs: Weeping Wound, I Feel Disgust, Kitchen Knife
6. True Sons of Thunder - Spoonful of Seedy Dudes - A handful of veteran Memphis musicians come together to make this album that sounds like Flipper decided to try and write a straight rock and roll album but remembered half-way through that they were Flipper and ended up with this weird garage sludge/dirge punk masterpiece. Best songs: Nate the Rat, Killin' It, Wood Shampoo
5. The Credentials - Goocher - These guys are splitting up and it sucks. Furious snotty songs with smarter lyrics than you can usually expect from pop-punk. Best songs: Sex Dream, Energy Drinks for the Broken Hearted, I Killed 122 Iraqis and All I Got Was This Lousy Engineering Degree
4. The Gateway District - Perfect's Gonna Fail - The best dualing vocals in punk rock. Best songs: New Hands, Fishman's Story, Queen Ave
3. The Slow Death - Born Ugly Got Worse - Featuring the principle songwriters of both The Ergs! and Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels, these guys have some serious brokenhearted credentials. Catchy and gruff-voiced and imbued with some real stinking of whiskey blues. Best songs: Dirty Jokes, Ticks of the Clock, Phantom Limbs
2. Bomb the Music Industry! - Vacation - These guys never disappoint. It opens with an insistent piano riff that teases at you delaying the inevitable burst of noise for far longer than you expect and then after that rolls into the same sort of wild mash of synth hooks, horn riffs and punk noise that constitute the screamalong anthems of twentysomething disillusionment that BTMI! have perfected. Best songs: Shit That You Hate, Everybody That You Hate, Why Oh Why Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)
1. Night Birds - The Other Side of Darkness - Everything I said about their seven inch collection applies here. Those early 80s skate-punk sounds all torn up and injected with with rippling beach noise. Dick Dale drunk and disorderly and shot through with Adolescent threat. Hawaii 5-0 Police Truck. They're also amazing live. Best songs: Oblivious, Born of Man and Woman
Collections:
5. Direct Hit! - Domesplitter - I wish these guys had put out an album of new material (the new seven inches they put out are fucking great) rather than just rerecording their older stuff. Still, not a single bad song on here.
4. Hard Skin - We're the Fucking George - Oi! Oi!
3. The Muffs - Kaboodle - It's the goddamn Muffs. Everything that isn't on one of their full-lengths including a few great new songs to show they're still making great music.
2. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels - Let's Go Home - Country-punk. I've noticed how often I describe bands as sort of falling into one sound rather than the other. PBT and the FnAs are definitely like that with their two genres. Though they're clearly country in a lot of ways, they don't exhibit much twang in their sound compared to a bunch of other country-influenced punk bands, it's more just that classic heartbroken catchy country mode pushed as hard and fast as it'll go.
1. Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1 - The best modern day punk rock money or sexual favours can buy
Other stuff (demos/EPs/singles/splits):
25. School Jerks - Control - Sounds like something a bunch of pissed off 14 year olds recorded in 1981 and then forgot about for thirty years.
24. Hold Tight! - Call the Zoo - Like I said, I've got a little bored with a lot of shoutalong punk bands, I think I'd like those bands a lot more if they got all their songs done with in 50 seconds like Hold Tight! do.
23. Omegas - NY Terminator - More of the same form this great hardcore band.
22. Nazi Dust - Wretched Hour - It's got ten songs, but it's way shorter than Big Business' release this year. Screechy fast hardcore punk. Only one song scrapes two minutes, the others all hover around 60 seconds. Angry angry stuff.
21. Fidlar - DIYDUI - Lo-fi surfy power-pop.
20. Cervix - Winter Tour Tape - This was either recorded in someone's bedroom or in the bowels of hell itself. Furious hardcore punk and vocals that sound like the echoing screams of the damned.
19. Leagues Apart - Buffalo Club - Anthemic pop-punk songs that alternate in subject between going out and having a miserable time and staying in and having a miserable time. So like a bunch of shit, but with British accents, so even closer to home than usual.
18. Personal and the Pizzas - Diet, Crime and Delinquency - Hey man dis is kinda a personal one to me yaknowwaddamean? Dese boys really rock, yaknow? Yeah, good job pizzas. I'm serious man.
17. Direct Hit!/Tit Patrol - Tit Patrol are a lot of fun and DH! prove they haven't lost their knack of writing incredibly infectious singalong pop-punk songs. Mutant Drunk in particular manages to sound exactly like what a song you'd write about being drunk should sound like. Stumbling and chaotic and still screaming at the top of its lungs.
16. The Dopamines/Dear Landlord - Dopamines and Dear Landlord prove that too.
15. Vacation - Dream Dad - Fuzzy pop-punk at its finest.
14. Big Business - Quadruple Single - Four fantastic sludge-metal tunes, the highlight is the final song Guns and the way it descends into noise towards the end of the song. GUNS! GUNS! GUNS ARE BETTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE!
13. Little Ease - s/t - Short and snappy punk rock. Really great strained but clear vocals.
12. Chixdiggit - Safeways, Here We Come - Took six years to put out this EP but when the songs are as perfect as this then who cares? Swedish Rat is possibly the best song ever written about a haircut.
11. Iron Chic/Pacer - I've always enjoyed Iron Chic more than Pacer until this split. I don't know what happened but Pacer stepped their game up and released the two best songs they've ever done. The Iron Chic songs aren't bad either.
10. Sros Lords - Evil Spawn - Weird synth/garage/psych punk.
9. Punch - Nothing Lasts - Punch are one of my favourite hardcore bands around at the moment. I always think of them as a sort of hardcore Jack Palance Band, not because they sound anything similar, but because The Jack Palance Band wrote fully formed songs that never lasted more than 90 seconds. They were in and out before you knew it but it never felt like they'd cut the song short, or that they were doing a gimmicky thing like Short Attention and their catalogue of 25 second pop-punk ditties. Punch are often associated with powerviolence and fastcore, fun blasts of brief rage like Threatener, but Punch's songs are slightly more expansive than that, they always feel like they've got a structure and purpose beyond dogmatically sticking to Jello Biafra's I LIKE SHORT SONGS creed (now long, long forgotten by Biafra himself). Punch like short songs. They also like anguished shrieks, steamroller heavy guitars, always keeping you on your toes with tempo and style changes (this is usually something that turns me off hardcore but with the brevity of the songs it really works) and generally taking your fucking head off.
8. The Slow Death - Turnstile Comix #1 - Four songs about heartbreak and a great comic to go with it.
7. Shit Creek - Lust for Brains - Sounds like a cross between region rock pop-punk and Oi! I love both those things.
6. Criaturas - Arañas en el Corazon - Lower-fi than the full-length. Same sort of amazing shit.
5. Twat Sauce - Demo 2 - These guys sound like if Good Luck got really wasted and recorded all their stuff in a toilet. I like Good Luck a lot, but I'm pretty sure I'd like them more if they spent less time learning their instruments and more time getting wasted.
4. Smash Detox 7" - Members of a bunch of great Japanese and American hardcore bands come together to coincidentally make a seven inch that sounds like the best parts of Japanese and American hardcore.
3. Unfun/Stymie - Two of my favourite current punk bands on one seven inch.
2. Hank Woods and the Hammerheads 7" - Three stompy rockers drowning in garagitude. Like the Mummies never unundied.
1. Empire Builder demo - Don't know anything about this band but my friend sent me this demo and I just can't stop listening to it. Yes, like a lot of other stuff here it's scratchy pop-punk, but it's not afraid to spread its wings a bit on songs like justputRUSHonandwaitforthedrugstokickin. The vocalist also kind of sounds like Stza. In a good way. I love these songs.
Live sets:
15. Chixdiggit! @ The Garage, Islington - It's kind of weird to see Chixdiggit in the flesh as their lead singer has such a distinctive voice it's kind of weird to hear it coming out of a real person. See also: Kepi Ghoulie. A long set, everything I could've wanted them to play. One the most extreme power stances in existence.
14. The Dwarves @ Camden Underworld - They covered a Ting Tings song. The show ended with a stripper shooting sparks into the crowd using a disc sander applied to her crotch. Yep, it's a Dwarves show.
13. The Slow Death @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Their singalongs are even more singalong when you can actually singalong to them. Also contains 100% Taylor Swift breakdowns than most other punk bands.
12. D4 @ Florida Theater, Fest - Duhnuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh. D! 4!
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Florida Theater, Fest - Ted Leo is pretty much responsible for my entire relationship with my girlfriend so seeing him with her and bouncing about like crazy during Me and Mia was amazing.
10. Dead to Me @ Florida Theater, Fest - Took a long time for me to get round to seeing these guys and they were incredible. Ended up crushed at the bottom of the crowd underneath one of the band.
9. World/Inferno Friendship Society @ Camden Underworld - Lost count of how many times I've seen WIFS but they always put on an amazing show.
8. Los Mendozas @ Cafe El Paso, Hoxton - I think these guys have stopped playing shows now but I'm glad I caught them a couple of times while they were around. Four guys in luchador masks with terrible speedy gonzales style fake-Mexican accents playing 5 one minute thrash songs about wrestling, the rest of their 35 minute set was taken up with arguing with the audience and each other.
7. Vacation Bible School @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Punk rock fun times.
6. TV Casualty @ Florida Theater, Fest - Half pisstake, half-tribute. Opened with Danzig's Shopping List, closed with Mother, played all my favourite Misfits songs along the way. So much fun. When I sang into the mic on Hybrid Moments I sang the words to Hungry Moments by the Misfats.
5. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - After the Slow Death I skipped Worthwhile Way in order to catch the Copyrights, then I ran back across the street to catch Cletus unaware that they had cancelled and been replaced with the Falling Angels, a band I love even more. A totally drunken singalong mess that ended up with everyone on stage for Remember the Lilies of the God Damned Field.
4. Night Birds @ The Grosvenor, Stockwell - The lead singer looked incredibly pissed-off throughout. The guitarist spent the entire gig throwing himself about like a madman and almost twatted a photographer who kept sticking a flash in his face. So good.
3. The Arrivals @ 8 Seconds, Fest - Sunday at Fest I was just fucking out of it for most of the day. I spent most of the day just sitting on the floor in Durty Nelly's as I was so tired, but Future Virgins were a pick-me-up and then I got to see Kyle Kinane and I laughed until my face hurt, then I ran back to 8 Seconds and caught the second half of the Measure (SA)'s final show which was a great bittersweet moment then The Arrivals came on and it felt like everybody in the room was smiling. A really fat guy crowdsurfed and everyone just giggled as they pushed him over the top. They ended on Simple Pleasures in America and a bunch of people from various bands I love jumped on stage to carry on the singalong that went on for a long long time after the set finished. Amazing finish to an incredible weekend.
2. New Bomb Turks @ Red 7, Austin - Never thought I'd get to see these guys live. Fighting with the number one band on this list for the title of best garage punk band ever. Eric Davidson bounced about the stage like a madman and Defiled and Born Toulouse Lautrec in particular were incredible.
1. Guitar Wolf @ Islington Academy - ROCK AND ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!
50. Something I haven't heard yet. No matter how hard I try, every year around February/March I discover or listen to one album from the previous year that completely blows my mind. It might be an album I've been meaning to listen to but haven't (this year I really wanted the Vaginors (ex-Bloodclot Faggots, heard a track or two on youtube and it's amazing) and Peer Precious albums (on Dirtcult and compared to Hickey) but I haven't got round to getting them yet) or more likely something I've never heard of before. So I'll reserve this place on the list for that as yet unlistened to masterpiece.
49. F-Bombers - Pledge Allegiance - Angry white man chants from professional musicians. Except with really strong female vocals. Sort of like that poppy New England street punk (Ducky Boys, Pinkerton Thugs etc). Not gonna tear the world apart but fun. Best songs: Whiskey and Cheap Wine, Working Class, Billy Bad-Ass
48. The Dauntless Elite - More Bloody Bad News - More bloody great songs. Extremely English pop-punk. Best songs: Better Than Nowt, Danson in the Dark, Thinkles
47. Flashlights - I'm Not Alone - Superchunk-style pop-punk. Best songs: Choking, It's Raining
46. The Manix - Neighborhood Wildlife - Singalong midwestern pop-punk. Yeah, that stuff. Just like your grandmother used to make. Provided your grandmother was in Rivethead. Best songs: Fingers Crossed, Red Truck, This Old House
45. Something Fierce - Don't Be So Cruel - Danceable punky indie-pop, or maybe danceable indie pop-punk. Something like that anyway. Best songs: Ghosts of Industry, Dying Young These Days
44. Dead to Me - Moscow Penny Ante - A return to straighter punk rock for one of my favourite punk bands of the last few years. Best songs: The World Gone Mad, The Monarch Hotel
43. Heartsounds - Drifter - Some modern day melodic punk rock combined with 90s skate punk and even a couple of metal solos thrown in for good measure. A compelling fusion of styles. Best songs: Race to the Bottom, You Are Not my Body
42. Girl in a Coma - Exits and All the Rest - Fantastic huge indie-rock tied together by incredible vocals. Best songs: Hope, Knocking at Your Door.
41. OBN IIIs - The One and Only - Saw these guys supporting the New Bomb Turks and it says a lot about their stage presence that they were memorable even when compared to possibly the greatest garage-punk band of all time. The album manages to capture the ferocity and anger of their live show. Pure garage rock. Best songs: If the Shit Fits, New Innocence
40. Omegas - Blasts of Lunacy - Blasts of lunacy. Best songs: Disgusting Fun, FSOM
39. The Copyrights - North Sentinel Island - It's a Copyrights album. The most singalong of singalong bands. This album seemed to have more bummer moments than they usually indulge in though. Best songs: Worn Out Passport, 20 Feet Tall
38. Dead Milkmen- The King In Yellow - Maybe it's just the knowledge of the tragic absence of Dave Blood, but this album really seems to highlight that melancholy tinge that the Dead Milkmen always had bubbling under their goofiness. A great comeback after a long time away. Best songs: The King in Yellow, Or Maybe It Is, Cold Hard Ground
37. Wugazi - 13 Chambers - It's Wu Tang and Fugazi. Perfect combination. Best songs: Ghetto Afterthought, Sleep Rules Everything Around Me, Shame On Blue
36. Elders - Blind Rage - Kind of crusty but well-rooted in classic 80s hardcore sounds and that's why I love it. Best songs: Blood on the Blade, Out of Spite, Philosophy Failures
35. Burmese - Lun Yurn - I listen to a shit-ton of noisy music, which means that I end up finding stuff that most people would consider loud and disruptive to be fairly relaxing. Sludge-metal is my chillout music of choice, but there's no way that you could ever relax while listening to this incredible slab of aggression and noise, it's like a kick in the face from an iron horse. Definitely gonna tear the world apart. Best songs: This isn't really a 'favourite songs' kind of album.
34. The Dwarves - Are Born Again - Here's a weird thing. The opening lines of this album proffer two, some would say contradictory, some would say complimentary, facets of The Dwarves' manifesto: #1 Let's Just Get High and Fuck Some Sluts! #2 A Cure for Cancer and for AIDS. while the first is business as usual for the jizz-punk shock-pop, and their usual miasma of pop-punk, garage and boooooobs, I'm not really sure about the second, I doubt it represents a maturing of these eternal adolescents but the weird thing is that shortly after this album came out I ended up reading two articles about serious advances in the search for cures to AIDS and cancer. This leads me to only one conclusion: The Dwarves have the power to rewrite history, I can only quiver in terror at what the global socio-political consequences of the song Working Class Hole will be. A goofy mix of punk rock snot and pure pop sensibilities.
33. Cobra Skulls - Agitations - Cobra Skulls maintain their usual irrepressible bouncy punk rock with what feels like more of an early-80s hardcore influence at times. Best songs: Solastalgia, Hiding, The Mess
32. Brain F - Sleep Rough - Manages to be sweet and very noisy at the same time. Garage punk/pop. Best songs: Seawall Sea, Sleep Rough, No More/More
31. Star Fucking Hipsters - From the Dumpster to the Grave - A fantastic guest verse from Boots Riley on one song, a really strong They Might Be Giants cover. Some of the strongest songwriting Stza has ever displayed, just, you know, ignore most of the lyrics unless you're 15. Best songs: Ana Ng, War Widows Vietnam, 911 til Infinity
30. Shards - Shards - Deeply dark, fantastically melodic hardcore punk. Best songs: DMT, Breeder Scum, Bleach
29. Mischief Brew - The Stone Operation - The usual compelling punk rock injected with the rebel sounds of a dozen folk-traditions. Best songs: Three-Cord Circus, Pompous Ass Manifesto, On the Sly
28. Pharoahe Monch - W.A.R. - One of the best MCs of all time delivers a timely sweeping political concept album. My favourite verse on this though is probably Jean Grae's turn on Assassins, she also put out a really solid mixtape this year and I can't wait for her album proper next year. Best songs: Assassins, W.A.R., Let My People Go
27. Fucked Up - David's Town - A stylistic exercise that also manages to be lots of fun and includes some incredible songs? Count me in. Best songs: Do You Feed?, Byrdesdale Spa FC
26. Good Luck - Without Hesitation - The first time I heard this album I rated it a lot higher but I got a bit tired of it. It doesn't have anything as simply perfect as Stars Were Exploding/Bringing Them Back to Life on Into Lake Griffy but still some wonderful noodly often melancholic pop-punk. Best songs: Novel Figure, Impossible
25. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life - This album is huge in every sense of the word. Giant in concept, execution and sound. I'll be honest, I didn't really invest in the rock opera aspect of it and taken as a whole it can be a little overwhelming, but there isn't a single bad song on this and for an album well over an hour long that's pretty incredible. Sweeping and triumphant. Best songs: Queen of Hearts, Lights Go Up, Running On Nothing
24. Wiccans - Skullduggery - Like Elders if they incorporated more melodic influences. Best songs: Disorder, Silver Lining
23. Underground Railroad to Candyland - Know Your Sins - Power-pop from one of the most consistent punk rock songwriters of the last 20 years. Best songs: My Number's on the Stall, We Aren't the World, The Wicked Shakes
22. Dude Jams - How to Abuse Everything - A bunch of songs about being fuck-ups who get fucked-up, like that 20 second Rivethead song in album form. Also the best cover art of the year. Best songs: Timebomb
21. Vacation - s/t - Somehow managed to be simultaneously poppier and noisier than their preceding seven inches, I was a little thrown off at first but on repeated listens I'm amazed how they've managed to develop their sound and integrate a bunch of different shit while still keep this a totally cohesive recognisably pop-punk album. Best songs: Cop Knock, Columbus is Not a Hero
20. The Reaganomics - Lower the Bar - The Reaganomics probably hate you and it's a shit-ton of fun. Favourite songs: Ed Hardy, Chireland, The WB
19. Caves - Homeward Bound - Catchier than the singles collection, same great vocals. Best songs: I'm Not Sorry, Homeward Bound
18. Midnight - Satanic Royalty - More metal than a devil horns thrown from the window of an 84 Camaro with flame decals full of long-haired seventeen year olds as they try and catch air from the humpback bridge just outside of town. Best songs: You Can't Stop Steel, Violence on Violence, Holocaustic Deafening
17. The Men - Leave Home - No idea what's going on here. Shoegaze, hardcore, punk rock, post-rock, drone and a bunch of other stuff all plastered together.into a big beautiful mess. Best songs: If You Leave..., Bastille
16. Tenement - Napalm Dream - More scratchy pop-punk. I am such a one-note motherfucker. This has less of that quirky shivering bounce of Future Virgins and more of an insistent rollicking rhythm with a bunch of drawn out WHOOOOOOOOOA backdrops. For an album so up-tempo and singalong a lot of the time it has an oddly downbeat feel, maybe because the singalongs are down more as tender harmonies, soft echoes of the foreground, rather than the shoutalong mania of The Copyrights. Maybe also because the it's one of those albums where the guitars, bass and drum don't really stand out for the most part but instead coalesce into a solid yawning base a lot of the time, they feel like an almost anonymous bedrock, an insistent engine grumble. They have spikier slower numbers like Dreaming Out Loud and When Time Caught Up which trip and squawk a bit. My favourite moment is the opener when it all drops out into fuzzy bass and the builds into a singalong that pushes out past the music at the end of the song. Best songs: Stupid Werld, A Death in the Family
15. High Tension Wires - Welcome New Machine - Supremely catchy speedy power-pop jams. Best songs: Lose Face, Incorporeal, The Secret of the Hydrogen Bomb
14. Red City Radio - Dangers of Standing Still - I kind of wrote this off the first time I listened to it, I've got a bit burnt out on that big-sounding anthemic post-Gaslight punk rock that bands like Banquets play, but I gave this another listen a few months later and it's all so well put together that it made me remember why I liked this particular style of music in the first place. Every whoa-oh and riff is perfectly timed, but never cynically so, it all feel likes a natural progression in order to get you through to the next glorioussingalong. Perfectly executed punk rock. Can't wait to see them. Best songs: Spinning in Circles is a Gateway Drug, Drinking Ourselves Into the Future
13. Criaturas - Oscuridad Eterna - Ex-Deskonicidos. Female vocals. Spanish lyrics. Catchy as shit hardcore punk. Pulls in a bunch of Japanese burning spirits hardcore influences in the guitar work. Best songs: Criaturas, Nunca Va a Cambiar, Esperanza
12. The World/Inferno Friendship Society - The Anarchy and the Ecstasy - Another fine collection of cabaret-punk stompers and beautiful slower quieter numbers. This time round they eschew the conceptual topics of Addicted to Bad Ideas and instead focus the most part on songs about shitty deadend jobs, drunken parties, stealing cars from members of well-known street-punk bands, the same sort of things that most of these noisy snotty bands sing about, but enshrined in swing and ragtime these topics feel altogether more mythic. Best songs: I am Sick of People Being Sick of my Shit, The Politics of Passing Out, The Disarming Smile
11. Turkish Techno - Past Due - Nothing on this is quite as perfect as the song Meth Not Meat but it's still a collection of ridiculously fun snotty pop-punk that I can't stop listening to. Best songs: A Letter to Mike xVx, Breakfast of Champions, Little Lies,
10. Ramshackle Glory - Live the Dream - It's been a long journey for Pat the Bunny but he seems like he's doing alright now. Around this album the dreaded 'm' word flutters and makes itself insistent, yes this is an album more mature than the teenage fuck yous of Johnny Hobo but he's retained the energy, talent and way with a catchy phrase. It's definitely not mellowed out either, sometimes that pissy seventeen year old screech still breaks out and it manages to deftly incorporate that overdriven guitar that you can hear on the earliest Johnny Hobo demos. It's great to hear someone coming to terms with themselves in a constructive artistic way and making great music from that transition. Ben Weasel, this ain't. Best songs: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Vampires are Poseurs
9. Crusades - Sun is Down and the Night is Riding In - Existing in an odd warm spot between Agent Orange and Samiam, Crusades play a melodic yet sinister brand of pop-punk. And they hate god. Fuck yeah. Best songs: Beacons, Dreamers, Driven
8. Future Virgins - Western Problems - Future Virgins are a pop-punk band from Chattanooga, Tennessee, a town I know nothing about apart from the fact that it has a name that's really fun to say and seems to excel at producing bands aimed solely aimed with pinpoint precision at my eardrums, sloppy scratchy pop-punk like ADD/C and The Jack Palance Band (they might share members with those bands but I'm not sure). In contrast to the three stunningly good seven inches the band put out before this full-length, they've incorporated some more Jammy bouncy power-pop stuff reminiscent of Used Kids and Tranzmitors. It's all a bit more smoothed down than the EPs and at first I wasn't into that but with repeated listens I've come around. They've got a bit of the twinkle of Good Luck to their guitars which I don't recall hearing before and the singing occasionally slips into more of a croon whereas before it yelped and bit more. It even has a few rolling melancholy stretches nestled on the likes of None of Them in between all it's spiky miniature upstart rock and roll. I think I'm still more into the rougher scrapes of the seven inches but this is still great. Best songs: Ruin Me, Bitter Eyes, Troubled Heart
7. Burning Sensation - s/t - What Night Birds are to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, this band are to Husker Du's Land Speed Record. Furious and melodic. Erratic and brilliant. There's a song called I Fear Erections. Best songs: Weeping Wound, I Feel Disgust, Kitchen Knife
6. True Sons of Thunder - Spoonful of Seedy Dudes - A handful of veteran Memphis musicians come together to make this album that sounds like Flipper decided to try and write a straight rock and roll album but remembered half-way through that they were Flipper and ended up with this weird garage sludge/dirge punk masterpiece. Best songs: Nate the Rat, Killin' It, Wood Shampoo
5. The Credentials - Goocher - These guys are splitting up and it sucks. Furious snotty songs with smarter lyrics than you can usually expect from pop-punk. Best songs: Sex Dream, Energy Drinks for the Broken Hearted, I Killed 122 Iraqis and All I Got Was This Lousy Engineering Degree
4. The Gateway District - Perfect's Gonna Fail - The best dualing vocals in punk rock. Best songs: New Hands, Fishman's Story, Queen Ave
3. The Slow Death - Born Ugly Got Worse - Featuring the principle songwriters of both The Ergs! and Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels, these guys have some serious brokenhearted credentials. Catchy and gruff-voiced and imbued with some real stinking of whiskey blues. Best songs: Dirty Jokes, Ticks of the Clock, Phantom Limbs
2. Bomb the Music Industry! - Vacation - These guys never disappoint. It opens with an insistent piano riff that teases at you delaying the inevitable burst of noise for far longer than you expect and then after that rolls into the same sort of wild mash of synth hooks, horn riffs and punk noise that constitute the screamalong anthems of twentysomething disillusionment that BTMI! have perfected. Best songs: Shit That You Hate, Everybody That You Hate, Why Oh Why Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)
1. Night Birds - The Other Side of Darkness - Everything I said about their seven inch collection applies here. Those early 80s skate-punk sounds all torn up and injected with with rippling beach noise. Dick Dale drunk and disorderly and shot through with Adolescent threat. Hawaii 5-0 Police Truck. They're also amazing live. Best songs: Oblivious, Born of Man and Woman
Collections:
5. Direct Hit! - Domesplitter - I wish these guys had put out an album of new material (the new seven inches they put out are fucking great) rather than just rerecording their older stuff. Still, not a single bad song on here.
4. Hard Skin - We're the Fucking George - Oi! Oi!
3. The Muffs - Kaboodle - It's the goddamn Muffs. Everything that isn't on one of their full-lengths including a few great new songs to show they're still making great music.
2. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels - Let's Go Home - Country-punk. I've noticed how often I describe bands as sort of falling into one sound rather than the other. PBT and the FnAs are definitely like that with their two genres. Though they're clearly country in a lot of ways, they don't exhibit much twang in their sound compared to a bunch of other country-influenced punk bands, it's more just that classic heartbroken catchy country mode pushed as hard and fast as it'll go.
1. Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1 - The best modern day punk rock money or sexual favours can buy
Other stuff (demos/EPs/singles/splits):
25. School Jerks - Control - Sounds like something a bunch of pissed off 14 year olds recorded in 1981 and then forgot about for thirty years.
24. Hold Tight! - Call the Zoo - Like I said, I've got a little bored with a lot of shoutalong punk bands, I think I'd like those bands a lot more if they got all their songs done with in 50 seconds like Hold Tight! do.
23. Omegas - NY Terminator - More of the same form this great hardcore band.
22. Nazi Dust - Wretched Hour - It's got ten songs, but it's way shorter than Big Business' release this year. Screechy fast hardcore punk. Only one song scrapes two minutes, the others all hover around 60 seconds. Angry angry stuff.
21. Fidlar - DIYDUI - Lo-fi surfy power-pop.
20. Cervix - Winter Tour Tape - This was either recorded in someone's bedroom or in the bowels of hell itself. Furious hardcore punk and vocals that sound like the echoing screams of the damned.
19. Leagues Apart - Buffalo Club - Anthemic pop-punk songs that alternate in subject between going out and having a miserable time and staying in and having a miserable time. So like a bunch of shit, but with British accents, so even closer to home than usual.
18. Personal and the Pizzas - Diet, Crime and Delinquency - Hey man dis is kinda a personal one to me yaknowwaddamean? Dese boys really rock, yaknow? Yeah, good job pizzas. I'm serious man.
17. Direct Hit!/Tit Patrol - Tit Patrol are a lot of fun and DH! prove they haven't lost their knack of writing incredibly infectious singalong pop-punk songs. Mutant Drunk in particular manages to sound exactly like what a song you'd write about being drunk should sound like. Stumbling and chaotic and still screaming at the top of its lungs.
16. The Dopamines/Dear Landlord - Dopamines and Dear Landlord prove that too.
15. Vacation - Dream Dad - Fuzzy pop-punk at its finest.
14. Big Business - Quadruple Single - Four fantastic sludge-metal tunes, the highlight is the final song Guns and the way it descends into noise towards the end of the song. GUNS! GUNS! GUNS ARE BETTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE!
13. Little Ease - s/t - Short and snappy punk rock. Really great strained but clear vocals.
12. Chixdiggit - Safeways, Here We Come - Took six years to put out this EP but when the songs are as perfect as this then who cares? Swedish Rat is possibly the best song ever written about a haircut.
11. Iron Chic/Pacer - I've always enjoyed Iron Chic more than Pacer until this split. I don't know what happened but Pacer stepped their game up and released the two best songs they've ever done. The Iron Chic songs aren't bad either.
10. Sros Lords - Evil Spawn - Weird synth/garage/psych punk.
9. Punch - Nothing Lasts - Punch are one of my favourite hardcore bands around at the moment. I always think of them as a sort of hardcore Jack Palance Band, not because they sound anything similar, but because The Jack Palance Band wrote fully formed songs that never lasted more than 90 seconds. They were in and out before you knew it but it never felt like they'd cut the song short, or that they were doing a gimmicky thing like Short Attention and their catalogue of 25 second pop-punk ditties. Punch are often associated with powerviolence and fastcore, fun blasts of brief rage like Threatener, but Punch's songs are slightly more expansive than that, they always feel like they've got a structure and purpose beyond dogmatically sticking to Jello Biafra's I LIKE SHORT SONGS creed (now long, long forgotten by Biafra himself). Punch like short songs. They also like anguished shrieks, steamroller heavy guitars, always keeping you on your toes with tempo and style changes (this is usually something that turns me off hardcore but with the brevity of the songs it really works) and generally taking your fucking head off.
8. The Slow Death - Turnstile Comix #1 - Four songs about heartbreak and a great comic to go with it.
7. Shit Creek - Lust for Brains - Sounds like a cross between region rock pop-punk and Oi! I love both those things.
6. Criaturas - Arañas en el Corazon - Lower-fi than the full-length. Same sort of amazing shit.
5. Twat Sauce - Demo 2 - These guys sound like if Good Luck got really wasted and recorded all their stuff in a toilet. I like Good Luck a lot, but I'm pretty sure I'd like them more if they spent less time learning their instruments and more time getting wasted.
4. Smash Detox 7" - Members of a bunch of great Japanese and American hardcore bands come together to coincidentally make a seven inch that sounds like the best parts of Japanese and American hardcore.
3. Unfun/Stymie - Two of my favourite current punk bands on one seven inch.
2. Hank Woods and the Hammerheads 7" - Three stompy rockers drowning in garagitude. Like the Mummies never unundied.
1. Empire Builder demo - Don't know anything about this band but my friend sent me this demo and I just can't stop listening to it. Yes, like a lot of other stuff here it's scratchy pop-punk, but it's not afraid to spread its wings a bit on songs like justputRUSHonandwaitforthedrugstokickin. The vocalist also kind of sounds like Stza. In a good way. I love these songs.
Live sets:
15. Chixdiggit! @ The Garage, Islington - It's kind of weird to see Chixdiggit in the flesh as their lead singer has such a distinctive voice it's kind of weird to hear it coming out of a real person. See also: Kepi Ghoulie. A long set, everything I could've wanted them to play. One the most extreme power stances in existence.
14. The Dwarves @ Camden Underworld - They covered a Ting Tings song. The show ended with a stripper shooting sparks into the crowd using a disc sander applied to her crotch. Yep, it's a Dwarves show.
13. The Slow Death @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Their singalongs are even more singalong when you can actually singalong to them. Also contains 100% Taylor Swift breakdowns than most other punk bands.
12. D4 @ Florida Theater, Fest - Duhnuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh. D! 4!
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Florida Theater, Fest - Ted Leo is pretty much responsible for my entire relationship with my girlfriend so seeing him with her and bouncing about like crazy during Me and Mia was amazing.
10. Dead to Me @ Florida Theater, Fest - Took a long time for me to get round to seeing these guys and they were incredible. Ended up crushed at the bottom of the crowd underneath one of the band.
9. World/Inferno Friendship Society @ Camden Underworld - Lost count of how many times I've seen WIFS but they always put on an amazing show.
8. Los Mendozas @ Cafe El Paso, Hoxton - I think these guys have stopped playing shows now but I'm glad I caught them a couple of times while they were around. Four guys in luchador masks with terrible speedy gonzales style fake-Mexican accents playing 5 one minute thrash songs about wrestling, the rest of their 35 minute set was taken up with arguing with the audience and each other.
7. Vacation Bible School @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Punk rock fun times.
6. TV Casualty @ Florida Theater, Fest - Half pisstake, half-tribute. Opened with Danzig's Shopping List, closed with Mother, played all my favourite Misfits songs along the way. So much fun. When I sang into the mic on Hybrid Moments I sang the words to Hungry Moments by the Misfats.
5. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - After the Slow Death I skipped Worthwhile Way in order to catch the Copyrights, then I ran back across the street to catch Cletus unaware that they had cancelled and been replaced with the Falling Angels, a band I love even more. A totally drunken singalong mess that ended up with everyone on stage for Remember the Lilies of the God Damned Field.
4. Night Birds @ The Grosvenor, Stockwell - The lead singer looked incredibly pissed-off throughout. The guitarist spent the entire gig throwing himself about like a madman and almost twatted a photographer who kept sticking a flash in his face. So good.
3. The Arrivals @ 8 Seconds, Fest - Sunday at Fest I was just fucking out of it for most of the day. I spent most of the day just sitting on the floor in Durty Nelly's as I was so tired, but Future Virgins were a pick-me-up and then I got to see Kyle Kinane and I laughed until my face hurt, then I ran back to 8 Seconds and caught the second half of the Measure (SA)'s final show which was a great bittersweet moment then The Arrivals came on and it felt like everybody in the room was smiling. A really fat guy crowdsurfed and everyone just giggled as they pushed him over the top. They ended on Simple Pleasures in America and a bunch of people from various bands I love jumped on stage to carry on the singalong that went on for a long long time after the set finished. Amazing finish to an incredible weekend.
2. New Bomb Turks @ Red 7, Austin - Never thought I'd get to see these guys live. Fighting with the number one band on this list for the title of best garage punk band ever. Eric Davidson bounced about the stage like a madman and Defiled and Born Toulouse Lautrec in particular were incredible.
1. Guitar Wolf @ Islington Academy - ROCK AND ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
So Scratched Into Our Souls #10: New Bomb Turks - Born Toulouse Lautrec
"...if there is a god, he's only concerned with artists. Specifically those of us who possess both skill and energy. And he only troubles himself long enough to swat us down like horseflies just before we become his rivals." - Sam Edwine in Tom Bradley's Killing Bryce
When I was 17 I thought I was an artist. I thought I was pretty fucking great. And I found this album that was called Destroy, Oh Boy! and the first track was called Born Toulouse Lautrec (still a fantastic pun 20 years after it was released) and over a breakneck snotpunk swell it kicked to pieces my puny artistic exceptionalism. NO HEROES, NO LEADERS, NO ARTISTS, NO GODS. It screamed. I'm a worker, you're a worker, would you like to be a worker too? Eviscerating the high minded rhetoric of the ultracrepidarian artist with a sarcastic superspeed sneer and years after I've heard it, when I must've heard it dozens of times, when I've sang along to it on a warm Texas November night with Eric Davidson strutting, twitching and mincing across a low stage, it still makes me smile, still holds me true, because I know a lot of writers and artists, I am a writer, and let's face it, we're wankers. But that's okay, I'm a wanker, you're a wanker, wouldn't you like to be a wanker too? Because if there were just artists and no plumbers we'd have endless beautiful villanelles and murals about what it was like to be covered in shit all the time, a thousand loves in a time of cholera, rather than what we have which is endless beautiful novels and plays about what it's like to be drowning in metaphorical shit all the time, but go the other way and we'd all have immaculate crappers but no way of properly articulating our appreciation for it (there's a big chunk of Don Delillo's Underworld all about bowel movements as a metaphor for traveling into communist countries).
It's all a job and as such it fills your days and changes the way you perceive the world, whether your mindless furniture shop job leaves you absent-mindedly assessing the kitchen units in every new house, you visit, line names and serial numbers and styles reeling unbidden in your head, or the restless desire to make art about the world turns you into a constant vulture for your own emotional damage. Kicking about in the dirt, we scrabble about for commission, a speck of cash for the way you've said something, in paint or words or notes, about the way the world works, the way people spin. And then you take that measley cheque and spend it on a beer, or to fix the washing machine, or something mundane while the steady trudging monthly pay from a day job is getting thrown away on art supplies, or too many books, or saved up for that guitar hanging like a teardrop in the music shop window with which you plan to pour everything you've got into a furious garage thrum, panicky riffs to staple to jackhammer drumbeats and switchblade lyrics to pummel, gut and pull apart the stupid fucking certainties of another 17 year old and rearrange their head so they gasp and mouth to themselves in shit and wonder, "Destroy... oh boy..."
When I was 17 I thought I was an artist. I thought I was pretty fucking great. And I found this album that was called Destroy, Oh Boy! and the first track was called Born Toulouse Lautrec (still a fantastic pun 20 years after it was released) and over a breakneck snotpunk swell it kicked to pieces my puny artistic exceptionalism. NO HEROES, NO LEADERS, NO ARTISTS, NO GODS. It screamed. I'm a worker, you're a worker, would you like to be a worker too? Eviscerating the high minded rhetoric of the ultracrepidarian artist with a sarcastic superspeed sneer and years after I've heard it, when I must've heard it dozens of times, when I've sang along to it on a warm Texas November night with Eric Davidson strutting, twitching and mincing across a low stage, it still makes me smile, still holds me true, because I know a lot of writers and artists, I am a writer, and let's face it, we're wankers. But that's okay, I'm a wanker, you're a wanker, wouldn't you like to be a wanker too? Because if there were just artists and no plumbers we'd have endless beautiful villanelles and murals about what it was like to be covered in shit all the time, a thousand loves in a time of cholera, rather than what we have which is endless beautiful novels and plays about what it's like to be drowning in metaphorical shit all the time, but go the other way and we'd all have immaculate crappers but no way of properly articulating our appreciation for it (there's a big chunk of Don Delillo's Underworld all about bowel movements as a metaphor for traveling into communist countries).
It's all a job and as such it fills your days and changes the way you perceive the world, whether your mindless furniture shop job leaves you absent-mindedly assessing the kitchen units in every new house, you visit, line names and serial numbers and styles reeling unbidden in your head, or the restless desire to make art about the world turns you into a constant vulture for your own emotional damage. Kicking about in the dirt, we scrabble about for commission, a speck of cash for the way you've said something, in paint or words or notes, about the way the world works, the way people spin. And then you take that measley cheque and spend it on a beer, or to fix the washing machine, or something mundane while the steady trudging monthly pay from a day job is getting thrown away on art supplies, or too many books, or saved up for that guitar hanging like a teardrop in the music shop window with which you plan to pour everything you've got into a furious garage thrum, panicky riffs to staple to jackhammer drumbeats and switchblade lyrics to pummel, gut and pull apart the stupid fucking certainties of another 17 year old and rearrange their head so they gasp and mouth to themselves in shit and wonder, "Destroy... oh boy..."
"ART: A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when I
was about eleven years old. I'd be interested to hear from him. There are so
many pseudos around taking his name in vain." - The Hipcrime Vocab, Chad Mulligan (from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar)
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