D-Clone - Creation and Destroy

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


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

Bits of Shit - Cut Sleeves

Stooges swagger and gut and snot, rumbling basslines and the nasal bite of the vocals while the guitars flail and thrash about them. They've got the feel of the more bluesy New Bomb Turks numbers, and more than a hint of Eric Davidson's scathing wit to them as well. Wedding Song takes apart the facade of an unhappy marriage, constructing one of those great break-up songs where it's less about some specific fault but the unsteady foundation that this was built on, sneering "Two kids playing an adult game You can't fix your identity by changing your name".

Rock Sing excoriates the tedious old punk fucks who run through the same tutting bullshit they rebel against and have totally boomer'd up in their narcissistic accidental conflation of their own narrow tepid cultural narrative with the entire span of fucking human culture, whining "Their rock’n’roll IS noise pollution" about the teenage music of today. Red Blade snarls with mid-tempo slasher menace. Patrol begins with a sort of outraged-warning call-and-response that is filtered vocally through a Joey Vindictive pastiche of a reproaching mother and goes on to construct a short war song that never really comes down one side or the other in its condemnation but, like the whole albums, is bathed in an air of baleful contempt for fucking everything. This is mean, minatory rock and roll. On Homeless Records.

Sad Boys - Eat Shit

This is so much fun. Brief pogo-punk ditties with screechy female vocals, like The Grumpies meet The Disclapties. 12 songs, 13 and a half minutes. I have no fucking clue what any of these songs are about, but there is a song called Violent Violence, another call Crucidix. Pure obnoxion and it's all so bouncy and fun, the pop of the drums and the clamor of noise, the goofy-sweet almost Jughead-style simple guitar lines on songs like Frolic!, songs that begin with an intense squeal of feedback and glass being smashed as if it was a fucking leitmotif, the high-pitched squawk of the vocals snapping at everything through the noise and muddle. With this, the new Vaginors 7" and the inexorable glue-addled rise of Who Killed Spikey Jacket? there seems to be a minor-resurgence in that sort of dumb-as-fuck funpunk alley-dance-party Tom and Boot Boys shit, where the babble and spit of broken twitch-close arseholes kicks over the po-faced goodperson pronouncements of stale hippie shit and run away giggling.

Hank Wood and the Hammerheads - Go Home

What would The Mummies be like if their gimmick wasn't being incompetent revenant lounge-lizards of Karloff-pulp garage-snot, but being swing-first emotionally-stunted Noo Yawk assholes. Go Home is city beasts and contempt, spiking snare hits, revelling in subway graffiti and proclaiming Ground Zero Hardcore over burning towers on the back cover. This is 96 tears drawn from leathery bullies sticking knives into mortar, chanting murder and trouble amongst simple organ lines and surf meannesses. It's Hard On The Street is a tramp home where you drag yourself back from some shitty nightjob or bad bar letting the loathing and hatred of your sad traipse roll around inside of you and sharpen your step into a don't-fuck-with-me stalk that tries to grind its way through the asphalt and tarmac with each hated step. It's also got something of that tight crew face-in-the-camera backed-up shit with its little choral echoes of "FUCK THE STREET!". Don't Walk Away From Me rides its buzzy keyboard underruns from a little lumbering bug-beat into an urgent runaway downtown ride into the dankness and blight. This album is about those wormy twin feelings of city living, where you despise the alienation and industrial numbness of these human-factory farms ("I don't belong here." broods Snide...Petty...Fools) but also revel in the badass ice-eyed streetwise motherfuck-goddamn-superstar-Luke-Cage-fearless cynosure shitcun' cunt you cut yourself into in order to survive.

Most of the tracks have simple refrains that build and twist in on themselves, growling and snapping at you, twitching inwards and out with raw raw firehose power, like the song My House which consists almost entirely of the line "HEY YOU! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" like that point of utter dissolution in an argument that ends a party or relationship when you just hang on to one phrase repeating it with machine-malfunction rhythm again and again and a-fucking-gain to the slippery point of semantic satiation because its that now-or-never separation you need right now, not any sort of showdown, not any sort of explication of issues and history you just need the lonesomeness and you can't see anywhere, think of anything, but that repitition and the respite it seems to shape.

This whole record, from the clanking sewer-noise of its untitled track, to the redneck rumblings at the start of Bad Things which quickly devolving into another growling stompy scratching-at-the-seams mess, is a jittery uncomfortable grumble on urban rot and the Mega-City Dredd attitude it cultivates inside us that boots up against our smarts and dreams and failing stars and tussles there til we drown it with alcohol or cyborg drugs or abandon the fight, the blame and the corruption, for the quieter apocalypses of suburban blowjobs.

This is violent, stripped-down catchy-as-fuck garage-punk, all Lee Ving pose and Travis Bickle psychosis, Dee Dee anxiety and Hubert Selby Jr depravity, itching and twirling in its own rock and roll pissstains and spraypaint-hiss, culminating in genuinely fucking painful nasty rant on I Don't See Nothin' where the shitskein unravels and the plastered-on nihilism and worldfuck demeanor turns finally in itself in an comes apart shuddering with trypophobic reaction to the neurotic holes in ourself and our lives, screaming with hate and panicattack flames that burn themselves out into dry declarations of all-encompassing negative realities, as the album stumbles to an unhappy sobbing end amongst the clatter of drums, the dimming of the city's glamour and the taut keening of suicidal ideation and guitar feedback.

Arms Aloft - Sawdust City

BEGINNING A RUNDOWN OF MY FAVOURITE MUSIC OF 2012. IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.

Sawdust City, industry and bloody floors. Orgcore! Beardpunk! Gruffpunk! Midwestern pop-punk! Bannerpilotblues! Whatever the fuck you wanna call it, you know how it works. Up-tempo anthemic pop-punk with the whine of spindly-pop-punk replaced by despairing bellows. Really though, this sort of thing is the Charles Bukowski to Oi!’s Richard Allen. Fight music for college dropouts conflicted about their middle-class roots and working-class existences so they beat themselves up rather than someone wearing the colours of a sports team their sports team doesn’t like. Oi! is just simple melodic singalong punk songs about working a shit job and then going out and getting drunk with your friends, orgcore (beardpunk/gruffpunk/whatever) is simple melodic singalong punk songs about working a shit job then going home and getting drunk by yourself listening to Jawbreaker, and that's the space that Arms Aloft sit in, and do it as well as anyone else ever really has.

It's stuff that's super-situated in its artistic context, working the geography of Broadways songs, listening to Ben Nichols records, throwing a nod at the sort of punk films that we spent teenage afternoons lazily watching in The Decline of Midwestern Civilization, tossing off a goofy Misfits joke on Where Seagulls Dare, it's drawing on a whole lot and it knows it, but, unlike the  thumbsucker inanity of Gaslight Anthem's rock-and-roll mythos, it cuts sharper than that, interested less in the mellifluous balm of rock-and-roll redemption, but in the moment after that, ruminating on the true malaise of poverty, the histories and sciences of being fucking skint, the day-to-day trap and we know who's to blame but we're too tired and beaten-down to raise that black flag, and fuck that black flag anyway, its got nothing on a Black Label. In its huge fucking choruses Sawdust City recalls the basement euphoria of D4's Doublewhiskeycokenoice, but its more concerned with the cold that bites the next morning when you wake up and realise it's 10 days til pay day and the heats off and you blew way too much cash on shitty beer and t-shirts last night so it twists that beautiful dancing D4 moment into the dry bleakness of DOUBLEDRANOPERCOCETNOICE. Music for the long walk home where we can touch and recall those moments of rapture that took us in the chorus but they fade away like winter breath and fuck...