Dishpit - 7"

Scrappy squeaky dirtpunk from Dishpit, a band made up of members of Empire Builder who put out an absolutely fantastic demo a couple of years ago and then quickly disintegrated. Six reckless punk songs, in the fashion of Twat Sauce, Driller Killers or the Los Canadians/Chickenhead split. All that regionrock punk rock that battles with itself, pulls at its own visible stitches, quickly self-destructing sloppy poppunx scratches with the texture of an old splintery wood floor and the rhythm of bikechains coming loose on hillbombs.

Remnants of similarly sloppy scrappy punx forebears abound. There's the nowheresville bummer of Hickey's The Only Lesbian in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the cramped geography of The Lazer or Cleveland Bound Death Sentence, parking lots and shortcuts between shit jobs and shit punkhouses, in the clatterpop of Stupid Parties. Throughout you have the close crash and jump of the first three Future Virgins seven inches. Maybe bits of real early Screeching Weasel, like Raining Needles or Can't Stand Myself, where it's just primitive speedsnot, words coming in a muddy frustrated rush, on Super America's breathless everything's-shite rattle.

There's Dishpit Anthem, a Pete Jordan bounce, dancing with yelps and whoa-ohs, Geno's, a song about how a sandwich place sucks that also manages to to be a song about cops suck ("for every shitty cheesesteak made there's someone still not loving police"), The Scrabble Song's sweet self-doubt and desire over coffee and board games, the mixed-up letters and mixed-up emotions, all this thrown together in the Borrible-heart amalgam of Forever Punk.

Forever Punk is, like last year's Hunx and his Punx album Street Punk, invested in reclaiming the punx pride/punx unity singalong shouts from the hands of oldfuck lumpen punk rock and roll, returning them to the grasping hands of young fuck-ups. "Still working fuckin beets/still hating the police/still just wandering around/fuckin' off in any town with the same old crowd". An affirmation of the path chosen, Op Ivy's Jaded with more venom, not beautiful because beauty's overrated and untouchable, but just here, still here, a misfit community in rickety working order, "SO UP THE PUNKS/OFF THE PIGS/AND I'LL COME VISIT YOU IF YOU COME VISIT ME".

These are the sort of throwaway songs that will endure longer than any art that's sturdy and built to last, cos these marginal nothings, these petty hates and spittle-glued loves are the real shit that swamps your days, not the widescreen wideshots of bigger picture politics, epic romance, but the dumb little punx uglies and their bent busted communions. I got this seven inch with a homemade button made from a ringpull, a bottlecap and a safety pin and Dishpit are the sound of tiny discarded objects pulled together. They are ephemeral and concerned with little things, the personal lives of people who know too many oogles but aren't really one themselves, who can't quite explain to their mum exactly why they hate cops so much, who laugh hard at their own bad decisions as soon as they've stopped punching a wall over them, who get a tad faded on fumes throwing up a wonky Gauze tag under the bridge, and get chased out of abandoned buildings. Who stay forever punk, in these songs, and in mushy mispelt zines, broken tapes, in stained and sleeveless homemade Die Kreuzen shirts strewn about on dirty floors. Not rebel souls, nothing so romantic or pure, just the brief grotty freedom of small punx lives drawn in sticky, pokey punk rock. To get stuck in your head and to poke at your ramshackle hopes. To get under the skin and live in your itchings.

The Gateway District - Old Wild Hearts

It's been almost three years since I started this blog, since I stole the title from first the Gateway District album and switched it up in the manner of Sam Elliot's character in The Big Lebowski summing up the essential uneven nature of life. I've written a bunch here. Some of it I'm kinda proud of, some of it I could give a fuck about. But it's good to write, I enjoy it, putting on word in front of the other, it's tougher sometimes to make it work, I've gone long stretches without writing, through procrastination or pain or Person of Interest marathons. It's tougher sometimes, to avoid slipping into overworked patterns or to dodge logorrheic obfuscation, but it provides ultimately a way to get a handle on the world, this tiny corner of the world, punk rock, that makes the most sense to me in its wild heart wailing, its youngpunx squealing, and that's the world that the new Gateway District album, Old Wild Hearts, on It's Alive Records, knows well.

Like Perfect's Gonna Fail, it avoids the country sections of Falling Down and Leaving Town or Highway Song on Some Days You Get the Thunder and sticks to this pop-punk chug, but it's got that twang deep down there, it runs with country obsessions, the call of hearts, if not broken, then at least slipped out of alignment, it's got country in it, the body evaporated but the spirit remains.

More than their other albums it's tempered by a certain restraint, for the most part avoiding the reckless tumble of something like Lake Street is for Suckers or Odd Powers. It's still punk, still filled with feeling with but weighed down with familiarity with the consequences, the emotions plays itself out in regrets and reconciliations, pain reworked and scars faded so that you just scratch them out of habit, rather than the rough and ripping roar of fresh emotions in flight. The title track lays it out "Our hearts are drugged and down heaving with the stress of fear silence cancels sound and I’m not sure how we wound up here we try to forget what we’ve got".

Murakami Novels is rueful but moves onwards, it's heartache worn lightly, Go Home is warm advice, rooted in personal experience and struggle, shaking its head as it recognises its former self, Tell You Why lays down its rules with confidence, clear markers for the relationship born of past missteps. The album reverberates with larger stories, rooted in, inferred from the minutiae, like Cline counting cigarettes in an ashtray, "the early morning highway trucks" of Murakami Novels, the "model homes, designer clothes and gender roles" of The Cut.



The wild hearts have grown old, they creak more with movement, but they still can burst joyously, transcending the limits of lives in order to reach for bigger things, as in the chorus of Tell You Why, or in The Cut, a tale of suburban dulling, where the rock bottom is reached and then turned into a defiant last stand: "They can't break you when you're broken". The Gateway District's primary strength remains in the incredible dual vocals, soulful and forceful, capable of these sparks, but also capable of a dry dissection of the situation, of embracing or bracing you. An album heavy with knowledge, "you got some tattered dreams I know" on Don't Mean Anything, "I recall the way things were some things I’ll always know for sure" on Speed Past, "I know it don’t matter you said you’d never stay  and I knew you weren’t lying" on You Always Let Me Down. It's cognizant of human frailty, of patterns of crossed lines and promises snapped, but still chooses to invest in the feeling, knowing too that there is little else but this. Those wild moments, when it sings and soars, are worked for, earned from uneasy living and the sort of lessons that burn. But it is not beaten down by those lessons learnt hard, it retains the twang and twinges, in the smudges and particulars, the worn books and drunken nights, "the cheapest vodka stings and all the clumsy warmth it brings" of Don't Mean Anything.

A word I hate, a word I always try to avoid when discussing punk is the word 'mature', cos usually it's a get-out clause for an unthinking slip into acoustic tedium and smoothing overs, to forget and become what you hate, but here there is something that might be described as a sort of maturity, or at least a building, a construction, putting together the bad sharp parts and trying to move up on over them, to feel just as strongly, but stand strong against the wind, to not let it sweep through you, to struggle more with failure than anger, with drifting apart not crashing and burning. To forgive maybe, especially yourself. To fucking deal with some shit. Some days you still get the thunder, but the days that you don't have the same number of hours. But you walk on.

Wastoids - EP

Thumping hardcore punk. Three quick hardcore mutations crammed between two big clumping hardcore trudges. Red Meat stomps in, all burly and graveltoned, the guitars surface, scraping and fading, like night sounds, before an animal grunt intercedes and throws the song down into a fierce knockdown dragout thump, gorging itself on violence, a song as graphic and as any vegan sXe hardcore screed, but without the bargainbasement moralising, just living in the gore and living with it. RED! MEAT! I'm a Prick, My Toronto and MCAB are the shittalk seethers, nasty and brief, shouts and thuds in the rumbles, shivering guitar flickers on MCAB cracking out of the mess. I'm a Prick opens "I'm a prick just like you", Minor Threat connotations, but screaming for the recognition of its own shittiness rather than personhood, tearing itself down. MCAB reiterates its self-loathing, cutting between sarcasm and flailing anger: "I hate this shit and I hate you/I hate myself and I hate punk too/I hate this city, I hate my dick/I hate this scene, it makes me sick". It can't commit to its own satire before it breaks apart with bare disgust and then it can't even keep that up before it curls back in on itself. It's the quickly descending stages of alienation. Brown Sugar/Brown Liquor's another slower one, angry bloody lead vocals trading off with brickhead Oi!-rocked roars. The music dropping down to a drumbeat, leaving that scream, shorn of the deeper uglier stomp it seems less angry, more anguished, breaking up not breaking out, drug numb not drug warm. While the whole thing hits with the simplistic violence of skinhead pulp, Dragon Skins and Knuckle Girls, it's darker, less communal than those shoutalong sections imply, it's the fragmentation of those little cliques and scenes and it stabs and cuts with the shards left over. Hardcore punk rock, hardnosed and brawling, infused with shifting levels and dynamics of violence, with the consequences as well as high, the bruises as well as the punches thrown.

Koszmar - Jeniec Wojenny

World-ripping d-beat from Canada, screamed in Polish, on Rust and Machine records.. Chopping, charging. Onwards motion, full of surges and blood, sparks of solos dying fast amongst the drum crashes, the vocals painful and spitedrenched. The shrill feedback wails squeezed and shaped into purposeful discordant weapons on Anioł Miłosierdzia, the carceral bite of Zdrazony's push/pull riffs. The eight minute torrent of Atomowa Groza, half-inches a riff from Fleetwood Mac's The Chain and tortures it with noise and thunder, settling into one of those rippling rhythms to close the album in a way similar to Disclose's nine minute relentless Wardead topping off Yesterday's Fairytale, Tomorrow's Nightmare. When you pull and prod a genre so used to self-destructive one/two-minute assaults, it no longer becomes a fresh gust of radioactivity air cutting your head up new ways, it stops being a winding gutpunch of fury, you fall in lockstep with its gets and gives, it becomes more a journeyed anger that sustains you, the once dissonant discomfort enshrouds you, sticks in the bone and warms the fingers, tight and close like a hood, which makes Atomowa Groza's slide into this ghoulcall wasteland echoes all the more jarring, and the straight bomber fury with which it bursts out of this all the sharper.

Murderer - Let My People Go cassette

Murderer. Another band from the fertile sewergardens of the current New York Ground Zero hardcore scene, on Toxic State records, featuring members of Hank Wood, Crazy Spirit, Dawn of Humans etc. Another crepuscular creep, in terms of its lineage it's not got that reckless whine and wheedle of some of these bands but it does have a bit of the Crazy Spirit gallop and a bunch of Hank Wood's urban ugliness, dilemmas restated again and again without growth or comprehension, in caveman shout, brainworn repetitive. "I try to be good at everything I do/But everything I do is dirty and bad/I'm a bad boy, baby." Lowdown and lowfi, shrugged acceptance and despair. Music for guileless hoods of a rundown Personal and Pizzas persuasion, all punches and failure, struggling with the limits of their perceptions of the world. A band with the rhythm and futility of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta laying into the jail wall in Raging Bull. Murderer. In his essay The Simple Art of Murder Raymond Chandler railed against the elegantly contrived mysteries of the likes of Agatha Christie and wrote that Dashiell Hammett "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." and this is the kind of crime that Murderer provide the soundtrack for, purposeful and unclean, Abuli-Bernet Torpedo cold. "Death, it comes for every man" warns the band's theme song. It comes with the slap of the drums and the music's grubby punk burble. It comes mucky and reeking and it won't let up, it's stuck in this pattern, this broken asphalt rut. Recidivist hardcore.

Get it here.