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

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

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


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


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

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

Lumpy & the Dumpers - Gnats in the Pissa

Two more squirts of sticky body-horror blues from Lumpy and the Dumpers, two more squalid fantasies enacted in punk itchings. While the Sex Pit seven-inch detailed the inner humours this new seven inch on Total Punk deals with invaders, namely GNATS IN THE PISSA! A grubby punk pump about insects flying into your dick, GNATS IN THE PISSA!, briefly drawing some sort of conformity parallel of being colonised by these beings, succumbing to the muck, but the physical revulsion is the real point here, Candiru-attitude cracking out a low-down knucklehead creepy-crawl of a sax shuffle. The second song, Ghoul Breath, is accompanied (invaded) by this acrid burbling, clearing rooms with halloween halitosis, a mouth, a body full of mephitic spirits. "WHEN I BREATHE OUT COME THE PESTS/CENTIPEDES HERE TO INFEST!", the unconscious procedures of eupnea corrupted with the demonic stench. As the cauldron bubbles, the guitars squeak, Lumpy sneers with snotty Pig-Pen pestilence, and the Dumpers play with the cackles and glee of childhood foulness, worms and little living beings, slugs and snails and smegma and corruption. All this to make you shiver and sicken, all this to make you ripen and rip and slide with them, filled with bugs and evil odours, dancing to retching rasping punk too dirty to die.

Vixens - S/T MLP

Heavy punk, messing with d-beat signifiers, 80s hardcore reapings, coming together in a violent crunching. V. I. X. E. N. S. Slurred and screaming, fill each letter with careless brutality and ugly insolence. A hard fuck-off manifesto. "THIS SCENE IS DEAD AND SO AM I/FUCK THE WORLD AND GET US HIGH" Entirely untethered on the sandpaper storm of Personal Habits or Absolute Complacency, House Taken Over stumbles in a sludgey muck "LITTLE BY LITTLE/WE STOPPED THINKING." Hatefuck crunches before exploding with desperate abnegation, drowning in sarcasm. "BE A MAN/TAKE CONTROL/I DON'T WANT IT ANYMORE." Each time a recognisable riff is happened upon the song destroys itself before it can be destroyed. No apologies, ripping through bullshit, taking a certain sonic savagery used generally to explore the same rote terrors: nuclear war, government evil, police brutality. All important injustices to rage and clash against, but too often seemingly smashed at out of a sense of slavish Cal-cified generic duty. Here Vixens grasp and use this assault it as a voice for the smaller moment, imbuing personal crises with missile crisis significance, taking that violence down to its individual (invasive & intimate) expressions, not the looming of oblivion, but the spurts and cracks of pain and responses to pain that are lived through every day, militarising, weaponising emotion and casual actions with wartorn swagger, sweeping with corrosive dirt across the windscoured nuke-blasted wastelands of your social scene. The sickness and the cruelty grits right down into the mechanics of thought and interaction, so that's where the aural rampage will begin. Silly Punk, serious noise. "YOU ARE SUCH A FUCKING LOSER."

Gas Rag - Beats Off MLP

Gas Rag Beats Off. Gas Rag breaks in. More brisk whirrs of hardcore punk, ravenous in its eradicative wants, disgusted in its truths, raw with the crepitus of the world's broken bones. Biting fiercely at the drugwar apathy with gruff blunt repetition: "SIXTY THOUSAND DEAD. SIXTY THOUSAND ARE DEAD." on Drugs and Violence. Life traps catalogued/struggled with on The Clock: "LIFE BY THE CLOCK, IT'S A TIME BOMB" and Criminal Gas: "GOT CAUGHT, HANDCUFFED, A NEW COURT DATE/MAYBE COULD HAVE ESCAPED, NOW IT'S TOO LATE". Death worship drawn and trashed on Endless Vietnam, Mass Grave and It's a Gift. Beats Off runs at sex with the same dry sharp rush as it runs at war evils on the title track: "BEAT OFF AND FEELING FREE", self-abuse as self-demarcation, brief relief from those traps, from that pain. It smacks down the ugly smugness of twee science fetishism as easily as it rips up the vast hypocracies of religion on Annihilation: "ANOTHER WAR IN THE NAME OF RELIGION AND WE ARE THE PAWNS/BUT'S IT'S FUCKING SCIENCE THAT GAVE US THE BOMB."

These ills and more laid down hard in short hardcore punk cuts that might lean into powerviolence territory in their brevity, but keeping it firmly in the sharpened punk claws of 80s snotheads like Dayglo Abortions or 90s terminal velocity burnthrash like Death Wish Kids. For in all it's rage it rarely flirts with chaos, these songs aren't crashing into themselves and exploding, not squealing manically into noise tantrums, these venoms are tightly controlled, tripwire taught, toeing a shock-collar line of nervous form, corralled and driven onwards by the piston drumming, like a coin whirling around a table in a spin, the speed maintains the poise, the ferocity spat out with presence and furious tightrope grace. A few times this tension breaks, it wails away on Annihilation in a scratching addict itch and whine, it wriggles out on It's a Gift, but for the most part this anger, just and terse, is aimed true. Spasms of pith and hard rancor and speed, outlining the aches and woes of the living and carrying a deep rage for the unsettled dead.
 

Voco Protesta - Neniam Konfidu al la Stato

"I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability of an universal language; but I do not believe it will be brought about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language. Such a course of action, or rather of slavish inaction, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for mastery between the languages of the greater powers.

On the other hand, a large number of small communities, speaking different tongues, are more likely to agree upon a common language as a common means of communication than a small number of great empires, each jealous of its own power and seeking its own supremacy." James Connolly, 1908

Raw punk from Japan screamed bitterly in Esperanto, a melding of form and content, a language built to erase borders, unify humanity in one tongue, one language. The use of Esperanto harkens back to movements of the early 20th century, futurists as optimists, the wide open possibilities of revolutionary camaraderie spanning the world, before futurism played its hand as fascistic ugly machineworship, Esperanto is new rules as new loves, new grammars as new communities. It's an old-fashioned idea, because the imposition of new languages is now synonymous with the erasure of old ways, those "smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language" that James Connolly wrote of, the native kids taught English or Spanish or French and punished for using the words that connect them to their heritage, it's been a severing, controlling tool, a cleaver, so that the more revolutionary act is one of reclaiming lost tongues, preserving languages sitting on the brink, crafting literature and poetry and song in a voice that speaks to your family but not the majority, that you hold tighter, make those who wish to see and understand you have to work at it actively engage with your voice, the intimacy holding back the malicious hegemony that globalisation carries with it. Charu Nivedita's Zero Degree written in Tamil not Malayalam or English, Der Nister's The Family Mashber in Yiddish not Russian. Punk bands across the world letting loose enraged rants in every language under the sun. Esperanto is seen as an odd utopian relic.

Voco Protesta embrace this revolutionary tradition of the language fully, although it is a far from utopian perspective expressed in this album, a raw graze of violence and struggle, pain and burning, capitalism, bureacracy, police violence, profits and nuclear fallout, a litany of illnesses poisoning the planet. The unifying force of Esperanto here is the unity of struggle and the promise of anarchism, the reaching grasp of hunger and unhappiness, in this we find a makeshift communion with people across the globe, and languages so steeped in blood as English or Japanese, though they are capable of great beauty and truth as all language, are unfit for purpose to lay this struggle bare. Reach back into the past to find this half-forgotten thing to blast apart bureaucratic nightmares and nuclear traps.

The brutality here, as in the works of Pichismo, an Esperanto punk band hailing from Ukraine, is fully alive in the music, blistering and violent, underpinned by a radiation hum, exploding out of tension on Kontrauatako, setting up moments of respite from the thrashbuzz, sweet woundings on Divido Kaj Konflikto, jaunty marching on Vivas Morte, only to kick them in with unnatural forces of distortion. Only to crash onwards.

Eight years after he penned the words at the top of this review, James Connolly was standing before a British firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising. In word and deed, commitment to a better world is what we all aspire to, and almost always fall short of, battered by the blows of an unjust world, tugged down by the human compromise, but we can find moments and small places where these revolutions live, in protests, in voices, in the shape of the language we use or refuse to use, in art and in song. And for some of us, in the warm savagery of noise.

On La Vida Es Un Mus.