Decraneo - s/t LP

Chopping punk from Mallorca. Catchy and cutting, brash and brief, it rocks and it rolls, short and smiling nasty, the swipe and slash of the vocals clear, pointed as the guitar licks. 13 fast punk numbers in Dangerhouse pose, bitten and kissed off parts of The Bags or The Dils, Mi Cuerpo tumbles up and down urgently, Turbulencias rumbles with surf sinisters, Sistema Del Olvido drives hard, Vida Ideal gets down into a kinda Dead Kennedys Police Truck shimmy, but each song is snapped off abruptly, like drumsticks brought across knees shattering into splinters and shivs. A dancefloor sharp punk album of decurt viciousness, potent, all edges and spiked charm.

EEL - Endless Fucker

"I think the ICA probably started to realise something was afoot when a cement mixer was set up on stage, alongside electric drills and jackhammers. There was a piano, too, but that would be smashed to pieces." Alexander Hacke, Einsturzende Neubaten

Reflecting on Einsturzende Neubaten's use of power tools in their infamous ICA performance Alexander Hacke ruminated on the band's intent of "leaving the stage from underneath. The plan was to dig through the stage into the tunnel system underneath the venue". A plan he describes as 'Utopian'. Pittsburgh punk band EEL, take a different approach to the use of (the other) DIY equipment proclaiming themselves to be "OBSESSED WITH DEATH AND DESTRUCTION AND DRUNK WITH POWER TOOLS" in Discharge font on the insert for their new EP Endless Fucker, a 7" on Even Worse in Europe, a 12" on Mind Cure and Konton Crasher elsewhere.



Power tool pogo madness, the fizz and screech of building sites, taking the mechanised destructionlust of power electronics and industrial and using it not as some world-cracking exploration of unfeeling present, avant-garde expeditions into the outer reaches of sonic insanity or a ranging search for a holy harshness to rearrange and rework the cosmic shape of things like the earshredding glories of Ramleh or similar noise bands, but just as a wild piercing backscatter to stomp and career through with breakneck stumblings and pogo lunges, getting bladdered and dancing silly buggers with dangerous machinery, not a care that you might wake up with infected bloody stumps where your thumbs used to be.

It's just the furious scummy shitground for an explosion of bursting punk madness. Bouncing with Tom and Boot Boys/00 Squad swagger through teethgrinding panic squirts. Terminal runs into real ugly muck, in alleys and prisons and divebars, dead bodies and puke piles, squeaking guitar solos, hatefilled drawls. Jisatsu  "VIOLENT ANARKY IS ALL WE NEED/RADIOACTIVE GLUE AND SPEED!" in desperate shouts and monster growls. Endless Fucker writhing with the mauling facts of fuckedworld realities. Combat Amputee Victim and Dead crowing at corpses, giggling at veterans. Sneering and cackling with that sort of teenage untouchable vitriol, no social niceties, no conscience, deliberately dulling it with drugs, cheap fixes, quick highs, chaotic shapings. You're dead. I'm alive. In an uncontrollable runaround, switching from hating on boring drunks, to drinking yourself unconscious, jumping up and doing it again. Squealing into Jisatsu Noisy, a strippedbare mess of toolnoise and drum clatter and looped plunderphonics speech samples, like some weird kid drumming along in his room as the world ends outside. Delinquenx punx, knock it down.

Crown Court - Trouble From London

Thumping new stuff, raw and blustery, the shoutalong momentum of Oi! combined with the melodic power of those early punks caught up in bashing in and fouling up early rock and roll templates like 999 or Slaughter and the Dogs, Chelsea or The Lurkers, sharp with the tang of public transport piss-stink, catchy but with the pinched edge of violence. Three London anthems, slapping down tedious crusties and their affectations on Hammer a Nail, screaming of endless nightbus journeys and the alienation and paranoia of the tube and its thousand watching eyes on TFL and BTP, songs pulled from the rusty arteries of the city sprawl, a transitory deadtime where you spend too much of your life, rolling from once grey suburb to another, overground, underground. Lately I've been fairly obsessed with a video of Jeff Turner kicking a Nazi out of a Cockney Rejects show, a video taken not in the bad ol' days of 1981 but in 20-fucking-14, where a performance of Are You Ready to Rucks switches immediately from the communal beery arm-in-arm singing to Jeff threatening to "punch the cunt outta ya", Jeff is totally fucking ready to ruck, that's the moment that Crown Court are living in, the snap from throaty bellowing ("OI! OI!") to dead-eyed threat. Howling roughs and bloody cunts.

Hysterics - Can't I Live?

True roiling hardcore punk straight out of the early 80s, flailing with whip-quick shifts of emotion and tempo, Outside In screams, then sneers, then lifts from a spoken verse into rushing anger and manic laughter, each change-up throwing out waves of bitterness, alienation, the snap of frustration flowering into rage, dissent. Stomp-along or crash through wild riffs, matching crushing choruses with chaotic verses. "LEAVE ME ALONE. DON'T WASTE MY TIME. OR MY SPACE. CAN'T YOU SEE. I'M A HUMAN BEING." the chorus to Leave Me Alone bludgeons, force and bluntness, "DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, MAN?" it drawls, spitting derision and venom, ripping shithead cat-callers to pieces. Hysterics tear at crushing ills of every day, grievances mirrored and exploded, disconnected and uncomfortable on Outside In, scornful on Psychic Drain, tired on Now I See, enraged on No Vision. Classically corrosive, contemporarily barbed.

The pace slackens on Please Sir (I Want Some More), a mid-tempo thump at the smug grandiloquences of male supremacy, rolling along in scathing scratching punk, "PLEASE SIR/BESTOW UPON ME/YOUR INVALUABLE GIFTS/THE WORLD/AS IT IS THROUGH YOUR EYES". The vocals bite and sneer and then split into wordless retching, disgusted by the lines that they're intoning, however satirical they may be. It's like the truth behind the words, the truth of the obliviousness of dudes acting like that, marinating in their own self-delusion and fragile egotism, cuts through the mockery and, unable to play these caustic words with a straight face, the song explodes, the words breaking apart into a slurred scream, the guitar lacerating. I started writing this review at the end of last week and left it as I went off to spent the weekend getting fucked up and watching amazing bands and terrible bands. In that time the supreme vileness of male entitlement was expressed publicly in the worst possible way, several people are dead because of it. Hysterics rage at the world that allows those poisonous ideas to flourish and bloom into tragedy, they try to rip them up at the root, with the tools they have, sharp disdain and hardcore punk fury. Can't I Live? You can, but the bastards aren't gonna make it easy.

Aspects of War - The Presence of Death

Many shitty punk bands as they go on become more competent, almost by accident, improving musically through force of habit and locking into genre grooves. It seemed that's what Aspects of War were doing, moving from the lo-fi Total Disfuckers demo which buried the vocals almost totally to the equally killer, if slightly more competently put together, In Order To Satisfy Their Mania For Conquest Punks Are Squandered demo and then last year's 4-way LP with Disable, Truncheons and Total War: 全滅 - Annihilation: Konton Crasher Omnibus. They were perfecting their Kawakami-born attack, relentless onwards momentum, noise and volume.

Cos that happens, bands hit the style they want and run with it, using their improved musical abilities to crank out raw rockin taut assimilations of the noise that spoke to them first, using a deep knowledge of dis to lift from the best bits of -close and -charge and -fear and -konto and -honorable Discharge, not deciding to burst out of the genre in a throw of manic misguided self-destruction (people learnt their lessons from Grave New World). Aspects of War had found their place, and yeah it was pretty fucking awesome, one of the tightest rawest bunch of self-identified disfuckers doing it at the moment. Each release would tighten that formula, screw in deeper, ready to take the place of the knowingly named D-Clone as bearers of the true Dis-crown and then they release this, The Presence of Death, on Brain Solvent Propaganda‎, where they come out sounding like a band of teenagers who had d-beat roughly described to them and decided that it sounded really cool and wanted to play it without ever actually hearing it. And as such, it fucking slaughters.

What Aspects of War do here is to take all that proficiently molded dis fuckery and thump it to piss-sodden pieces, manage to sound noticeably shittier, more inept, more unhinged, cracking apart the genre into a rough approximation of itself, each identifier in place, but the feedback hiss viler, seething and eating the sound, the drums thudding clear but on This Is Hell working a weird off-kilter mid-tempo groove, nails to the forehead, the thick bass attack from before gone, halfdrowned in the ghastly mix. "This is hell/Hell is here". Here the solos whinier, more scatterbrained, sudden noiseburps and coughs of indeterminate origin come forth, the vocals desperate and burnt, everything fucked-up, destroyed, ugly past ugliness, into strange territory, loose and wild and incompetent. Presence of Death opens jangling practically like fucking sleigh bells. Sounding less sweeping and apocalyptic, more sawdust and stumblings. A pervasive sense of distaste with it all (NO SYSTEM WORKS!). Getting back to unlistenable fuck-off of dirty-handed youth. Regression as progression.