Saturday, 15 August 2015
Gas Rag - On the Beach 7"
The final and posthumous Gas Rag 7 inch rushes them out the door with the same screwed-tight hardcore fury that blazed them through their previous releases. The same speedpunk Fix fix, stamping runners of unbreakable cycles, vicious circles, snarling with cynical karma on On The Beach "Don't we all deserve to crawl?", confronting the inevitability of fucked destinies on Human Bomb "His path was clear he had no choice/Now he's a human bomb", the social prisons of Short Leash, the real prisons of Neglect, a series of jails spun out of complacencies and worn paths followed, built and maintained from structures unchallenged and flourishing, conventions obeyed. Burning and bright, Gas Rag made hardcore confined and screaming.
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
Hank Wood & the Hammerheads - Stay Home LP
"It looked like a city. Ghostly, wavering buildings appeared through a drizzle of midnight rain. Of course, no two minds were alike..." - Terry Pratchett, Thud
Stay Home, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads second album of Mummies-beat New York squalorsquawk, Quintron-by-way-of-Queens, following on from 2012's Go Home, possibly my favourite release from that year. It's more panicky though, Go Home having its fair share of tuff cunt strut in songs like It's Hard On The Street and Don't Walk Away From Me, Stay Home rippling with more uncomfortable grooves, restless itchings, claustrophobic mutterings, skittering percussion like the ricochets of paranoia and angst of the inside of your skull. Go Home had a more conflicted attitude towards its city environs, stumbling between pissed-off rantings and face-up fuck-offs, Stay Home has burnt itself out, wrapped itself too deep in the toxic understandings and fetid cracklings of the city and it wants out.
It's an album living in a maze of traps, internal (Neurosis's agonised "THE DOCTOR SAID TO GO FUCK MYSELF/BUT I'M IN MAD PAIN/I KNOW IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD/BUT I CAN'T CHANGE", The Ghost's frantic "IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/THE MIND/THE MIND IS THE PROBLEM") and external (In Bookings' jailhouse lugging "THROWN INTO A CAGE UNDERGROUND/TRAPPED BEHIND BARS WITH A MILK DRINKING CLOWN/TAKE MY WILL/TAKE MY PRINTS/TAKE MY LACE", Shook & Hungry's propulsive roll of "I'M LIVING IN A DEEP DARK PIT/CONCRETE WALLS TALL AND THICK") and then times where these two merge in a psychogeographic wounding, ripping up city and head, pavement and frontal lobe shocked and splitting simultaneously as on Nervous City's repetitive rankle "BROKEN BRICKS/ANXIOUS CITY", These Chains's blunt instrument jabbing "THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE IN A CITY THAT DEPRAVES ME/CYCLE CYCLE PRISON CYCLE".
But whenever there are traps and prisons, dreams of escape snarl up, like This World Is Beat and In Space imagine a way out from these insomniac wanderings beset by chaotic urban chatter. Searching for silence and isolation, an escape from this noir of perpetual rain, this pulpy shitsmear of an Ed McBain potboiler, interminable degradation in familiar patterns, they imagine the free-floating void, "DRIFTING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS/PEACE AND QUIET/WHAT IS THIS" but these remain a fantastical vision, a utopian oblivion tickling inside the dank confines of a old city mentality, built-up tight and built-down deep, cramped, no sprawl.
Rollicking along, Stay Home bounces with gunk and gusto, keys jabbering, guitars gurgling and squeaking like cyclical thought patterns spinning off the axle, infectious skeleton-rattle rhythms like snatches of blackened calypsos, breathy oohs and aahs and huhs like James Brown interjections or stress-induced ticks, like little snorts of pressure released ("THE PRESSURE/THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING/AND I'M SUFFOCATING" on Shook & Hungry). Shaking with a cokesick shiver throughout, ratty gnawings at the worn burlap of your brainfilm, the fraying diaphanous membrane of your psychological wellbeing the relapses of What's So Bad About a Bad Idea, the ugly realisations of I Thought I was a Good Man, tuning into the repetitive rhythms of anxiety and anguish, depressive diggings. A city's bricked-up sickness let loose, the scratching inside the walls amplified and shaken out.
"He turned down a winding lane where pain had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people's feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air." - Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole
Stay Home, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads second album of Mummies-beat New York squalorsquawk, Quintron-by-way-of-Queens, following on from 2012's Go Home, possibly my favourite release from that year. It's more panicky though, Go Home having its fair share of tuff cunt strut in songs like It's Hard On The Street and Don't Walk Away From Me, Stay Home rippling with more uncomfortable grooves, restless itchings, claustrophobic mutterings, skittering percussion like the ricochets of paranoia and angst of the inside of your skull. Go Home had a more conflicted attitude towards its city environs, stumbling between pissed-off rantings and face-up fuck-offs, Stay Home has burnt itself out, wrapped itself too deep in the toxic understandings and fetid cracklings of the city and it wants out.
It's an album living in a maze of traps, internal (Neurosis's agonised "THE DOCTOR SAID TO GO FUCK MYSELF/BUT I'M IN MAD PAIN/I KNOW IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD/BUT I CAN'T CHANGE", The Ghost's frantic "IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/IT'S A PATTERN/THE MIND/THE MIND IS THE PROBLEM") and external (In Bookings' jailhouse lugging "THROWN INTO A CAGE UNDERGROUND/TRAPPED BEHIND BARS WITH A MILK DRINKING CLOWN/TAKE MY WILL/TAKE MY PRINTS/TAKE MY LACE", Shook & Hungry's propulsive roll of "I'M LIVING IN A DEEP DARK PIT/CONCRETE WALLS TALL AND THICK") and then times where these two merge in a psychogeographic wounding, ripping up city and head, pavement and frontal lobe shocked and splitting simultaneously as on Nervous City's repetitive rankle "BROKEN BRICKS/ANXIOUS CITY", These Chains's blunt instrument jabbing "THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/THESE CHAINS THEY GAVE ME/I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE IN A CITY THAT DEPRAVES ME/CYCLE CYCLE PRISON CYCLE".
But whenever there are traps and prisons, dreams of escape snarl up, like This World Is Beat and In Space imagine a way out from these insomniac wanderings beset by chaotic urban chatter. Searching for silence and isolation, an escape from this noir of perpetual rain, this pulpy shitsmear of an Ed McBain potboiler, interminable degradation in familiar patterns, they imagine the free-floating void, "DRIFTING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS/PEACE AND QUIET/WHAT IS THIS" but these remain a fantastical vision, a utopian oblivion tickling inside the dank confines of a old city mentality, built-up tight and built-down deep, cramped, no sprawl.
Rollicking along, Stay Home bounces with gunk and gusto, keys jabbering, guitars gurgling and squeaking like cyclical thought patterns spinning off the axle, infectious skeleton-rattle rhythms like snatches of blackened calypsos, breathy oohs and aahs and huhs like James Brown interjections or stress-induced ticks, like little snorts of pressure released ("THE PRESSURE/THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING/AND I'M SUFFOCATING" on Shook & Hungry). Shaking with a cokesick shiver throughout, ratty gnawings at the worn burlap of your brainfilm, the fraying diaphanous membrane of your psychological wellbeing the relapses of What's So Bad About a Bad Idea, the ugly realisations of I Thought I was a Good Man, tuning into the repetitive rhythms of anxiety and anguish, depressive diggings. A city's bricked-up sickness let loose, the scratching inside the walls amplified and shaken out.
"He turned down a winding lane where pain had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people's feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air." - Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole
Sunday, 9 August 2015
Sheer Mag - II 7"
The second 7" of this Philadelphia punk band. Sheer Mag lay a patina of dirt over classic rock riffs, like Thin Lizzy as a region rock band. Free bent outta shape, Bent Outta Shape dragged through with hooks. Echoes of bits of powerpop like The Frenchmen's No Surprise and its melancholic pomp, something like Hanson Brothers's Right Back Where We Started From cover but jumping back to Maxine Nightingale's original vocals.
It opens with Fan the Flames's shimmy swagger, rueful bad neighbourhood blues, singing of old houses and decrepit fixings, reverberating with that Double Duce charm, the chaos of a home that is shabby and barely held-together both inside ("Getting hard to stay in tune/The boys are getting me down/I'll be staying in my room") and out ("In the dark and the bitter cold/They're freezing us out/It's as good as gold"), but still shakes and lives with the feeling of a home in spite of the spectre of gentrification lurking in the background.
Travelin' On's jangle and sway cataloging the whispering lure of the roads, the rough shackles of wanderlust, living drifter mythic, burnt bridges and patched soles and leaving town as you watch yourself leave town, moving like a snowball down a hill, silently gathering yourself for an impact. "When all the smoke was clearing out/Oh yeah I was on my own/I ain't coming home to you/I was born to roam the streets yeah."
Button Up a fuck-you self-affirmation, that precarious place where telling others you're not to be fucked with and at the same time convincing yourself of that fact, of telling yourself you can deal with some shit, of screaming at the world that you're through with their shit. "I'm taking time whatever I do/I'm working hard whatever I do/With You"
Whose Side Are You On?, echoing the old union tune, but grounding it less in accusatory polemic than in the bonds of friendship and understanding stretched in the face of too much real shit, as slipperily unsteady as it it forceful and joyous. "The factory wheels'll keep spinnin along/It ain't cut and dried/And it never will/But the fightin' baby that's half of the thrill"
The diminutives and asides that pepper the lyrics adding to the sharp familiarity they carry, 2nd and 1st person, conversationally poetic, a distillation of times when you somehow managed to say the right thing. They assume you're conversant with certain knowledges, certain struggles. And these are often worn topics, the road, home, friendship, the fight, your fight, but they're worn like scarred fists, discoloured deformed couches, rusty cars with silly nicknames. They're worn with real living process and the battering winds of experience.
That's part of what gets this songs stuck so deep into you, like the way the Hold Steady could root around in a riffed up charger and pull out of it a smaller closer story, but with greater personal kick here, a more tender gutpunch, a brighter spark. Mixing those punk-fractured intimacies and dilemmas with a wayward scrappy version the kind of music that reminds you of your dad getting really drunk and ranting about how he wants this song, this song playing right now, blasted at his funeral good and loud.
I've had this EP on my phone for a couple months now and back in May after a show it had me half-cut and footloosin' it up around an empty coach station at 2am, work seven hours and 220 miles of megabus away, but I was skipping around free in myself in a way I rarely feel until I got too hype and attempted to leap gracefully onto a bench coming very close to a dramatic faceplant. These songs swallow you up in their world, they tell you to fuck off and hold you tight with the roughness of a true friend, they get you movin, whether it's out into the world or just onto to the dancefloor. There are always steps that you need to take, there are some steps that you need to be reminded to take. By a friend or by a song.
It opens with Fan the Flames's shimmy swagger, rueful bad neighbourhood blues, singing of old houses and decrepit fixings, reverberating with that Double Duce charm, the chaos of a home that is shabby and barely held-together both inside ("Getting hard to stay in tune/The boys are getting me down/I'll be staying in my room") and out ("In the dark and the bitter cold/They're freezing us out/It's as good as gold"), but still shakes and lives with the feeling of a home in spite of the spectre of gentrification lurking in the background.
Travelin' On's jangle and sway cataloging the whispering lure of the roads, the rough shackles of wanderlust, living drifter mythic, burnt bridges and patched soles and leaving town as you watch yourself leave town, moving like a snowball down a hill, silently gathering yourself for an impact. "When all the smoke was clearing out/Oh yeah I was on my own/I ain't coming home to you/I was born to roam the streets yeah."
Button Up a fuck-you self-affirmation, that precarious place where telling others you're not to be fucked with and at the same time convincing yourself of that fact, of telling yourself you can deal with some shit, of screaming at the world that you're through with their shit. "I'm taking time whatever I do/I'm working hard whatever I do/With You"
Whose Side Are You On?, echoing the old union tune, but grounding it less in accusatory polemic than in the bonds of friendship and understanding stretched in the face of too much real shit, as slipperily unsteady as it it forceful and joyous. "The factory wheels'll keep spinnin along/It ain't cut and dried/And it never will/But the fightin' baby that's half of the thrill"
The diminutives and asides that pepper the lyrics adding to the sharp familiarity they carry, 2nd and 1st person, conversationally poetic, a distillation of times when you somehow managed to say the right thing. They assume you're conversant with certain knowledges, certain struggles. And these are often worn topics, the road, home, friendship, the fight, your fight, but they're worn like scarred fists, discoloured deformed couches, rusty cars with silly nicknames. They're worn with real living process and the battering winds of experience.
That's part of what gets this songs stuck so deep into you, like the way the Hold Steady could root around in a riffed up charger and pull out of it a smaller closer story, but with greater personal kick here, a more tender gutpunch, a brighter spark. Mixing those punk-fractured intimacies and dilemmas with a wayward scrappy version the kind of music that reminds you of your dad getting really drunk and ranting about how he wants this song, this song playing right now, blasted at his funeral good and loud.
I've had this EP on my phone for a couple months now and back in May after a show it had me half-cut and footloosin' it up around an empty coach station at 2am, work seven hours and 220 miles of megabus away, but I was skipping around free in myself in a way I rarely feel until I got too hype and attempted to leap gracefully onto a bench coming very close to a dramatic faceplant. These songs swallow you up in their world, they tell you to fuck off and hold you tight with the roughness of a true friend, they get you movin, whether it's out into the world or just onto to the dancefloor. There are always steps that you need to take, there are some steps that you need to be reminded to take. By a friend or by a song.
Inmates - s/t LP
Inmates first LP in 12 years is everything you could expect from the band that typified a time and a place that's come to be spoken of in shitpunk circles with the kind of semi-apprehensive reverence reserved for the edge-riding scenes of crazed hardcore violence, responsible for some of the best fucking records and the most dangerous shows of the 90s and early 2000s. The oh-shit heady riot-madness and hardnut aura that's super cool when viewed through the intoxicating lens of old teenage wildness and the distancing prism of grainy youtube videos, but the more adult person inside you kind of knows would probably leave you real real fucked up in actual fact.
This is a consummately put together violent ugly record. It knows when to drive, when to snap, to stop, to stomp, to grab you with the rough thickness of the sound like you're hearing the reverberations of rusted steel cables rather than guitar strings, when to squeal clean in the solos, the vocals a perfect blend of menace and method, wrapped up in mutant snarl and growl. Got its Japanese/American hardcore roots balanced and locked in. It's music well-versed in that cathartic power of capturing that semi-inchoate anger that inevitably swirls out of you as a potent amalgam of sublimated depression, unshakeable frustration and gut-stuck futility. The only problem is that its also everything you could expect from a band that hasn't released an LP in 12 years.
Sushi; 39.6 lyrically brings to mind nothing so much as Separation of Church and Skate, NOFX song from 2003 that got immediately put-on blast by Propagandhi for its tired-ass olds-gonna-old premise way back then, Joe Dolce is literally a Joe Dolce cover, whose 70s cod-Italian novelty hit is repurposed as a hardcore anthem, and there's a a storming cover of a Cleveland hardcore banger from 1984, The Guns' Rotting Away. Crust Dust is a song about how crusties are stupid, a punk song about how crusties are stupid is possibly the only thing more played out than a crust song about how nuclear war sucks. It's all a bit like Eminem's Rap God, formally sick genre-savvy constructions, but essentially reruns of stuff that played well 15 years ago, Em dropping six minute tracks of dense hyperspeed multi-syllabic rhymes and still making tired gay jokes and Monica Lewinsky references. Inmates writing a slammin song about annoying oogles.
The panic and pain of Into Crypts of Smith is a tough hit though, touching a deeper darker emotion than most of the other songs, the generalised threats about running someone out of town, envisioning beating the shit out of some fucking prick, that classic subtweet hardcore, on Little Bitch or Form a Mob, still kill, still get into that primal righteous stomping part of you, cos it's a perfectly hardcore record, but too perfect to be a perfect hardcore record. Or to phrase it in a even glibber fashion, it's hard but there's not much at its core.
This is a consummately put together violent ugly record. It knows when to drive, when to snap, to stop, to stomp, to grab you with the rough thickness of the sound like you're hearing the reverberations of rusted steel cables rather than guitar strings, when to squeal clean in the solos, the vocals a perfect blend of menace and method, wrapped up in mutant snarl and growl. Got its Japanese/American hardcore roots balanced and locked in. It's music well-versed in that cathartic power of capturing that semi-inchoate anger that inevitably swirls out of you as a potent amalgam of sublimated depression, unshakeable frustration and gut-stuck futility. The only problem is that its also everything you could expect from a band that hasn't released an LP in 12 years.
Sushi; 39.6 lyrically brings to mind nothing so much as Separation of Church and Skate, NOFX song from 2003 that got immediately put-on blast by Propagandhi for its tired-ass olds-gonna-old premise way back then, Joe Dolce is literally a Joe Dolce cover, whose 70s cod-Italian novelty hit is repurposed as a hardcore anthem, and there's a a storming cover of a Cleveland hardcore banger from 1984, The Guns' Rotting Away. Crust Dust is a song about how crusties are stupid, a punk song about how crusties are stupid is possibly the only thing more played out than a crust song about how nuclear war sucks. It's all a bit like Eminem's Rap God, formally sick genre-savvy constructions, but essentially reruns of stuff that played well 15 years ago, Em dropping six minute tracks of dense hyperspeed multi-syllabic rhymes and still making tired gay jokes and Monica Lewinsky references. Inmates writing a slammin song about annoying oogles.
The panic and pain of Into Crypts of Smith is a tough hit though, touching a deeper darker emotion than most of the other songs, the generalised threats about running someone out of town, envisioning beating the shit out of some fucking prick, that classic subtweet hardcore, on Little Bitch or Form a Mob, still kill, still get into that primal righteous stomping part of you, cos it's a perfectly hardcore record, but too perfect to be a perfect hardcore record. Or to phrase it in a even glibber fashion, it's hard but there's not much at its core.
Sunday, 12 July 2015
Disguise - Signs of the Future
Dublin, like New York or London, is a city whose punk in 2015 matches its vibrancy with its refusal to be defined by one sound. Multiple bands, all with wildly divergent takes on 2015 punk, all unified in their DIY ethic and refusal to compromise. The first 12" from searing rawpunx Disguise continues where their System Shock 7" left off, slamming together the lithe turmoil of Gloom, the monstrous purpose of Bastard, the ugly burn of Crude SS into a violent driving gunk, like Florida's Mauser or Australia's Kromosom, taking that Scandi-Japanese rawpunk axis and stretching it out to their own corner of the globe.
Built on a relentless sinister thrum, a taut propulsive clatter, Disguise explode with scalding fury in the screaming guitars and tortured barks and roars echoing out of the radioactive slurry. From Constant Victim pure vitriol rolling into Signs of the Future's noisestomp groove, to Depleted Uranium heady crash and Breed Bastards broken fade, this is ferocious hardcore punk, worked til its end.
Built on a relentless sinister thrum, a taut propulsive clatter, Disguise explode with scalding fury in the screaming guitars and tortured barks and roars echoing out of the radioactive slurry. From Constant Victim pure vitriol rolling into Signs of the Future's noisestomp groove, to Depleted Uranium heady crash and Breed Bastards broken fade, this is ferocious hardcore punk, worked til its end.
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