Piss - demo

Housed in a small facsimile of a bible, Berlin's Piss bring a nasty hardcore punk, rippling with blown-out scumfuzz, Die Kreuzen energy and collisions. The scrape and sparks of metal on metal as furious riff grinds to a halt and then explode again in a redoubling of manic scratched-out punk effort on stop-start blasts like Spranga Allt and Civil Cops. Tight Jeans rumbles and stomps, flexes and squeals. There are breathless sub-30 terrors on D.I.Y. and How Simple Can Punk Get?, terrifying screams, male/female vocals, equally tortured and destroyed. Piss change things up, throwing a catchy guitar line into the middle of Puke on the Patriarchy's 50-second torrent, dropping into snappy chants and drum breaks on Civil Cops. But it never feels like a forced technicality, it's restless, but it's progression is smooth, when a riff or a guitar line sneaks out of the mess in order to drive the song forward for a couple of seconds before disintegrating, it always feels like a natural outcome of the noise.

These clatter dynamics stretched to breaking point on Snake Vomit, the final track, touching on eight minutes, its dragged out sludgey intro goes on longer than most of the other seven tracks, before sticking into a noisy bass and drums groove, held together with a sturdy rhythm, it gives space to a crash and alarm-squeak of guitar, the echo of screams, and then building in a sample of a real wild freakout lifted from Japanese avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe, squealing and squawking, unhinged and free, its tremulous pain and caustic life, rolling with the bloody momentum and then outstretching it.

Gutter Gods - Innersense LP

Pulsing negative futurepunx, mechanistic hardcore chomping broken up with cyberparts, building a swirling surreality of samples, feedback sparks and guitar crunch, all encased with this kind of scummy hum. Virtual Reality squealing manically, barking rabidly as the song grumbles into life. Mind Corruption rolling slowly with the harmonica squawk of alarm blares reaching you through the din, then the feverish screech, then exploding, slowing, cracking onwards with its psychotic shifts."A SICKNESS TAKES HOLD ALL TOO OFTEN/ACCELERATING THOUGHTS/MIND CORRUPTION"

Constantly brutalised and confused, Gutter Gods attack with such relentless cynicism and antagonistic fervor as to spray its hostility on all it contacts, including itself. Hang Out burns with a rancor for all social scene shit, but as that kind of dismissive scream often is, it's matched to a stabbing self-loathing (which explodes on Rut) rather than an arrogance. And Street Walker might seem like a bleak scathing portrait of a prostitute, but it switches up between third and first person so quickly, marries itself to its target and then jumps away from that, snaps between the specific and the general, that all you're left with is just an overwhelming sense of unease and gathering despair, all thrust into your head by the thump of the hardcore.

Even the hearty Oi!-shot crew-stomper of Chosen Few oscillates between being the prototypical celebratory fist-in-face fucker-upper, and a snide, self-lacerating satirical take on that brainless violent mentality "BUNCH OF APES THROWING SHIT/WE DON'T TIRE WE DON'T QUIT/RUIN THE NIGHT FOR YOU/WHAT THE FUCK YOU GONNA DO?" Even at one point breaking down into peppy goofy handclaps, heightening the ridiculousness of that thugpunk shield-wall unity. "SPILLIN' GEAR CAUSIN' FEAR/SPILL A PUNK ROCKER'S BEER/SLAP OF REALITY ACROSS YOUR FACE/CLEAR THE POSERS OUT THE PLACE" Cos maybe even a brawl is a level of interaction that can't sit right with the forceful isolation of Community: "HUMAN NATURE/SUCK IT DRY/NO COMMUNITY/JUST ALIVE"

Allan where this all disintegrates, the purposeful noise losing that momentum, breaking apart with the strain of pessimistic totality, the energy previously corralled let loose, the constituent parts wild, damaging, unformed. Background turmoil and a rant of paranoia and nihilism, the coiled and wriggling thoughts that fester and live with mental quarantine, but this break is shouted again with such ferocity as to cut and bloody, just digging deeper as it's dragged out uncomfortably long.

As well as the uncompromising desire to push this negativity to hard blank endpoints, what makes Innersense really live is the way the album matches malevolent fury to the space-smooth sterling guitar whispertone, rocketship fuselage sheen over mucky snarls, Innersense chugs and cuts with Gutter Gods' perverse anti-faith, anti-human swivel. Hate articulated and thrown in all directions, animosity towards self and others and torn up with thunderous hardcore stomp and drive, but the psychshiver guitar that bookends Streetwalker, stabs out of Community, whips and swoops through Mind Corruption, and that constant wheedling squeal that lives to itch out of the quieter moments, take this venom into way weirder, darker, creepier places yet than simple fuck-you with a riff strapped-on.

Scumheads - Demo 2014

Discombobulated nitwit noisepunk from Ireland in the Wankys/Swankys/Vaginors/Dislike vein, squawking over fuzz, manic and careening onwards like trollies with jacked-up wheels being flung down hills, mirroring the insouciant chaos and prickling agitation of childish or adolescent needs and impulses. I'm a Dog and Shitty Kitty indulging in animal inanity, like the screeched and tortured remnant's of children's ditties. Smell and Problem sweatsticky squeals of hormone and odours, crashing apart. Stick Fight's a burst of roughly orchestrated violence, Scumheads are the moment when it stops being fun and games and someone loses an eye.  The hopped up glee of Sex Music's feverish pogo "I LIKE GIRLS AND I LIKE BOYS/I LIKE SEX AND I LIKE TOYS/BUT MOST OF ALL I LIKE NOIZE!". The blackly comic stump-punk of Perfect for War: "I GOT NO HEAD/I GOT NO ARMS/MADE OF CHICKEN LEGS/AND BITS OF STRAW/I'M THE PERFECT MAN/PERFECT FOR WAR!" Scumheads writhe around showing off a venereal love for dischord and noise, exhibiting a smile that you know isn't a happy one at a world animalised and bloody, stomping in puddles of shit and phlegm, kicking rocks, breaking the few things that aren't already broken, caught up following the simplistic and inchoate logic of a mind that could be still-forming, or half-dead and acid-decayed.

Los Monjo - La Vida Que Todos Envidian LP

Catchy Eskorbutan punk from a bunch of Mexican brothers (and a cousin) out on Discos MMM and Trabuc Records. Los Monjo are all about getting dug into you with those thick melodic basslines up front, cymbal rattles and guitar swishing away in the back, so low in songs like Herederos De Miseria as to sometimes feel like gentle crackling echoes. The vocals are sharp and mean, drawling, shouting, never mellow but never losing their biting clarity. Al Filo De Una Era chops through a mid-tempo Adolescents kinda groove, the catchy bass and perfect retreat, crouch and pounce dynamics of Adolescents' finest moments is all over this record. Rock Basura snatches one of those soulworm simple guitar lines and rides through on a courageous chug. La Vida Que Todos Envidian is eight new punk anthems to dance and nod to. These songs hit with the sweet tang of punk classics remembered, punk futures kicked into gear.

S.H.I.T. - Collective Unconsciousness EP

Rushing reaping hardcore punk from Toronto's S.H.I.T., ready to rearrange face and brains, fit for blowing up rooms. Vocals dragged roughly out of throats and echoing away with the dynamo pace, retching over the collision of body and society, mind and matters, writhing and snatching clumsily in flat bursts of alienation, sex negative. Pressing onwards, crashing forwards. S.H.I.T. lay down four punk rippers, exigent, rowdy. Collective Unconsciousness wails on the blankness "SEDATED SOCIETY/APATHETIC INSANITY/SEDATED SOCIETY/CATATONIC REALITY", Masochism is power structures of bedrooms splayed out in the social sprawl, the political game, gimps and kinksters all, whips and taxes and corruption in every corner, and we take it. "POWER IS THEIR PLEASURE AND PAIN IS DIVINE/YOU CARRY THE WHIP AS IT EATS YOUR HIDE". Nobody Knows Anybody slams at the barriers between and on The Stimulator, S.H.I.T. get physical, crawling with desire, stamping out a minute of lust in the guitar churn "I NEED SENATION/I NEED A CHEMICAL REACTION/INFECTIOUS CRAVING STIMULATION" disgusted with both its wants and its inability to channel, process, said wants. There's a lot of creeping grief in the world, a lot of uncomfortably empty spaces and formless evil shit waiting to fill in the gaps, S.H.I.T. see that. S.H.I.T. show it off. S.H.I.T. body it.