Curious mixture of hardcore-, anarcho- and post punk on this Kingston, NY group’s debut tape, assembling a distinct style out of gritty KBD-drenched vibes à la Launcher, a hint of UK82 energy, plenty of Rudimentary Peni and the occasional bit of Crass.
Fuck, that shit smells… but in a good way. After their mildly disturbing one-and-a-half tapes on Impotent Fetus we finally get their first “full” length cassette from Tetryon Tapes and once again this is some joy to behold. Ultra-septic hard- and noisecore vaguely reminiscent of present-day acts like Soupcans, Stinkhole or Vulture shit but also of old pioneers of the Flipper, No Trend, Broken Talent variety. There was a time when, as a kid, folks from my church told me that listening to evil rock’n’roll music might give you a demon infestation (thankfully, the fearmongering didn’t work for long…). I don’t know what listening to C-Krit is gonna leave you with but its side effects include violent sarcasm, diarrhea and not giving a shit.
A veritable gut punch, the debut tape of this St. Louis, Missouri group. Hardcore punk with elaborate & flexible anything-goes song structures, at times catchy and melodic, in other parts showing a gloomy post punk / death rock undercurrent and also there’s some of that oh-so-fashionable (don’t get me wrong, i totally love that) garage edge to it. You might be reminded of hardcore-era Hüsker Dü at some points, as well as recent hard- and postcore stuff such as Nopes, Pink Guitars, Cement Shoes or the colorful yet nightmarish hardcore psychedelia of Murderer.
A fun, smart high-energy blow of garage-infused hardcore punk delivered by a group that might or mightn’t be from Long Beach, California, holding a perfect balance between dumb straight-ahead oldschool energy and the various quirks and eccentricities of more recent hardcore phenomena, which sorta locates them on the genre map somewhere in the excellent company of other contemporary troublemakers such as Mystic Inane, Launcher, Fried E/M, Modern Needs or Liquid Assets.
This Philadelphia group's line-up brings together generations of punks, having Chuck Meehan of hardcore dinosaurs YDI among its ranks as well as members of more recent acts like Blank Spell, Haldol and DeStructos. Their first EP explodes right into your face with eight-and-a-half bursts of unpredictable, chaotic and noise-infused hard-/post-/weirdcore roughly in the ballpark of what you might've heard in recent years from bands like Kaleidoscope, Daydream or Fugitive Bubble.
This L.A. group comes right out of the orbit of Launcher and Co-Ed. As you might already expect, this is another explosive charge of simple, raw and energetic noise made up to equal parts of garage- and catchy early 80s hardcore punk enhanced with that certain ragged KBD-style additive we've come to know and love out of this particular neighborhood.
An early contender for the loudest record of 2022, this burst of maximally abrasive noise - recorded sometime in 2016 and now finally released via Runstate Tapes - truly has what it takes to startle the dead and sounds like it crawled out of a disgusting brown puddle of pure despair, its hardcore punk foundation buried deep under thick layers of white noise and feedback… but listen closely and you might also find many unexpected flashes of melody embedded deep in there.
…and here's yet another short and sweet artifact of vaguely egg-related garage punk by some NJ person. This shit plays out like a mix of Alien Nosejob in HC 7" mode, S.B.F. and Connie Voltaire's hardcore-focussed projects. Also, good call transforming two slow, boring tracks into exciting, fast tracks through the wonders of cutting edge pitch adjustment technology.
This Demo of by a NYC group is an explosive ripper that doesn't even try to squeeze any new nuances out of a style of ultra-oldschool hardcore punk that could plausibly have originated from any point in time for the last 4+ decades, instead shredding through that very old formula as forceful as it's ever gonna get with conviction, persistence, unerring aim and precision.
The 2019 demo by this Washington, D.C. group had its very own thrills already, but their debut 7" on 11 PM Records is a different kind of beast altogether, way more focused in its vision and benefiting from increased production values. The opening track Blood Runs Through is the prime example here for what makes them special - a general catchyness and sense of melody rarely heard in contemporary hardcore punk collides with straightforward riffs that often seem to originate from the oldschool "heavy" metal playbook rather than classic hardcore, woven into slightly eccentric song structures that always have a surprise or two up their sleeves. At their best, they kinda come across like an unlikely fusion of Cülo and Naked Raygun.