After the grave diasppointment that was the too-slick-for-its-own-good, overly sanitized second Poison Ruïn LP recently, i’m glad to have come across this neat substitute drug created by a Philadelphia group, scratching some similar itch of strongly ’80s heavy metal-influenced, dungeon-adjacent punk, even if the overall style here feels more at home in the wider hardcore and d-beat landscape. Nonetheless, if you take a closer listen these tunes reveal an abundance of sophistication, attention to detail and tons of highly captivating hooks to both anchor and elevate these seven bursts of breakneck-speed ecstasy.
The last two weeks had two outstanding hardcore releases in store for us which i’ll take the shortcut of rolling into one post here. Brainwash Victims from Milwaukee, Wisconsin have a new cassette out via Alawful Assembly sporting a sound that’s not only fuzzed-out and noisy, raw and pissed as fuck but also comes up with plenty of inventive twists and turns, catchy hooks and melodic overtones along the way. These dudes don’t just go hard, they’ve also got the tunes to make it stick!
Cleveland’s Yambag then is a group i’ve had a bit of a sketchy view of over the years, especially with some of their more recent outings which at times sounded as if the harder these dudes play, the less effort they tend to put into the underlying tunes as if to compensate for a lack of song substance… Anyway, a decade into their efforts, they’ve released a new eight-song EP that shows them from their best side with a strong set of new tunes that keep things simple but also hard-hitting and catchy, just about hitting the sweet spot in their stylistic Venn diagram where everything that makes them shine is in place and perfectly dialed in. This one’s a keeper.
New hardcore shit from Athens, Georgia that owes its overwhelming what-the-fuckness and disorienting qualities in part to the completely blown-out fucked-uppery in the engineering department but also in no small part to some hints of noisy Big Black-ishness that still seeps through the cracks underneath a brittle surface of pure distortion and white noise. Strip all that muck away and you may be left with the greatest or the worst hardcore performance in the world and i don’t care either way ‘cos the way it is, this shit sounds like pure bliss to me.
The second EP of these Oslo metalhead punks is yet another rippin’ affair of NWOBHM-inspired hardcore thrashin’ that feels a bit too old-fashioned to fit into the dungeon punk category, a bit too thrash-heavy to fit the motörpunk mold. There’s also a bit of a ’90s postcore quality goin’on in the closing track Shallow Grave. Sitting comfortably in the middle between a good number of adjacent niches, this is a record that scratches many itches at once and i’m all here for it.
Physicalist is a new group from Vancouver i presume, centering around Dave P of the local power pop sensation Night Court whose catchy qualities are also present on this record of otherwise pretty different sonics, an infectious blend of hard-, art- and postcore with a distinct garage punk edge and melodic overtones which overall reminds me of a bunch of groups like Mystic Inane, Rolex, Launcher on the more hard-/artcore side of things and The Dumpies, Sauna Youth and Eyeball on the catchier, pop- and garage leaning side.
Not terribly hard to describe what this Atlanta group is doing on their debut LP as it’s basically yet another Crass Discharge of Rudimentary Peni unspooling right in front of us, yet for somthing this straight and specific, they pull this shit off in a thoroughly convincing fashion with plenty of intelligence and variation to their compositions, staying reasonybly close within the expected boundaries of their chosen early hardcore, 1st gen anarcho and death rock frameworks while never repeating themselves and drawing a good deal of fresh energy and surprising turns from the decades-old genre tropes in an effort that strikes me as leagues ahead of your average oldschool genre excercise.
This Richmond, Virginia group’s ’24 tape Fucking USA already showed the early signs of something worthwhile but their newest EP via Sex Fiend Abomination finally proves what what all the fuss has been about in the first place, as this group strikes me as a breath of freah air breaking up the rampant hardcore comformism signified by a bottomless ocean of fairly oldschool-ish groups that seem to pride themselves on playing really fucking hard yet never fail to bore me to death with their ultra-generic, fatally unimaginative tunes and arrangements. Yankee Bastard refuse to play that game, not by inventing anything particularly new here, but by exhibiting a baseline level of creativity and playfulness that should be the rule rather than the exception in punk, basically enriching every tune with that certain bit of weirdness, a novel idea or a flash of melodic brilliance that reminds you how this music can be grim and angry but really freakin’ fun at the same time. And damn, as much as we do need our music to speak the ugly truth, we also desperately need to get some fuckin’ joy out of it cos honestly, just reading the news every day is enough of a depressing doom spiral to me right now. It’s been said that an integral feature of fascism is an utter failure of the imagination so in turn i expect of punk groups to have some of it instead, ‘cos otherwise, you’re just wasting my time and attention and i’d rather read more of the news then… at the very least there won’t be any boring-ass bland music accompanying it.
Before i forget it, there’s been yet another kickass burst of certified not-boring hardcore released on the same day, same label, same city. U.A.V. excell on this one by way of a neat garage-y, KBD-esque basis to their unpretentious, oldschool sound, a neat fuzzy and quite adaptive guitar performance and an unhinged, over-the-top pissed vocal freakshow. It takes so little to stick out of the pack, really… an idea or two basically, the slightest of fucks given to your songs and arrangements and maybe a riff that’s not that one stale riff everyone is playing all the time. It’s why i’ve grown increasingly unwilling to engage with anything less in hardcore these days. If you can’t do as much, i don’t care how fast and hard and tight you’re playing your borecore and how freakin’ punk you look doing it.
This group from Perth, Australia featuring members of Semtex 87 easily outdoes that band’s already pretty fuckin’ brutal sound in terms of sheer overwhelming force in a maximally hazardous sonic assault obscured by a thick layer of noise, feedback and distortion, grime, oil and dust, though if you listen closely, you’ll also find surprising amounts of nuance and intricacy underneath the rough surface, making this thing an unexpectedly rewarding listen, more than just a couple notches above your average noisy hardcore artifact.
More excellent hardcore shit from this Dartmouth, Nova Scotia group on what i consider their most appealing release so far, mixing some classic early eighties hardcore attack with lots of garage-y hooks, ’77- and KBD-era melodicism. If the likes of Jacket Burner, Buck Biloxi or Bart And The Brats were to record a hardcore punk record, this is just about what i’d imagine it to sound like.
Quality hardcore shit courtesy of a Tokyo group which blends some distinctly ’90s school of post-thrash-era (not the website, haha…) hardcore riffing with a particularly japanese-sounding melange of NWOBHM-infused garage-, speed- and motörpunk… you could almost say right in time for that new Guitar Wolf record just to remind us in what corner of the world this particular sausage has been made particularly tasty and consistently for many, many years now.
