Five Things You Should Know
Aging is stupid - like it rules not being dead but coming to the realization that the rumors about time speeding up as you get older aren’t rumors is at best alarming. Sometimes it feels like you’ve crested a hill and are flying down a slope towards the impending finality of it all, experiences quickly fading into memories and then suddenly all your friends are grayer and rounder than they used to be and it’s been twenty five years since His Hero is Gone broke up and you still think of them as being a recent band…
This compression of time and space is truly the most alarming part of aging - where ancient history feels like yesterday as the years of interaction start to blur together. When combined with a generally obsessive mindset when it comes to music, you can start to build a narrative in your head where records pressed in editions of 500 copies or less are the biggest bands that you feel everyone knows instead of the reality that this shit is obscure and random blips of eardrum splattering mayhem from a distant past. Put another way, no Thorn, people who are 30 years old didn’t see His Hero Is Gone because they were five when they broke up so of course they’ve never heard the blah blah blah demo no matter how contemporaneous those things feel to now for me.
So sure, but what’s the point?! I think this is it… one of the cool yet frustrating thing about punk rock, hardcore, whatever is how ephemeral it can be while also serving to create mile markers in our brains around moments in our lives. That one band, that one show, that one song which you create a connection to based on a specific memory no matter the obscurity of the artist. They matter to you for a myriad of reasons. This obscurity oftentimes leads to things just being forgotten to the steady onslaught of time’s march and that is really the point over here.
I tend to focus on current bands over here at the Razorblades & Aspirin shitstack as i think it is important for the continuation of the thing for it not to get too mired in the past despite the fact the past feels so present to me. So what I want to do this week and I’ll do it again, I’m sure, is talk about a few, sorta forgotten bands/releases from the past that are sorta forgotten and/or I feel more people should appreciate.
Enough yammering, let’s get stuck in.
Despite being from Toledo, same as me, I actually don’t know a lot about RADICAL LEFT. I believe they were from the same suburb that later birthed Doghouse records and Majority of One but were part of the first wave that gave us the Necros. I’ve seen flyers with them playing with the Big Boys & the Misfits but their demo sort of faded into obscurity - its odd they didn’t release something on Touch & Go and while I’m sure I could get the answer to the why of that in one or two emails, I prefer to let the mystery linger.
LAST CHANCE were a later 90s early 00s scorcher out of Arkansas - birthed from the same crew that gave us Burned Up Bled Dry, Rash of Beatings, BG, etc they take a less grinding and more straight forward hardcore punk attack. They did this split with Mexico’s Fallas De Sistema and a split tape with Austin’s Negative Step and seemingly vanished from the earth. Its raw, fiery hardcore with that hint of rage that comes from living in a place where the Bible Belt is always around your throat.
Stumbling across the Reuben James demo online was one of those rare moments where found myself praising Al Gore for creating the series of tubes known as the internet. I’d always heard about a recording of this band featuring members of Tragedy, Talk Is Poison, Arctic Flowers, Copout, Vegas Thunder, etc etc existing but could never get anyone to make me a copy. It’s aggressive creative stuff - certainly straightforward and raw in it’s approach but not in a retro, tribute to USHC 1982 manner but with a more modern sensibility around heaviness and dissonant riffing. It’s a shame this never got a proper release.
Another Midwest ripper - Detroit’s Heresy. It’s madness this band was never bigger - one of the grand mysteries of hardcore history I guess. Quick blasts of high octane thrash, they reflect some of the crossover flirtations with metal common to the period but maintain their base in blazing punk thrash. The demo is from 1989 - I think someone finally pressed their EP in like 2008 or 09, grab it if you see it. Essential shit here.
Fucking Chickenhead - the Germs of the 90s? I mean how can you go wrong with a singer who would light himself on fire and then dive headfirst into a trash can? The associated acts of is like a laundry list of 90s and early 00s punk - Cavity, The Crumbs, Powerhouse, Straight Youth, Bikini Kill, Scam zine, Stun Guns, Ye Olde Buttfuck, etc (Ok no one probably remembers Ye Olde Buttfuck but I just really like that as a band name - also, they had one of my more favored lyrics “gotta job so i can kill my boss, shit my pants in the food stamp office”). Its disjointed, thrashy, sloppy and just perfect. I mean how can you go wrong with a band that wrote one of my favorite punk lyrics of all time “Do you like my car, it was free because I stole it!”
Down With The Sickness
I’ve been slack this week with my writing because I’ve been suffering the one-two punch of being in interview hell for a new job and battling a sickness where I just want to sleep and not do much else so, I’m just going to highlight a few release this week. Next week, hopefully, we’ll be back on track - just a quick reminder - I basically only write about things I like, if I don’t write about it, I either didn’t like it or haven’t heard it yet. If you send me something to review, I’ll probably write about it though keep in mind, I’m just one person doing all this so it might take a minute. Want me to write about your release - get in touch! Am happy to cover both physical and digital stuff, as long as I like it, I’ll write about it.
Absolutely raging - minimally distorted, speedy hardcore punk in the more traditional USHC manner. Think that early Boston swagger and venom - more in along the line of Choke’s output (NEGATIVE FX, SLAPSHOT, etc) than the total musical deconstruction of SSD. Play this shit loud.
Well this is a long awaited LP - at least for me. Their demo from a few years back set the stage for me to be absolutely obsessed with them - as some of you may know I’m a sucker for that early OC/SoCal melodic hardcore that just drips with melancholic angst and these folx do it to perfection. It’s as though Rikk Agnew bestowed these riffs upon them from his deep vault. Think DI, think ADOLESCENTS, think more recent bands like THE WAR GOES ON, RED DONS, NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS, etc. Absolutely perfect.
Just two originals and one cover its a great taste of this Indiana band’s potential. Taut, metallic riffing on their songs which brings to mind Cause For Alarm-era AGNOSTIC FRONT. For the cover, they chose what is arguably the only good song on DYS’ eponymously titled LP - “No Pain, No Gain.” It’s a solid take, though think I still prefer DILLINGER FOUR’s version personally, COLOSSAL MAN does a solid take on the classic.
PUBLIC ACID - Deadly Struggle LP
There is part of me that just want’s to mimic Tim Yo’s review of the DIE KREUZEN S/T LP where he just goes “This is fucking great!” over and over because what else really needs to be said?! From the first time I got to witness this powerhouse of a band I’ve been just fixated by their ferocity and intelligence around their songwriting. Live, they are unstoppable - just a juggernaut of monstrous riffs saturated in a cacophony of noise inducing frenetic mayhem and general bedlam. While I’ve been a fan of their releases from the first drop of the needle, none of them truly reflected the feeling of them live like this album manages to do. It’s a tricky thing, distilling all of energy and volatility of the live setting to a few minutes of tape in the recording studio. How do you harness chaos without losing the power in the punch? In many ways PUBLIC ACID manage to combine the duality of my hardcore musical tastes - profoundly immoral sounding metallic riffing a la GASTUNK or GISM saturated in sheets of white noise driven through a filtration of Tom Robert's early manic riffing on Kings of Punk and the urgency of Mike Dean fronted COC. Just a monster of a record - essential.
For me, DC bands and in particular Dischord bands have a general sonic quality to them, at least in my head. It was a rather lazy trope in my early days of writing about music to just flippantly state “oh you know, they have that Dischord thing going on” but upon more mature reflection it was more they sounded like JAWBOX. Melodic yet angular in the riff construction, mature lyrics which approach both personal and political matters in a poetic and thoughtful manner, and everything is assembled in a mindful and professional manner which was still yet compelling to an eighteen year old me that just wanted more stage dives and higher velocity. And suddenly here I sit, thirty plus years onward and I’m still enraptured with J. ROBBINS ability to write interesting, densely melodic songs - there is a mature sense of aggression and angst present which mirrors that of the more recent BOB MOULD output. It’s inspirational to see an artist continue to create evolve while not totally divorcing oneself from the foundation which a career was built upon and that’s certainly what we find here, a beautiful, dense, and guitar rich album that takes you on a journey without detaching itself from the aggression of youth while being mindful of the need to expand the definition of that thing as you get older.
As a baby punk, I used to just blindly shove money in an envelope and blindly order releases based purely on the knowledge or at least belief that if say, Slap-A-Ham was putting it out, it was worth my time because the hits greatly outnumber the misses. While one of the joys of the current era is being able better curate your record collection thanks to streaming, I feel like Convulse is one of those labels where I could just send them a couple hundred bucks and be like just send me everything until the money runs out - on this latest release, my belief is just given further credence. ULTRAS are this violently aggro, burly and stomping destructo unit seething with ferocity. Mad blasts of blown-the-fuck-out thrash which crashes into face pummeling heavy breakdowns allowing for snarling singalongs and piles of many angry youth. Don’t sleep on this.
Punk from Eastern Europe has been a long obsession and fascination for me - there’s probably a number of reasons for this but it probably can be distilled down to how genuinely unique the bands sounded marrying Western punk tropes with local folk music and an array of the ‘alternative’ influences which would trickle through state censors and speaking of which, there is a general obsession with people creating space to create art and culture in adverse situations. While the political reality of overt oppression has shifted somewhat and you can find bandana thrash or youth crew bands in places like Albania or Slovenia - there is still a uniqueness to a number of artists and VOLE certainly follows in that tradition. Certainly recognizable as ‘punk’ they take cues from a diverse range of bands, inserting an almost mechanical, industrial staccato at times, while injecting a melancholic melodic sense to the song writing - its swirling, crunching and ferocious with a vocalist who spatters out lyrics in Czech in manner which demands your attention, even if you can’t understand a word. I read someone refer to them as being one of the of the current batch of European bands live, and if this recording is any indication, I believe it. Soaked in energy, it just ebbs and flows at a relentless and thunderous pummel. Absolutely killer and essential listening.