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Well here’s one from back in the day -
Man Is The Bastard / Capitalist Casualties split 12″. By that I mean: 1994. Possibly the worst year for hardcore. Certainly one of them anyway. This is a pretty cool record though, a career highlight for both Man In The Bastard, and Capitalist Casualties, both synonymous with so many patch distros from years past (ALL PATCHES ARE PRINTED ON RECYCLED FABRIC…specifically my mom’s curtains). This thing is starting to fetch some cash and is quite outta print. I actually need a vinyl copy if someone wants to trade. It’s one of 2 or 3 MITB recs I still need to get.

Cap Cas on this one still sound pretty good, if not much different from a lot of their other releases. At this point they’d started to lose their 80’s sound which was basically a copy of the first Cryptic Slaughter lp, and started incorporating more of the normal and expected aspects of “power violence”. It wasn’t really that much different, but I feel like stuff such as The Art of Ballistics was just more straight up hardcore. It’s weird they’d already been a band for 7 or 8 years at the point this was released. For mid-90’s Cap Cas though this is some of the best. My favorite will always be their earlier Raised Ignorant 7″ though. These guys like speed. There’s not really a whole lot I can say about them because they’re so simple. Kind of like the way Out Cold or someone is, although they sound way different. They’re just content to get fucked up and write really ripping hardcore forever. Mucho respect.

Man Is The Bastard side on this one is night to Cap Cas’ day. I’d rank this maybe in their top 5 recordings if I was going to make a list (and last time I counted there’s 19 or 20 that I know of). It’s from a time when Eric Wood was cool, as opposed to now where he’s into arbitrarily dubbing random myspace-violence bands as “getting it”… oh and he wears a Locust shirt (I’m saying the party was over when that Locust MITB split came out…what a bummer). I’m sorry I just can’t let it slide. This is why people don’t like me. What I’m getting at though, is that at one time anyway, the dude was a genius and surrounded himself with equally sharp collaborators. This release is even from the MITB phase that included No Comment’s Andy Beattie on additional vocals (you can check my previous No Comment posts to see what I think of Mr. Beattie). Foot Binding (first song) rips it out like a deconstructed PCP fueled thrash metal nightmare. The riffing is dizzying and it’s a perfect summation of the insane rage and power that the hardcore aspect of Man Is The Bastard’s sound delivered. Typical MITB protocol was flipping the shit on you just when you’d got your footing with them. Track 2, Feeding The Octopus, does just that, busting out a 4 and a half minute instrumental workout augmented by various creepy electronic buzzes and hums. As a band they’re a total exploration of “brutality” (a word dulled by its overuse in reference to HC at this point) and as such, it seems like they can’t not juxtapose a hardcore rager like the first song with this kind of sludgy progressive shred fest - they want you to make that connection, or they know you already have.  There’s 3 other “career bests” on here too. MITB wins the cup for best side of this release, and that’s not meant to be a slight on Cap Cas, but there’s just more for me to sink my teeth into here.

As an after thought, I do wanna say I have a lot of respect for Mr. Wood, I’m just not seeing eye to eye with his current interests, which is alright, such is life. Anyway, he took the time to drop The Crumbsuckers in a recent interview as a favorite record, and for that alone I give him a pat on the back, a tip of the hat, and maybe a “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” too. Love/Hate mail can be addressed to cc@bidhardcore.com.