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hardcore records on ebay — aggregated and examined
“Brutal” is an adjective that folks throw around wily nily these days. It’s no big deal to a lot of people. Brutal this, BRUTAL that, FUCKIN’ BRUTAL SLUDGE RIFFS BRO, etc. It’s really overused y’know? Brutality, when it’s real, is something that’s primitive and savage. It feels violent at its core, no matter what “it” happens to be (a song, a word, a building). It’s governed by something that’s neither modern, nor refined, nor civilized.
Showing or suggesting a disposition to be violently destructive without scruple or restraint.
Follow me?
YDI - A Place In The Sun (1983).
The cover is a black and white shot with a coarse film grain. The scene is a WWI battlefield littered with dead bodies. One is being picked at by a wolf. Might be a dog actually.
A Place In The Sun opens with a distorted guitar line, much like you’re used to, but also not at all like you’re used to. It sounds like the band was using an older amplifier that didn’t have an actual distortion channel to record with. They compensated for this by cranking the gain knob to its loudest volume, but finding this was still not distorted enough, elected to record the guitar with the mixer actually peaking into the red so as to further distort the sound. It produces something much thicker, much more abrasive, than anything I’ve ever heard. Like Blue Cheer - “Vincebus Eruptum” trying to kill you. It’s a unique, uncivilized sound, with serious weight and presence. The drums and bass come in bashing in a way that almost equals the guitar sound. Reckless and LOUD.
When vocalist Jackal makes his entrance it’s clear that he’s on par with the rest of the racket. He snarls and intimidates and growls and howls and seethes all the way through each song. His teeth sound clenched and his sanity questionable. Thuggish doesn’t even begin to describe it. Unsafe might would be an understatement. A Place In The Sun is of the same tradition as No Policy, and Can’t Tell No One. Though it may not have been as ground breaking or historically important, it’s every bit as good. This is the sound of real violent youth in a post apocalyptic world. This music is physical. It crashes against your body with measurable and seismic force. Wood breaking glass. Metal striking concrete. Bricks hitting bones.
Chew on song titles like “Out For Blood”, “Mad At The World”, “Get Up and Fight”, “Not Shit” — YDI (I should have mentioned before that’s pronounced WHY DIE?) are as blunt as a baseball bat, and as capable of inducing trauma. It’s 1983, you’re standing up front, Jackal is wearing a studded leather vest and a Damaged t-shirt swinging a mic at you. There’s a good chance you’ll leave missing teeth or with glass stuck in your scalp.
Brutal.
A Burn 7″ on pink? File Under:
- Records I Need Again, Please Trade Me One
- AJ’s Favorite 7″
- Sick Drumming, Weird Guitars
The Burn 7″ is one of the most indisputably brilliant Revelation releases, as I hope you know. It succeeds on every level, and only uptight jerks who don’t appreciate its subtleties have trouble appreciating it. What I always heard was that the riffs were conceived in an effort to make them unplayable on guitar by anyone but Gavin Van Vlack. No idea of the validity of that, but it’s a fine story. Alan Cage’s muscular snare roll leads the charge into the opening track, Shall Be Judged, one of the better late 80s/early 90’s vegetarian songs. Gavin’s guitar works kind of a post crossover, chorus dipped end of the 80’s in NYC approach. Like Prong and Helmet were happening and being metal influenced didn’t really mean sounding like Slayer or having guitar solos anymore*. Cage and Van Vlack really break the 90’s wide open about 40 seconds into things. It’s a new world, a new New York, and everything has more groove, and weirder chords, but holy fucking hell does that first break down hit you like ten tons of bricks. For all the mainstream praise that say, Helmet got for doing some weird Alt-Metal off timey heaviness, they never came close to anything this primal but at the same time complex. This is a great moment in 90’s hardcore, and in some ways, one of the last important moments for NYHC.
You can still see what a seismic change it was when suddenly Revelation dropped Burn, Quicksand, Supertouch’s lp, Inside Out, on everyone ears. Suddenly everything was extremely serious (including musicianship), real polished, and a bit more “industry”. Compare to the beautiful shitiness of the No For An Answer 7″ and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Back to Shall Be Judged, it has all the hallmarks of the 90’s, right down to a weird dissonant plucked part, a talking part, and a cool down part. This is a great song, because Burn is a great band, with an amazing frontman (Chaka Malik), but the number of horrible revisitations of its formula that happened in the 90’s, (thankfully for the most part when I was too young to be going to shows), is infinite.
The other tracks — Godhead, Drown, and Out Of Time, all expand on the musical themes established in Shall Be Judged. Godhead digs into the groove and breaks the 3 minute mark as it condemns organized religion in a way that I might describe as quaintly 90’s (but I feel kind of like a dick doing it). Drown has some more mellowed out and reflective moments with Malik declaring he’s “drowning in a sea of emotion”. Out of Time is a hair lower than the other 3 tracks in that it’s not the anthematic stone cold classic that they are, but it’s still a good weird groovy hardcore song. Following this Burn did a demo recording titled New Morality, presumably to shop to a bigger label that was a tape trading standard for years, its since been issued as a 7″ on Revelation. They imploded a little while after that and never made the sprawling epic lp they should have. There was a couple of brief reunions in ‘97, and ‘02, the later of which yielded a 6 song 12″ that had a few new cuts, and a couple of older, “lost classics” revisited on it, that’s not as bad as some people would try and tell you. But all of that aside, none of that shines as brightly as their 12 minutes of power here on their first 7″.
Back when this record came out, people bought records still and so there are 1000 pressed on pink like this one, and a few thousand more on the much more common black vinyl.
*(Who the fuck decided to dispose of guitar solos in the 90s?)
Dudes, ladies, doggs… I’ve been sick since Monday, with one of those ill February style cough/cold/rip-your-skull-apart type sicknesses. I feel disgusting. As such, blogging has been forgone in favor of sleeping, and medicinal regimens.
However: this is the Hardcore Torpedo Mega-Bonzer that simply cannot be passed on:
Fix “Vengence” and Necros “Sex Drive” together in one lot.
The buy it now price: “$8,000″.
Well say what you will here but even if that’s high now, eventually it won’t be. For the unaware, Sex Drive was pressed in a quantity of 100 copies as Touch and Go records #1, with Vengeance following in a quantity of 200 as Touch and Go records #2. Both are 2 of the earliest examples of hardcore bands cut to vinyl. These are probably the 2 most valuable and sought after USHC rarities at least insofar as regular releases go.
In the way of Sex Drive, a tradition of mediocrity was established early on for generic and unimaginative hardcore. While this record holds serious historical significance, the songs themselves are as undistinguished and interchangeable as those by the Violent Apathy’s and 5150’s of the world. The Necros did go on to complete some better recordings, and were a pretty big punk band in their heyday, but if not for this being the first touch and go release, and being pressed in such a minuscule quantity, it would not be a big deal. Police Brutality appeared on some later releases though, re-recorded and sounding pretty hard.
In the way of Vengeance (b/w In This Town) though, you have a stone cold classic. How classic? Arguably THE best hardcore 7″/45/single/EP ever, or at the very least the best Hardcore song (I might give NA “best EP”), but you wouldn’t have a difficult argument to make either way. Legend has it that Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts of Poison Idea actually followed the Fix’s tour itinerary in the late 80’s stopping at all the record stores in each town hoping to find a copy of the single. The song Vengeance is one of the best songs ever to come out of the Hardcore era. It buzzes with the electricity of The Stooges or Motorhead’s finest moments, but at about double speed, it has a ferocious and unhinged vocal, and the musicianship is on fire in the best way, perfectly walking the line between skill and recklessness. The recording is completely thuggish and brutal; shockingly thick for 1981. Such a bright start for a genre, even the Fix themselves never managed to top it. The b-side while not quite as immediate is still a real scorcher. The delivery and style are similar, muscular jockish proto punks going at warp speed, like if the Dictators took a toxic amount of speed on their best night. Here is a record that sells well into the quadruple digits on the 2nd hand market, but is worth EVERY PENNY the collector scum pay for it. There are not a lot of records I can honestly say that about. Here is a record that makes the most introverted humans burst into spontaneous air guitar solos, stage dive fantasies, and bedroom slam pits. If you really want to understand me and why I’m obsessed with the music I am, why I play in the bands I do, you can get it all here. When I hear Vengeance I’m Alex hearing the 9th by ol’ Ludwig van. My heart’s stopping and my soul is spinning. It’s probably the greatest song I’ve ever heard. I got a reissue though, I’m not dropping 8 grand on it.
I was going to make some mention of the panic that went up about Touch and Go, going out of business this week, but they’re actually just shutting down their distribution arm it looks like, so they’ll still be keeping their old shit in press, and releasing another Shellac lp in 4 or 5 years. Mr. Rusk, please, if you see this, we need to talk about the Negative Approach discography, some overhauling is needed, and if you don’t want to do it, I’ll do it free of charge. I would like to thank you though, for finally issuing the Fix Discography in 2007.
Dude another Seraphic Decay post? YES. (I hope I haven’t done this one before. I don’t really trust the search.) One of the finest and most desirable SD releases Mortician - Brutally Mutilated 7″. This is as low brow as music can get. There’s no way you can explain this to your parents, your girlfriend, your co-workers. You are a fucking freak if you dig this pile of excrement. The cones on your speakers will actually start to emanate the smell of wet garbage. Believe me, I know; I own this classic slab.
Listening to brutal death metal, grindcore, and other such harsh musics is what I think being a drug addict is like. I’ve never been a drug addict but I’ve heard about that shit. The first time it’s disorienting but something brings you back for a second fix, and then a third, and then you’ve got a taste for the foul stuff. Pretty soon the only people you talk to are other crackheads about the last hit you had: “dude the Traumatic - “The Process of Raping a Rancid Cadaver” demo…” (yes this is a real demo). In a word this is the most degraded catagory of music available on earth. Absolutely the lowest. However, there is something to be said for such a thing.
The incredible paradox of most death metal bands is that they are absolutely the most micro niche-specific music ever, but unlike say, “Noise”, “Lofi Black Metal”, “Hardcore”, etc. they generally require hours of practice and high levels of skill to perform. In that way I expect the late John Peel, was right in comparing the early offerings of bands like Carcass to “Free Jazz”. As they say, Jazz is made for other Jazz musicians, in that way it’s kind of vulgar and excessive, and a record like Mortician’s “Brutally Mutilated” is much the same. Virtually no one outside of genre followers can appreciate what’s on display on this record. A side note here, the level of skill is actually fairly low for a death metal record, which maybe actually insulates it more from the understanding of outsiders. At least on some level even the most uninitiated have to admit that “Left Hand Path”has skillful performances, whether they can appreciate the sound or not. The skill level on Brutally Mutilated though, probably gets up to a 4 on a scale of 1-10. Sloppy performances, simple riffs, and the band is never all that in sync. To me this makes for a better listen. It’s the difference between a CGI monster and a make-up and corn syrup job in a horror movie.
Speaking of horror movies - that’s basically as deep as it gets with Mortician. The alpha and omega of their influences. If the song titles “Mortician” and “Brutally Mutilated” didn’t flesh that out enough for you, just refer to “Necro Cannibal”. For early death metal and grind this is a pretty great single. The vocals aren’t so deep that they lose the flavor, the drums actually sound great (big boomy bass drum, very uncommon for this style), the guitars are nice and thick and not too treble-ful. A genre classic to be sure. Oh for those in the know, this is actually when the band still recorded w/ a live drummer (Matt Sicher R.I.P.).
Like I said before this is one of the more desirable Seraphic Decay items, though it comes up frequently, this was one of the bands that actually “made it” (you know… in the scene), so a lot of people want it. I’ve seen a lot on blue vinyl, some with different color covers (mine is tan). I know there’s black vinyl too.
ps. This post shoulda gone up yesterday sorrrrry.
Poison Idea - Feel The Darkness (American Leather/Vinyl Solution pressing) pt. II
Fuck it… I’m writing about the b-side of Feel The Darkness today because I listened to it like 3 times while driving around town yesterday, and for the here and now it fits right into my life.
I got pretty serious about the album yesterday when posting and I still feel pretty good about all that I said. The B-side though really is only a hair less perfect than the A. It opens with Alan’s On Fire, which is some real darkness. Heavy, midpaced, and hateful spring to mind as Jerry details a suicide where the victim sets himself on fire for all his family to see. It’s some low spirits shit, but it’s also sincere in the anger that comes across.
Step on me I’m here for you to see
I hope you choke as I go up in flames
I told you my problems but you never heard a word
This is the moment for once in my life I will be heard
I know there must be a better way but I don’t know how
You’ve lied to me and you’ve ignored me
but you won’t now
This is arguably the most bleak and desperate moment on a record that’s dark as they come. It just chills your spine and makes you feel sick.
The album doesn’t totally sink into the murk from here, there’s still more bellowing anger to go around. Welcome To Krell, though not what I’d call a signature track has a cool main riff that skips up and down the frets kinda start-stop-like, and keeps things running at a hardcore/Kings Of Punk type clip. Nation of Finks follows quickly and laments the way the code of the streetshas fallen to the wayside as well as the rise of constant surveillance of private citizens. Backstab Gospel probably comes the closest to a filler track on an album like this. It doesn’t have tuneful and catchy delivery of most of the other tracks, and would sound more at home on one of the previous Poison Idea lps (it might be a hold over from War All The Time), but I mean, that’s not a complaint. War All The Time is just as much a 5 star album in my book.
Painkiller follows, and it’s a classic PI drug and drink anthem. I can’t really relate, but they do a great job of stirring up the sound of addicted isolation, which as depraved and unsavory as it might be, was the reality that these guys lived (and some of them still do - R.I.P. Pig). I think part of what makes Poison Idea one of the greatest rock bands ever is that they always played music from the heart. Sometimes that meant they weren’t the most punk sounding band on the block, and sometimes that meant the words came from a pretty black place in Jerry’s soul, but that’s what makes it worth a shit.
Yesterday Judd posted this in the comments section about the title track and closing song:
Judd said: (November 7th, 2008 at 2:34 am)
Cosigned on this entire post. Also, supposedly the title track is about one of Jerry’s prostitute girlfriends who was murdered by a serial killer in Oregon, Dayton Leroy Rogers. “A sad description, five feet minus (two)” is a reference to the fact that Rogers would sometimes saw off the feet of his victims. Heavy shit.
I’m not really sure what insight I can supplement that with. It’s one of several PI tracks that start with someone opening and drinking a can of beer. It’s a slow and tortured song, clocking in at about 6 minutes, and it’s one of my favorite PI numbers, but that knowledge drapes quite a shroud on the whole thing, and also sort of brings into focus what this album’s really all about — the absolute most depraved and depth-sunk levels of American life. That’s nothing new on a rock album, but there’s only a few I can think of that paint the picture as vividly as this one.
At midnight my black heart’s fading - blue
A sad description, five feet minus - two
I can’t think about running back to - you
You started with nothing,but you ended up with less
Poison Idea - Feel The Darkness (American Leather/Vinyl Solution pressing)
Pound for pound, track for track, I fully believe Poison Idea’s finest hour is Feel The Darkness. This is the common opinion of many folks, but there are those that think it’s overblown and weighed down by its bombast. It’s certainly not the same band that made Pick Your King an early hardcore classic, but it’s in my eyes, a perfect mix of Punk, Metal, and Hard Rock. In their ‘88-’92 phase, Poision Idea had this vibe dialed. They were crossing boundaries and making records that people of all interests could appreciate. Their execution was powerful and their songwriting is to this day matched by few and surpassed by none.
Feel The Darkness opens with the signature P.I. track, arguably what you could even call THE Poison Idea song, Plastic Bomb. The song itself begins with a furious piano intro which is hardly how you would expect a classic hardcore punk album to begin, but after the ivory sets the dramatic tone, the guitars and drums crash in for an intro roughly the size of Mechagodzilla. It sounds a bit like the beginning to an Iron Maiden song, but soon the familiar PI riffing takes over with pronounced debts to the likes of Discharge and the Germs. The lyrics are dark and they start with little more of a spoken delivery, but as the song wears on Jerry A’s anger starts to mount and the tension starts coming to a head. When the cavernous ‘whoaaas’ of the chorus take effect and are then answered by Pig Champion’s ripshit axe shredding, there’s no doubt you’ll never forget this track. This is one of the greatest most perfectly crafted rock songs of the last 30 years. It’s an epic that plays like a pop song right down to being on that magic 3 minute mark, and it’s just track 1.
When Deep Sleep starts, it’s clear that things are going places. Jerry growls his way through a number about chronically sleeping in order to cope with his low spirits and misery. It rocks like Motorhead but it’s more combustible than Flag. It’s as simple as this — it’s a perfectly crafted hardcore song. I can’t break it down to a science, it just has the right stuff. The Badge is next working another sleazed up Motorhead type groove, this time with a bit less speed, but maybe even more anger. Yea, it’s a “hate the police” song, but it’s no pose. Poison Idea really do hate the police and the way they infringe on their lives. They hate the abuse and the corruption, and they hate the badge and what it really stands for. Like Jerry belows in the chorus, “some still call him pig”.
Just to Get Away is next, another alltime classic of a PI track. A true shitkicker for every fed up, let down, end of the rope person out there. It starts with a great set of drum breaks. It’s a song about being in love with your car, and leaving behind a mundane life in hopes that you can feel alive again. It’s also a song with one of the meanest main riffs in history ever. Ideally you should be smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer, starting a fight, or at least blasting this song out of a Camaro when listening to it.
Quit my job, told my boss to stand aside
Grabbed a gun, a fifth of booze, jumped in my ride
I got my girl, she’s sixteen and she’s really special
I can’t slow down, I’ve got a date with the devil
Two tons of steel, one hundred miles an hour
No looking back, grooving on the power
Responsibility made me quit
I’m sick of this motherfucking goddamn shit
There’s a road, beyond it lies, I don’t know
I just gotta run, I just gotta go
This is real punk rock and roll. This is real anger and bile and desperation. I mean this is basically the greatest song ever that’s not sung by Lemmy, Ozzy, Bon Scott, or a young Mick Jagger.
Gone For Good and Death Of An Idiot Blues give you a little room to breathe after 4 stone cold classics. It’s not that they’re not good, or even great, but they only get A’s instead of A+’s. Taken By Surprise closes out the A-side though and it has the kind of pop perfection that a breakup song needs, and the anger that Poison Idea doesn’t show up without. I firmly believe this is one of the 10 best breakup songs of any genre, any era ever. You will never write a song this good. Simple as that, this deserved to top the charts.
I think I’m going to stop here at the end of side A today, which is a shame because some of the best tracks are on side B. You should already know this. This is one of the great American guitar albums. Feel The Darkness.
Danzig took the name of the band from Samhain, the ancient Celtic New Year, which influenced the evolution of the modern Halloween. The band’s name is typically pronounced “sam-hane” (i.e. the syllables rhyme with “ham” and “pain”, respectively), though when the word occurs in song lyrics, Danzig himself pronounces it “sa-wun”, in conformity with the generally accepted pronunciation of the name of the eponymous ancient holiday. This is evident in the song “Samhain” itself, and in “November’s Fire” and the Danzig song “Soul on Fire”.
Ham and Pain made me laugh when reading Wikipedia to remember what I think of Samhain, who I first discovered in my freshman year of college. Perfect fall listening, as Halloween is about a month away and the leaves are starting to turn here. Initium was probably one of the first things I attempted to download via Napster as the albums were out of print at that time. How far we’ve come. Even then I knew what a mess of an lp it was, but I also loved it. As Danzig’s first band after the Misfits, it was his big chance to prove that he was the most important piece of that puzzle, and to also branch out stylistically beyond the Satanic Ramones image the Misfits had cultivated since the late 70’s. Unfortunately, it was 1983, and what may have seemed cutting edge and modern then, is painfully dated now. You can take it for better or worse, embracing it, or not, but you can’t ignore things like the over processed fake sounding drums and the cruddy sounding direct line guitar tracking. But you also can’t deny that, even when experimenting with studio trickery and inept-goth rock poses, Glenn is still close enough to his prime that he has more hits than misses by far.
The record begins with one of the worst openings ever, an ambient intro of distortion, echo, and tape noise that was recorded on a 4track (as noted in numerous interviews) and which is painfully obvious from all the “SHHH” and “PUH” that comes from using a cheap mic for Danzig’s awful spoken piece on this track “yoouuu think you know paiiin, you know nothing!” which sounds not even a little bit scary. After what seems an interminable amount of time, the first song actually starts and is pretty good. It sounds like a rougher version of the swaggery blues metal Danzig would play later with vocals on a heavy crooning Jim Morrison tip. The music is extremely simple though, and doesn’t seem to be much beyond a rough sketch. It feels unfinished with only a small difference between the verse and chorus, and not much happening in either one. The next track Black Dream reverts, somewhat, back to the Misfits formula, at least in terms of speed. It probably could have fit in on Walk Among Us okay. It’s good but, it’s not great. The next song is All Murder All Guts All Fun which is a full return to the Misfits sound, stylistically, and lyrically. I think this is worth noting because at least at this juncture, Danzig is still best writing Misfits songs. He tries to cover it up with more heavy metal style drums and vocal over dubs, but it’s obvious the song could have been a Misfits track. It’s also maybe the best track on the album. Succubus follows and is, in my estimation, the first total misfire on the record. Plodding pseudo metal riff, stupid vocal and keyboard fx, and hardly a song under all the muck that’s trying to hide the fact that there’s no song. It’s obvious Glenn was trying to find a new voice, but it’s also obvious he doesn’t know how, and he hasn’t found a way to break out of the box he’s in yet. Conversely we take on He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named next and it’s a perfect example of what made Glenn’s creative voice so good to begin with. It’s heavy and tuneful, and sticks in your head. Another would-be Misfits track. Shame on the Harry Potter film franchise for not using this track yet.
B-side opens with another low, but for different reasons than before. It’s a remake of the Misfits’ classic “Horror Business”, billed as “Horror Biz”. Glenn tries to add more precision to the proceedings, and adjust the lyrics, but it comes off like a crappy heavy metal cover version. Like those Metallica Misfits covers. So unnecessary and inferior. Luckily the rest of the side (the last third of the lp) takes an upswing, starting with “The Shift”. This song is almost calm in its delivery, and the slowly descending guitar riff has a hypnotic quality. Danzig is crooning something about changing into a werewolf, it’s the first successful attempt on the lp to write a non-Misfits song that’s good. It segues nicely into The Howl, which is of similar content but a little faster clip. Again though a little more subdued and hypnotic which works well with Danzig’s croon. The closer, Archangel, is ironically an unused Misfits song, that sounds very little like the songs they’re known for, and instead continues in the line the previous two songs are. Its got a great, if crude melody, and segues out of the album pretty well. It’s definitely one of Samhain’s signature tracks.
So of course, what would a Misfits related auction be if it wasn’t some uber rare mispressing of the record. Probably like 20 of these or something.
Well, the leaves are changing and the days are getting shorter, so here’s a great lp to play on your headphones while you take a walk in the fall night and contemplate the direction of your life and all that important shit. The Wipers 1981 classic, ”Youth Of America”is their second lp overall, but it’s personally my favorite from their catalog. It’s far less straight forward than ’79’s “Is This Real”, opting for more melancholy and stretched out almost Kraut-rock inspired pieces that emphasize repetition. It’s also extremely catchy, and still very poppy, although the level of mournfulness is probably deeper than anything previous.
A particular aspect of Youth Of America that I love is that it’s produced and engineered by The Wipers main man, Greg Sage (who was already the only remaining original member on this album). The guitars ring and echo with delay and vintage sounding fuzz tones, but are quite bright and defined. A lot of Wipers music is a showcase for Sage’s sinewy and spare guitar lines that sometimes remind me of what might happen if the early (punky) Cure material went on a surfing trip with The Ventures. The Bass is a nice round rumbling sound that fills in the bottom end as the guitar is often playing single higher notes. The drums are tight and snappy, there’s some echo on the snare, but they’re actually fairly compact sounding compared to the vast echo of the guitar. The drumming is typically circular with its patterns, and provides the solid backbeat for Sage to work off of. Again, it kind of takes me to a Ventures type space in my mind, but with much darker music built on top of it.
Side A is the more direct of the two, starting with Taking Too Long, which is almost power pop in its delivery, right down to the fact that it plays at the optimum pop song length of 3 minutes (well 3:07). Sage works a nice little guitar lead into this one during the intro that gets your toes tapping. He sticks with the upbeat flavor for the next track, Can This Be, which is also right around 3 minutes, and almost goes in a Ramones direction with a Chuck Berry type guitar progression, and a great rock ‘n roll ascending riff in the chorus. By the next song though, Pushing The Extreme, the pop shell is starting to crack a little bit. The song still has a hummable tune, but it’s more aggressive and also a bit more melancholy, with a guitar overdub that sounds like Sage is leaning on a tremolo bar. When It’s Over finds Sage contemplating his on mortality, sounding like a funeral dirge sped up to 78rpms. It works as a nice segue to the second half of the record, its indisputable centerpiece.
No Fair opens side B with a sad sounding guitar dirge, that the bass and drums fill into after a few measures. Sage inserts some spoken prose over it painting a pretty despairing picture from the get go that’s a lament on the futility of modern life. There’s a pause for a couple seconds of silence, and then the bass guitar builds up with the drums before the song kicks into a nice quick tempo. Sage sings in his recognizable mid-range about urban alienation and anomie as the band continues the minor-key assault until a fade out. The title track is the big closer and it’s been noted as a reaction against the increasing brevity that was becoming common in hardcore and punk songs, as it clocks in at about 10 and a half minutes, though it never actually slows down beyond a standard punk tempo. The melody that the song constantly returns to is instantly recognizable, mournful, and unsettling. The bass and drums pulse in another surfy sounding configuration, the guitar cutting in and out through the duration sometimes issuing sheets of heavy feedback, others soloing, sometimes working the grey area between the two. The lyrics make plain the point of the song from the getgo:
Youth of America is living in the jungle
Fighting for survival with the wrong place to go
Youth of America the pressure’s all around
The walls are coming down the walls are crumbling down on you
When the chorus kicks in, it’s big, arena sized even, maybe almost triumphant sounding but ultimately the track leaves the listener without closure, even fading out, suggesting that it may have actually been longer in its original incarnation.
Of course this is the original pressing on Park Avenue records, though if you’ve never heard it, I recommend picking up the very nice reissue that’s available in most record stores on 180 gm vinyl. Too bad this copy’s in Germany… HIGH postage.
One of the most claustrophobic, suffocating records I’ve ever heard is Rorschach’s “Protestant” lp. This is the one they really left the biggest mark with. It influenced a whole slew of post-metal hardcore and post hardcore bands in the 90’s. Most were bad that missed the point I think. It’s a feel bad kind of record, you don’t really throw it on when you’re going for a Saturday drive to the beach or in the morning when you’re cooking breakfast. The music here takes cues from Black Flag circa my war but filters them through 10 subsequent years of thrash and death metal leading to tremolo-picked progressions and staccato breaks that follow the same kind of putrid atonal patterns as Swingin’ Man or Forever Time. Other times find them getting slower and more contemplative. Various write-ups of the band try to liken these moments to being influenced by The Swans, I find it to be a bit of a stretch. I think maybe the more out there moments on some Melvins recordings might be a better point of reference, although the overall atmosphere of the Swans might not be a bad point of reference. This atmosphere is one of anomie and alienation in the shadow of early 90’s NYC. A feeling of overall aloneness and aimlessness. The feeling of being a small piece of an immeasurably large machine. Like I said before, Protestant is a feel bad record, and if your spirits are not already sunk, this album can do the job.
One of the most effective tools used in conveying the oppressive mood here are the screams of vocalist Charles Maggio. The tale goes that he was having serious voice problems (I assume as a result of singing in this band) at the time of the recording, and thus his voice changed drastically from the way it was on previous Rorschach releases. Here it sounds higher, less intelligible, at times even screechy. In fact if not for it being such a perfect fit to the music I can’t picture myself really liking it much at all, but I think in context it’s a perfect fit. It sounds like someone who is isolated, someone who’s sick and suffocated. The grey smog and garbage smell of New York, New York looms over this whole recording in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on. Mabye I’m projecting my own ideas onto it, but I feel like the vocal delivery is a product of that environment. It’s like hearing someone choke on the exhaust fume air and cigarette butt ground.
Protestant is dense and affecting. For such an isolated and isolating record, it also was taken to heart by a great many people in the 90’s. Pretty much the entire subsequent output of the country of Germany in that decade owes itself to this album. And of course there’s Converge, Metallica to Rorschach’s Diamondhead (save your protests, it’s an analogy). Mr. Bannon’s primary vocal attack owes as much as their guitar attack to the blueprints found in the grooves of this vinyl, and they’ve at least repaid insofar as name-checking interview moments are concerned. Still, Protestant is one of the rarest of records where the bands it influences never can have the same feel, it’s isolated even from would-be peers.
The last song on the album is Ornaments. One of the all-time best closers on any record. It creeps along with a slow picked clean guitar playing like the background music to the moment of realization in a movie. Maggio’s screams are pushed deep down into the mix so that they’re barely audible, more isolated and claustrophobic than before. The song builds to a lumbering mournful crunch, slow and deliberate, and then abruptly the tape slows down, playing at half speed for the last unsettling 20 seconds. It’s the perfect ending. Like you’re hearing the record die.
If you’ve ever been to a punk show where there was someone with patches on their pants or jacket, you’ve probably seen a Rudimentary Peni logo. I’m not quite sure how a band that hardly has played any shows in 25 years, and as such dense and unfriendly recordings can appear on the backs of so many teen’s garments, but I guess it’s probably because they had a Crass endorsement during a certain period of time, and are thus linked to the early anarcho/punk activist scene. Rudimentary Peni, despite some members personal politics aren’t really a political band though, at least not in the way that most people think of a politically minded band, with giant slogans and rallying cries. To them, Zach De La Rocha owes nothing. It’s true a lot of their songs even on their first single, which is pre-Crass affiliation, address political issues and themes, but these issues are addressed in personal ways from behind a wall of isolation and obliqueness, it’s like you’re hearing a man’s conversation with himself on issues like religion, or political candidates. The idea that it might be impenetrable isn’t an issue because why would a conversation with yourself need to be? What’s most surprising about that fact is that the lyrics are actually written by two different members in the band, bassist Grant Mathews, and guitarist/vocalist/visual artist, Nick Blinko, but they seem to all flow from the same source.
Both of Rudimentary Peni’s first E.P. offerings, 1981’s s/t 7″, and 1982’s “Farce” 7″, are early hardcore classics, but it’s their outsider sound, and also look, that set them in their own little world. The artwork found on these records is a perfect match for the creepy and hypnotic sounds on the vinyl. Thin lined, highly detailed, black and white chicken scratched drawings of deformed people and distorted objects, often made of hundreds of tiny dots or scratches that were obviously the result of hours of hypnotic repetition. This too is a good match for the sound of the records. While a lot of the songs begin as seemingly ordinary early hardcore numbers, most eventually erode (if they last much longer than 40 seconds) into trance-like circular patterns. The vocal delivery is constant and rhythmic, and as Rudimentary Peni’s records progress song to song, they tend to become increasingly oppressive because of these qualities on the listener. The songs do blend together as one, but I think in this case that’s a benefit. Occasionally there are breaks in the madness with songs like The Gardener on their first 7″ which crawls along like a psychotic nursery rhyme. If anything it sounds more isolated and nightmarish than the more straight forward numbers. Many punk bands make a lot of noise about being close to the audience, being one with the audience. On the contrary I think Rudimentary Peni build a wall between themselves and the listener, and for that matter the entire outside world. If you use these songs to look at the world through their eyes, it’s something like looking out through a black shroud. It’s cold, it’s lonely, and I personally find it affecting.
Shortly after these records were releases Mathews began a battle with cancer (eventually he won), and a few years later Blinko was diagnosed as “delusional” and institutionalized. Some people might theorize that the blackness they immersed themselves in brought on these horrible episodes. Some other people might say that they were born into that blackness though, and that Rudimentary Peni was just their way of making sense of their own world, where they felt like outsiders. When not stricken with debilitating mental and physical illness, Rudimentary Peni continues to sporadically release records. They just had a new album come out and the first half, if not quite as sublime as their early stuff, is still pretty good 3 chord punk, though by the second act it begins to meander with itself.
If all this is maybe too much, and you just want a fist pumping hardcore song, check out the song Sacrifice off the Farce E.P. (it’s the first song). It should give you the fix you need.
oh, and please CLICK
