bidhardcore.com

Disclose was a band that will probably be remembered more for their fetishizing of aesthetic and sound than any tunes they actually wrote. They really defined the modern noize-beat style along with Gloom and others that so many misguided myspace crusters try to emulate now. Their records celebrated genre conventions and the way they could define a band. Each new release (and there were more than I care to count) took influences from spikey jacket message heavy hardcore/punk that came from the UK, Sweden, Finland, Brazil, Japan, and then shot it through the meat grinder of founding member Kawakami’s hellish guitar sound and growled vocals.Someone, like maybe Stuart Schrader, could write a term paper on what Disclose means in the grand scheme of punk, the way their releases were in a way DISposable… the way they were paying tribute to the most minute details but at the same time putting their own stamp on everything… it might be post modern. Like Quentin Tarantino. But I’m not totally qualified for that kind of a write up, and that’s okay.Whatever the relative ups and downs of the Disclose legacy, Nightmare or Reality to me is their most essential release, or at least the best introduction to them. Mainly because it’s extremely high energy and heavy. There’s good song variety, that sizzling guitar sound, and pounding meaty drums. It opens with Fear of the Nuclear Age exactly like you expect, sounding structurally like an outtake from Why? but with a lot of added fuzz and Kawaikami’s very Japanese delivery. For a “rawpunk” band this record actually has a highly layered sound. There are at least 3 guitar tracks, possibly more, the drums are well recorded and not at all pots and pans sounding, the bass manages to actually have its own sound in the mix, and the solos are either double tracked, or played through an octave pedal. They manage to cut through in a very unique and somehow more over the top way than almost any other solos I’ve heard on this sort of record. Check out the solos after the break in Future Extinction. Sounds like it could be an octave pedal and doubled solos there. Wild stuff.Kawakami died in his sleep almost two years ago, and I know for a lot of people there’s still a gaping hole left in his absence.

I guess the main attractions here are exclusive tracks by Bastard and Cruck, but there’s also Mad Conflux, Bad Smells, Pile Driver. I wish more bands did little tour only samplers like this. Only like… not bogus amazing core bands that need another product for their package tour. Just cool bands that I like that need another product for their cool package tour of raging music. Good poorly drawn skull-beast art here. Not too much to say so just take it all in.

So I was out on the town last night with some of the guys, and by that I mean we went to get some burgers on a Monday, and Voorhees came up in the Ipod shuffle. We switched off the shuffle and started going through our fav Voorhees jams, you know how it is:

“play this one…”

“which is the one that starts out…”

“what record is Death To Pigs on?”

Anyway a while back I wrote about their first 7″, Violent, which is a thrashing HC classic, but the first Voorhees record I actually heard was the What You See Is What You Get 7″, which collects songs from a few different comps or splits on one record, and was made for one of their US tours. It’s also kind of the last really great Voorhees release. Following this there was a turnover in most of the members of the band, and they took on a bit of a different more metal influenced sound. Eventually they did get back to basics and returned to fast hardcore, but it was a bit of a weird trajectory.

At any rate, What You See Is What You Get served as a great introduction to the band. 8 raw throated skull smashers that last about as many minutes when all tallied up. A bit of the old Boston sound (SSD/DYS/NFX — the song Swamped on here even borrows the “Protester” drum beat from Negative FX) and a bit of the old Britcore sound (Heresy/Ripcord/Intense Degree) all crammed into one package. Ian Leck as usual brought the most threatening and throaty delivery to this and the fucking drumming on this (I believe courtesy Michael Gillham) is some of the finest fast skin bashing ever. Jams like Power Trip hurtle their way from one fast part to another, as meat and potatoes as hardcore can get, but that’s the appeal. No melody, no slow stuff, and one single focused emotion, anger. 

This might be kind of a bummer, but my favorite track on this record is actually a cover. In fact it’s one of my all time favorite covers of any band of any genre. The song is “Hinkley Had a Vision” by the Crucifucks, but it’s transformed into the most mean sounding, ‘about-to-snap’ anthem you could imagine. A lot of it is because of the difference in the Crucifucks whiny vocal squeal and Voorhees low growl, but it’s played with more balls out authority in the musical department as well. I’m not actually sure the members of the Crucifucks would approve, I’d wager that Doc Dart would find it to be fascist or something. But when the music cuts out and you’re left with the infamous rant “I wanna take the president/chop off his head/and mail it to them in a garbage bag” in Leck’s thuggish limey bark instead of Dart’s squawk, you feel a surge of sinister power.

 I think the copies with white covers of this record are actually the “tour edition” made in ‘96 (Mister Leck if you still check this blog please confirm). There’s a more common version w/ a black cover. Neither goes for much money so I’d recommend people picking either one before people start to get wise to this band again. One of the best of their decade.

Oh post script, I think all of these guys are still doing music. I know Michael Gillham is doing some sludge punk in the form of Drunk In Hell, and Lecky sings in Meatlocker (did a good lp last year).

Oh one last thing non-Voorhees related: Hatred Surge “Isolated Human” e.p. is out now on Painkiller Records. Grinding violence.

More Japancore annihilation for you today. Warhead - Drive It In Your Headis probably their most hard to find release, at least stateside. It’s also not necessarily as well liked as their first 2 7″s which are much more high speed and thrashy. Drive It In Your Head works a much more mid paced rockin’ tempo through the tunes but, with the same power drill guitar sound and screaming bloody hell vocals.

Getsuka bursts open with a machine gun style drum fill that starts to lock into a kind of groove back and forth across the toms. Even though it’s a break from the high speed stuff they’d done up to this point, the drumming itself is still actually quite fast, it just doesn’t take the form of a straight beat. Bass and then guitar start to swell over it and then you get the psychotic vocals. They pretty much sound the way the singer of Warhead looked when I saw them in the US in 2006. He had a mohawk, no teeth, and the same clothes at all the shows I saw them at (these were a few weeks apart). A serious lifer. His vocals shred with a kind of highish rasp, some hardcore singers really just end up talking in a scary voice, but this dude is belting it the fuck out. Every muscle on his body has got to be tightening up and as for his actual vocal chords, I can only imagine they look ravaged by machine-gun fire.

Face Crisis [???] continues with the pattern set up on the first song, throbbing bass, heavy drums, and guitars and vocals spiraling close to the edge of total collapse. In some ways I guess this all sounds more modern Japanese than the earlier Warhead stuff, but it’s still too unpredictable and wild to blend in with the crowd over there (like some of the lesser Burning Spirits style groups).

The last track Nichitai is basically some kind of noise-scape built on a cascading drum swell, random blasts of feedback and string noise from the guitars, screeching mic feedback, and wordless screams. This is probably the kind of thing you’d expect from some harsh noisers and at first it does seem like a bit of a throw-away, but it still holds onto the same intensity and broken up chaos of the two more traditional “song” offerings. All around a good way to punctuate the first two songs.

Love the cover on this one with the fighting wolves too. Very noble.

Tetsu Arrey

I can’t front like I know lots about Hardcore from outside the USA, but I do know a couple things. I know that Tetsu Arrey have a well deserved place near the top of the Japanese HC/Punk hierarchy, and a lot of the reason for that falls on their first lp which is just a powerhouse of riffs, licks, and power top to bottom. This is POSSIBLY the most memorable song for song/riff for riff 17  song lp ever. By that I mean that for an lp with that many songs, there’s an awful lot of hum-able, stick to your ribs riffs, and not as much blurry thrash as you’d expect. As a sidenote, Tetsu Arrey are also kind of infamous as being one of the most feared groups of men in the Japanese punk scene. They’re well known to be involved in some criminal elements in Japan, and their name roughly translates to Barbell.

The opening track on this lp is called High Way To Hell. I have no idea why, because it’s not a cover song, and frankly, it takes some cajones to name your song after an AC/DC song, but goddamn this is a band that can do it. What a way to bust out on your debut lp. Huge drums start building up, and might I add, these drums sound GREAT for like 1989 or whenever. When the guitars come in its with a busy little riff halfway between Motörhead’s Iron Fist era and Kill ‘Em All Metallica. But when the song gets going, there’s a curve ball, the drummer takes marching style beat. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever heard. Skull cracking, biker Motörpunk, all with classic growling Japancore vocals laid on top. The speed kicks in by the next song and the sound basically maintains the same Motörhead (’82) + Metallica (’83) + Systematic Deth (’86) style… or just Motörhead about 2 times faster, either way, it’s no joke. Everything about the sound and performance is serious and classy. The guitars have a perfect Marshall crunch and sound like they’re played from amps as big as a house. The bass has a pretty much identical to Motörhead fuzztone. The drums are thick and natural sounding. Perfect production, and great songs, I don’t know what’s more to say.

Anyone have the story on why this was pressed in such a low quantity in the first place? I can’t imagine it was cheap to produce. This thing is hard as hell to turn up and I expect a bidding war, especially this close to Xmas. May the deepest pockets win…

So we did Thanksgiving yesterday at my job, and it resulted in the entire building taking a 2 hour lunch, followed by overstuffed lethargy that carried over into most of today. Therefore I didn’t actually get around to posting yesterday, I only had the necessary brain power to do my actual job, not this one too. But here we are, a day later, and everything is fine.

So why not go with an easy one?

Gauze - Equalizing Distort is a sure bet if you like fast hardcore. I mean maybe there’s still a few people out there who wanna get all weird about listening to good music from not-America, but we don’t bug out about that around here, we just assume they were in Rain On The Parade or some such shit.

Anyway, for some people Equalizing Distort is THE Gauze album. I don’t think you can really declare one better than the rest with a band like this. They’ve existed for almost 30 years and played extremely uncompromising hardcore for the entire time, though they’ve only had 5 proper albums, and a few compilation appearances. But one thing that has to be noted is this is really the proper beginning of the Gauze sound. The starting point here is Discharge, and on early recordings they were truer to that style, but there’s a huge emphasis on a kind of herk and jerk starting and stopping that frankly the boys from Stoke-on-Trent wouldn’t have been able to manage in their heyday. This kind of rapidfire on-off-on-off-on approach to seemingly simple hardcore riffs serves, quite well to disorient the listener and really get your head spinning. People frequently site this fact about Gauze that they are trying to sound fast without actually playing at a high number of beats per minute. To give replicate the feeling of speed and movement. It’s interesting because, after music gets to a certain speed, like say in grindcore, the relentless pounding becomes almost static and unmoving again. So rather than just blast it out, Gauze keeps things at a decent mid-paced to moderately fast clip but with a constant shifting of the gears.  It’s something hard to put into words, but when you hear the pounding churn of opener and all time classic, Pressing On it just sort of crystallizes. The riffs ascend and descend back and forth while the drums are constantly rolling from snare to toms and back again. It’s a constant feeling of disharmony and chaos. With each recording subsequent to this, Gauze increased this tension in their music, building on top of everything they’d done the time before, but this is for all intents, the starting point.

I think a pretty convincing argument can be made for Nightmare’s “Give Notice Of Nightmare” being the best “Burning Spirits” style Japanese hardcore release. A lot of people are surely gonna kick their feet and say “what about Bastard”, “what about Deathside”, “what about Poison”, and I mean, you could make a good argument for any of those, and many more really. But I think, especially if this isn’t a style you know much about, Give Notice Of Nightmare is a great entry point. For one, it’s just long enough, 10 songs. Each one built on the perfect mix of Discharge, Motorhead, & Iron Maiden, balancing brutality, melody, economy, and swagger perfectly.  Each song has a big chorus, a couple of humable riffs, some great call response moments, and skull crushing production, in fact it kind of works kind of like a Japanese Victim In Pain, as a good overall genre summation of Japanese hardcore.

Unfortunately I haven’t got much time at work this week, and still haven’t set up the Internet at home, so this one’s brief, hopefully I can return to it next time this one’s on ebay. I know there’s plenty of people who love this one that read this blog, so please sound off. It deserves more than a paragraph.

Got a pretty good cult Japan-core item that doesn’t come up too often today: Blaze “But Nothing Ever Change” 7″.  This was issued in a run of 500 copies on SAKURAGI RECORD in the mid-90s, I presume this is a band label, maybe someone could confirm. Anyway it tends to be on the scarce side which is a shame because its got the same kind of sizzle the the first couple of D.S.B. and Warhead 7″s bring to the table and gives either a run for their money.

Right out of the box you get a blast of screeching feedback, a quick cymbal wash, and then full tilt “Burning Spirit” style hardcore. Plenty of call-response vocals between the singer and I would guess the other members, and of course a quick little solo to add a little extra spice, as well as some crazy sounding vocal punches that sound sung through a distortion pedal. No slowing down in this one, just pure driving hardcore.

The other 4 songs on here pretty much take the same approach, tearing through each track at similar high speeds with solos, little tuneful hooks, and crazy back-up shouts giving each its flavor. It’s kind of a bummer Blaze doesn’t have much else to their name. I know of 3 different comp appearances and I’ve heard of a demo, but since I’m not from Japan, I have to get most of my info on this stuff 5th hand. The value on Nothing Ever Change has been climbing into the triple digits for a little while now and I haven’t seen a copy for auction in a while so this might be one to watch.

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

Rudimentay Peni - s/t 7″ 

Paintbox: The Door/Provided Railroad 

Paintbox is a band that by all rights shouldn’t have been as incredible as they are on record just based on the fact that they used the world’s most unlikly instruments to achieve their sound. Then again maybe if anyone could do it, it would be them. When I heard last summer that their guitarist Chelsea (formerly of Deathside, Poison Arts) had passed away, I found myself rather blindsided by devastation. I didn’t know this man, and there are bands I’ve spent more time listening to than Paintbox or Deathside, and as they say, “people die every day”, but something about the knowledge that I’d never see this dude play in the flesh had an adverse effect on me. I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with the feeling. How do you really mourn the death of a stranger? I moped around most of the day, and then ended up laying on a river bank in the Nor. Cal. sun playing back most of the Paintbox discography on my headphones. Later on someone mentioned to me that when Paintbox was asked what they wanted to do and see when they were in the USA, they would always say “see beautiful nature”, and so maybe this was a fitting way to remember Chelsea.

Sorry to all the BidHc loyal to get “emotional” here, but as the date of Chelsea’s passing is only a few weeks away, I couldn’t help but think of this (there’s also a big memorial show coming up for him in Tokyo on August 17). The leads that this man could lay down are some of the most staggering I’ve ever heard, fluid and searing the way Pig Champion (who I feel lucky to have seen play twice), or Eddie Clarke could be. There aren’t a lot of guitar heroes in this day and age, and I’m sad to say for the last year there’s been one less for the likes of me.  When you play the B-side of this single, Provided Railroad, and in the middle of the chaos you hear him tear a solo on a classical guitar it’s just obvious the man is operating on another level. What? Oh you’re not familiar with Paintbox’s affinity for non-standardized hardcore punk instrumentation? Well on this particular release, in addition to the usual Scream/Guitar/Bass/Drum set up, you’ll hear a horn section, some wood blocks, a harmonica, and that classical guitar. While this may have disastrous results with any other hardcore or punk band, it pays dividends here, and mixes well with the kind of bizarrely tuneful riffs that Paintbox were able to cook up. The A-side, “The Door” opens with a blast from a brass section that sounds like they’re announcing the arrival of a king, which they basically are, and then proceeds to swoop you up in a whirlwind of speed-picking fury and rough throated shouts.  Only Motorhead and the aforementioned Mr. Clarke have reached this simultaneous level of brutality and popiness before. Or if maybe Poison Idea had recorded with a Mariachi band as accompaniment.

I’m sure a lot of people reading this are probably shaking their heads like “how can this be good”, so let me invite those people, and also anyone who doesn’t like riffs, to please leave the room and don’t ever call me again. Go home and listen to whatever idiots listen to these days. I think the band is called No Age.

Through their whole career Paintbox were a band that delivered riff after riff that only could have come from them, they’re sort of eastern-tinged, kind of Iron Maiden-ish, and there’s this undeniably poppy undercurrent. To me, trying to boil down the sound of their recordings is like trying to give reasons why the Sun is bright. Their second lp (and possibly last depending on the state of on their third), Earth Ball Sports Tournament, finally received vinyl treatment (after 8 years of being a CD only Japanese release) on Prank Records this June. If you have any class you’d do well to pick it up (as well as the Prank repressing of their first album “Singing Shouting Crying”). I firmly believe it’s one of the 10 most interesting and rewarding lps of the last 10 years.  

The Door b/w Provided Railroad is out of print now, and is about 8 or 9 years old, so it shouldn’t be too much. Maybe like $20-$30.

Ps. thanks.