Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape

Primate - Draw Back A Stump

2012, Relapse

I think I'm spotting the beginnings of a trend with these grizzled old hardcore/metal/grindcore dudes reclaiming their long lost punk roots in their middle-age, with the likes of Aaron Turner - of Isis-fame - churning out psychedelic d-beat craziness in Split Cranium, Vic Bondi of Articles Of Faith doling out vicious old school hardcore in Dead Ending and Brutal Truth's Kevin Sharp spitting toxic Poison Ideas via Venomous Concept. And now he's at it again with Bill Kelliher from Mastodon on guitar and Mike Brennan, Shayne Huff and Dave Whitworth, all from The Despised (and other acts as well) on guitar, drums and bass respectively. This time it's straight up hardcore with a bit of singalong punk and some crusty melodic d-beat hurled into the mix for good measure. There are times when we get some bordeline grind -notably in the awesomely titled grumpfest Get The Fuck Off My Lawn and closer Reform?- but this is basically a hardcore/punk affair, with tons of attitude, great riffs and lots of high paced, skull-shattering fun. Sharp's voice is one of the best in the business in my opinion; it has great variety, lots of range, a simian burliness as well as a wicked snarl that makes it a perfect fit for this type of 80's-US-hc-meets-metallic-japcore.
     This extended ep (or whatever you want to call it) is a reworking of the self-released ep from last year with some added tracks and a general polishing soundwise. Everything is nice and audible and has a dirty backdrop of distortion that adds some ruggedness to the songs and all the elements are given their proper space to breathe. Though I prefer the original and less dense version of the tite track from the original ep, I'm completely and utterly floored by crustcrusher Global Division, the midpaced crossover avalanche of Hellbound with its infectious solo-licks and headbanging singalong chorus and the awesome Black Flag cover of Drinking & Driving. And from thereon it's all equally stellar material until the very end, with enough variety in both pace and intensity to keep everything fresh and dynamic. The little solo flurries and sparse but effective melodic elements adds another layer of complexity to these songs, but they also make them even more memorable. Fuck what you call punk rock. We need more shit like this and less Offspring, Gaslight Anthem and Green Day. Monkeys rule!

Skin Graft At Seventy-Five Miles Per Hour

Retox - Ugly Animals
2011, Three One G

Released in 2011, this puppy slipped right past me while I was busy looking at  funny pictures on the internet of cats with hats and rabits with pancakes on their heads or something equally retarded and listening to something completely different and -more than likely- not even remotely as fucking amazing as Retox's full length debut Ugly Animals. When I realised that the band featured people from among others grindcore weirdos The Locust it became obvious to me that this was going to be a wild ride indeed. One that would leave welts and burn blisters all over.
     Ugly Animals is made up of eleven songs of intensely jarring music; like a sonic equivalent of something straight out of a crazy person's paranoia-fuelled, horrifying fantasy world. The album is like an epinephrine shot mainlined straight into an artery of a coding heart patient, only with sound (i.e it wakes you the fuck up). These guys have noisy, highly structured hardcore chaos down to a goddamn science. I hear lots of influences at work here, but none of them ever get the better of these guys' writing skills; what they grew up listening to is integrated into the songs, but always tempered with a personal touch and a rock solid sense of direction and emotion.
     Right off the bat it's obvious these guys don't give a shit about pleasing any sort of mainstream aesthetic. They're not at all interested in conforming to any sort of artistic norm, nor do they care one jot about trying to restrain even for a moment the most unhinged side to their music. It's like when author William Gibson says he often tries to put off any casual reader of any of his books during the first few pages, making them incredibly dense and self-referential, almost unreadable, to weed out the assholes who do not deserve to read his books. After those few handful of pages of literary murkiness and convoluted phrasings it's usually smooth sailing. Only here, with these guys, it never really gets any easier as time goes by. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't top notch punk rock hits aplenty in this shrapnel tornado of an album. After the bruising opening with The World Is Ending And It's About Time, we get the completely fucking amazing Thirty Cents Shy Of A Quarter, which brings to mind bands like Unsane, Black Flag and Every Time I Die with it's aural pummeling and even some Dead Kennedys in the jangly oddball surf melodies towards the end. In fact, I hear alot of DK's in Retox's music but I also hear tons of Nomeansno, Pig Destroyer and more Black Flag. But it's all tossed into an extremely effective mix where the same riff or theme are rarely, if ever, repeated for more than a few bars, which gives an explosively schizophrenic character to the songs. It's something I often find in the work of Scott Hull (Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Pig Destroyer) and something that often just turns everything into a blur of sounds that quickly loses any coherence and meaning. But Retox manages to steer clear of that particular musical IED and even though everything is chaotic and unhinged and an impossible hardcore gumbo soup of screamo, grindcore, noise rock, punk rock, black metal and whatever else takes their fancy, Retox manages to almost always keep their feet right on the razor sharp edge of the meat cleaver they're balancing on. Fucking impressive if you ask me.

On Earth as it is in Hell

Yeah I know, it's been a while. I won't make excuses, I won't pretend you really give a shit if this blog exists or not and I won't waste anymore of your or my time with this preamble. New shit I've listened to these past few days reviewed below.


Sulaco - Build and Burn
2011, Handshake Inc

Sulaco has been around since 2003 and even though I've seen the name around and heard of them I'd never made an effort to actually track anything of theirs down. It turns out I'm a bit of a fuckhead. Because I should've. Sulaco oozes energy from every available pore and orifice. There is a Converge-meets-Trap-Them sense of unstoppable urgency going on here that's impossible to not get hooked on. There are semi-mathy prog parts, lots of insane almost b-horror movie like melodies and a huge dose of Brutal Truth grindness/weirdness, both rythm-wise and in the riffing. The more I listen to this album the more I get an almost caleidoscopic feeling off of Build and Burn. I mean, shit there's a huge death metal presence here, loads of dirty punk as well as an almost, well, dare I say it...emo-esque sense of melody. There are heavy as fuck sludgy, almost doomy, parts and there are pure blast beat sections that weave in and out of it all, often driven by those mathy odd horror movie melodies. I am so incredibly pleased to have finally gotten my shit togehther to listen to Sulaco because it's most definately worth it.


Young Hunter - Children of a Hungry World
2011,

Young Hunter, hailing from Tucson, Arizona, sounds like they just stepped out of a time warp straight from the late sixties and they spin huge, epic doom yarns mixed with drugged out psychedelic rock and stoner elements in a way that completely blew me away. There are even black metal-ish segments thrown in for good measure, with blast beats and all! Amazing. This is living-in-a-van-smoking-dope-kinda-music, it's I-wanna-move-to-the-desert-and-do-peyote-music, this is Charlie-Manson-is-a-friend-of-mine-and-he's-groovy-kinda-music. With a modern twist that somehow eludes my attempts to pin down. Imagine mixing Jefferson Airplane, Black Sabbath and Kyuss and letting it all pass through the digestive system of both Boyd Rice and Hunter S. Thompson. That's what Young Hunter sounds like. Kinda. Their stuff is available through bandcamp. Go there and listen for yourself.


UFO Gestapo - Grandemmisair
2011, Streaks Records

Grandemissair is the latest offering from vaguely proggy, heavy doom dealers UFO Gestapo. There's a huge Sabbath presence in these songs but there's also a dirty, ADD-kind of punk vibe going on that's a bit Black Flagg-y if you get my drift. This isn't only all-out sludge in the EyeHateGod sense of the word, but there are lots of loose structures here, lots of weird, noisy parts and lots of spaced out jams. But there are also brief, wicked, blasts of unrestrained hardcore fury, that break up the plodding monotony that's inevitable in this kind of music. There is a strong sense of 80's hardcore to some of these songs, reminding me at times of bands like Flipper and early The Melvins. I know next to nothing about the band except that they're apparently from France and that this is their second full length release so far. Really good stuff.