FCK YR NSRCK: BLCKLSTRS

Blacklisters - BLCKLSTRS
2012, Brew

Since I'm a huge fan of Unsane, Helmet, The Jeus Lizard and Dazzling Killmen, it wasn't much of a stretch to figure that I was going to be into what these Leedsians are doing musically. What I didn't expect though, was that I was going to be completely friggin' floored by it. But, damn this album is sweet! It's one of those grating, jaggedly constructed pieces, where we get enough 'rock' structure, fucked up time signatures and repetitive staccato riffs, laden with noises and feedback to sate the Helmet-lover in us, but also tons of dissonant, wandering guitar 'melodies' ontop of massive basslines along with lots of unhinged, drunken, mic-half-way-rammed-down-his-throat David Yow-esque vocals. In fact the vocals are a huge part of why I like this band so much; they're as varied and as brazenly in your face as the rest of the music. I fucking love the screams on the chorus of opener Clubfoot By Kasabian, which is, possibly, the most vicious, energetic rock song I've heard this year, with a distinctly grungy quality that reminds me of Handsome for some weird reason. Being labelled a noise rock band you'd think these guys would steer clear of any sort of melodic elements but in fact they do incorporate loads of melody into their music, but they do so more along the lines of bands like, say, Nomeansno or some of the post-punk, industrial rock bands that came in the wake of Ministry's intitial success in the late eighties (think Lead Into Gold, Pigface, Chris Connelly's solo work etc), where the melodies are darker, colder or, simply, more 'gothy', if you wish. One thing that makes Blacklisters such a blisteringly entertaining band is the complete unpredictability of their songs. With little or no nudging -nor warning- they suddenly veer off into Whisky Tango Foxtrot-territory, where they construct these weirdly balanced structures, add oddball vocal parts and angular melodic patterns that shouldn't work together - like your grandma's over-sized dentures that shouldn't fit in your mouth but somehow do anyway.  But it's not all goofiness and hey-look-at-me-my-dick-is-hanging-out-my-pants kind of music, where the silliness and eccentricities of the music become an obstacles to enjoying it. There's still enough of a solid 'proper' musical backbone to this records to make it a solid rock album . But it's also plainly obvious these guys don't really care about rules about what 'works' and what doesn't. Which is when the magic often happens in music. Free your mind and your ass will follow and all that. But, enough with the words! Go here to listen/buy/download.

In the meantime: Go Whores!

Whores. - Ruiner.
2011, Brutal Panda Records

Sometimes being stuck in the past isn't all that bad. This Atlanta trio sounds like they slept through the latter part of the final decade of the last century and the better part of the first one of this century and just woke up bobbing their heads to the Helmet and Jesus Lizard tunes still ringing in their ears. Because that's exactly what they sound like. A brew made up of equal parts Unsane, Lizard and Helmet. In my book that's awesomeness beyond all awesomeness. We get the syncopated, start-stop-start-stop staccato riffs, the gruff raspy singing, the winding guitar melodies ontop of earth-shatteringly heavy basslines, bristling with noise and feedback. And we get great songs, recorded with just the right amount of noise and dirtiness to scare away any Nickelback-loving mainstream fuckheads and yet enough clarity and immensity to give the music that proper roaring, revving muscle-car engine kind of feel. This is a short album, merely five songs, of which only two move past the four minute mark. This means everything is tighter than hell and free from any excess fat. We get quick, riff-laden metal, with lots of stomping sometimes, angular time signatures and an attitude steeped not so much in the ambiguous machismo of heavy metal but in the snarling, vaguely self-destructive, finger-flippin', I-don't-care-if-you-beat-me-up punk attitude of underprivileged, urban youth. I'm not sure if these guys are still active but if they are, I hope they'll get something new recorded soon and get it released properly, because this shit beats ninetynine percent of anything else that's out there. Go Whores!

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.

Fuck your noiserock pt.1: Unsane - Wreck

Unsane - Wreck
2012, Alternative Tentacles

This is going to be a short review. For several reasons. The main one being this: Unsane has been around for over two decades now and have consistently released fucking killer albums, all of them shit-you-pants-intense and megarockingly groovy, in a style I sometimes refer to as stripteasecore (there's a sexy, sweaty, swagger to almost everything they do as well as let's-get-shitfaced-inducing vibe to their particular style of - yeah, I know, there's that shiatty expression again - noiserock) and if you don't know them, shame on you. Seriously. Shame on you. The second reason is this: Wreck has some of the band's strongest material to date (possibly as good as Visqueen) with a close to perfect recording and great songs that keeps growing all the time; and the fact that it's released on Alternative Tentacles is darn cool as well. Third reason: they cover Flipper's amazing, seminal slowcore anthem Ha Ha Ha! What more do you need?