That's youth, that's all

Cerebral Ballzy - Cerebral Ballzy
2012, Williams Street Records

Cerebral Ballzy is one of those bands that were born way too late. They seriously sound like they have just stepped out of the mid eighties DC hardcore scene, transported somehow across the temporal gulf by some otherworldly machinery, complete with scruffy Vans, ripped denim, self-made band-tees and bandanas tied around the legs. Everything they do reek of american hardcore in the vein of Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Void, Negative Approach, SOA etc. They even manage to capture that rough but warm, vaguely metallic, distorted sound of the era, where there bass is just a tad too high in the mix (which I love) and the vocals sometimes peak into the red (yes, there's love there as well), where there's just enough clarity to hear all the elements of the music yet nowhere near enough to be considered -by any standards- pristine or overproduced. Think Out Of Step-era Minor Threat mixed with Bad Brains on the ROIR cassette and you roughly get the idea. Like the many of legendary bands that came before them in the eighties, these guys aren't out to change the world, they're not here to save the whales, free speech or free abortions; they're not here to set right the myriad of injustices in the world - their goal in life is not to bring forth the revolution that will finally bring this whole corrupted peice of shit we call a society down. In fact they have no other aim than to write cool songs about shit they know and feel and have fun while doing it. Hence titles like Junkie For Her, Insufficient Fare, Sk8 All Day and Puke Song. Of course there's some sort of social commentary in these songs as well if you choose to see it that way, but I for one, don't need to take everything so seriously all the time and neither do Cerebral Ballzy. They're punks and they know it and don't give a shit if you like it or not.
     I'm way too excited about this album, I think. Maybe it's because this is like a long lost piece of my youth rediscovered; this is the way I wanted hardcore to sound when it veered off into Posthardcore-lala-Land in the early nineties and sloughed off most of its youthful rage and fury and moved into shitty hiphop-punkrock (Mucky Pup, I fucking hate that band!), crushingly boring and formulaic, paint-by-numbers, Epitaph/Fat Wreck-Chords emo/pop punk, bland, alternative, shoegaze rock and postwhateverthefuck. This is the sound of kids not giving a shit what you think or what you want them to be. Awesome!

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!

Punkrockacademyfightsong: Dead Ending EP

Dead Ending - Dead Ending EP
2012, Alternative Tentacles

"Oh great, here comes another goddamn punkrock supergroup!" may have crossed your mind when you heard that Vic Bondi of Articles Of Faith had teamed up with people from Alkaline Trio, Noise By Numbers and Rise Against to record tunes under the moniker Dead Ending. What crossed my mind was, "As long as they sound like early Articles Of Faith I couldn't give a shit if it's a 'supergroup' or a band of bearded lesbian acrobats with herpes". And to my surprise that's basically right on the money (not the lesbian herpes bit). This ep, released by hardcore stalwarts Alternative Tentacles, has that rough and raw, yet warm recording of mid-eighties hardcore, the speed and ferocity of AOF but also a bit of the melody of its' later incarnation. We get no re-invented wheels here, no new complicated theorems to fuse hardcore/punk with shoegaze, ragga, free-form jazz or dubstep or anything else; no convoluted attempts to bring anything new and 'exciting' into the genre. What we get is your basic bread and butter hardcore staples: righteous anger and lots of it (listening to the fury in Vic's voice on Wasted makes me wanna toss furniture around the room, punch the walls  and bitchslap some of the idiots I encounter on a daily basis), quick-paced frenetic songs that are pure 80's-throwback, built on fast, simplistic riffs, roiling, razorsharp basslines and fierce, agitated rythms. Nothing fancy, no stadium punkrock, no bs. Just old school, bouncy, semi-melodic hardcore. Five songs in roughly eleven minutes and we're done. Simply brilliant. It seems the guys are busy recording new material, so hopefully we won't have to wait too long to hear some new jamns from them.

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.

Still not loud enough! Still not fast enough!

Antigama - Stop The Chaos ep
2012, Selfmade God

Polish grinders Antigama are at it again and this time they've mixed their patented technical ultra-grind with a huge dose of thunderously heavy but less shredding caveman grind, a la Brutal Truth. In fact vocalist Lukasz Myszkowski (Seriously, do you need that many consonants in a name? Juszt aszkin'.) has, at times, even taken to emulating Kevin Sharp's weirdly timed and bluesy singing style and he does it fucking brilliantly. Stop the Chaos is like a amalgam of old school Antigama and the aforementioned Brutal Truth as well as a big pinch something more metallic in structure and riffing, that reminds me of Burnt By The Sun. It's a short ep with only a handful of songs but they manage to get the point across beautifully in around fifteen minutes or so. Opener E Conspectu is hands down the best song this band has ever wrtten. It manages to incorporate both an unusually crusty heaviness and over-the-top grinding speed as well as some complexity in structure without being overly technical or descending into any sort of mathcore wankery. From there on it's all fucking grindcore armageddon. But in a really, really good way.
     In some ways I find this style of music is best presented in this kind of, shorter, format, where otherwise the sheer number of songs of a full length (whatever the hell that means today) often overwhelms you and rapidly destroys any chance of appreciation of the album in it's entirety. I often find that even the awesomest of grindcore acts rarely write albums where the songs don't run into each other and start to blur after the first dozen or so. It's an inherent part of the style, I guess: it is supposed to brutalize you, it's supposed to blur into a whirlwind of sonic fecal matter, it's supposed to destroy your sense of good taste and remove any lingering shreds of artsy pretentions or musical decency in the listener. Grindcore's supposed to be like the rock equivalent of a really horribly bad date with someone, like, say GG Allin (if you're a woman; Lindsey Lohan, if you're a guy), where everything turns, really fast, into a nasty, bloody, shit-slinging, fist-punching drug-fest, that you probably will recover from, given enough time, but one you hopefully won't remeber too much of. So, yeah, there's that... Where was I? Oh yeah. Here, though, everything is fresh and crisp and memorable and packs a fucking nuclear punch that hopefully sets the course for Antigama in the future. Good sztuff guysz.

In Crust We Trust: Split Cranium

Split Cranium - Split Cranium
2012, Hydra Head Records

Considering the extremely diverse musical output of Split Cranium's four members, it's something of a surprise that their debut album is as easily digested as it is. Consisting of folk with heavy psych, freeform noise, metal and post-rock/metal pedigrees, Split Cranium's sound could easily have gone in a completely different direction. But I guess that was the whole point of Split Cranium: to combine the efforts of these four avantgardists and create something truly primal and basic, albeit with an unusual twist. What we get is a sort of brutalist take on Scandinavian/Japanese 80's crusty dis-core. At least for the first quarter of the album, which is pretty straight forward with lots of memorable metallic riffs ontop of ruthlessly powerful d-beats and the deep raspy screams of Aaron Turner (Isis, Mamiffer, House Of Low Culture etc). But then, about a couple of songs into the album, something quite different starts to happen. After the vaguely Minor Threaty (or possibly Negative Approachy?) opening of Blossoms From Boils - built on a furiously bouncy and poppy-as-fuck riff over a fast paced beat and a meandering bassline - we enter Weirdo City where the song morphs into something completely unpredictable, with boogie-woogie-fuzzy ZZ Top guitars, like something straight out of La Grange, and chanting, vaguely Indian-sounding vocals duelling with Turner's deep barking growls. After a while it becomes almost ambient and quite lulling in its repetetiveness. It returns briefly for a second or two to the hardcore riffs from the beginning before abruptly ending, leaving me wondering what the hell just happened.
     After this we're treated to the Killing Joke/Ministry-esque opening verse of Scepters To Rust and the following crusty d-beat bridge, which then moves into a Die Kreuzen/Bad Brains-styled double-snare gallop on the chorus. And then back again - rinse and repeat. Black Binding Plague starts off with a a minute or so of glassy guitar noises and then erupts into  an awesome midpaced Suicidal Tendencies/crossover pastiche, complete with clean, but at times slightly out of tune, Mike Muir-like vocals and a vicious mishmash of barbwire metal and hardcore riffs as well as some great fucking bass runs underneath it all. Yellow Mountain mixes clean, serenely melodic vocals and midrange aggressive barks layered into a midpaced slightly metallic Discharge-like tune, where the vocals carry the brunt of the force of the song. Not counting the digital-only bonus track where Daniel Menche remixes Sceptre To Rust (a fairly forgettable droning whirlwind harsh noise track), the album closes with Retrace The Circle which starts off innocently enough, sounding like something out of the old school eighties hardcore play book, with a blazing, though monotone, Motörheadish riff over a fastpaced double snare-tapping punk beat. But after just a few bars the song moves ever so slightly out of the comfort zone, with Turner's raspy voice and a serpentine chanted chorus taking alternate turns over the music and just as on Blossoms From Boils earlier, Retrace The Circle attains a certain droniness after a while, where the repetition turns everything a bit blurry and soothing, even with Turner's growling voice breaking through the haze now and again. About four minutes in, fizzing noises, distorted clicks and whirrs starts to drown out the music with a wall of abrasive sound, leaving the droning vocals and the odd guttural scream as the only sounds, beside the droning waves of distortion. This goes on a for a while until the music all of a sudden breaks through the wall of noise and abruptly restarts, almost as if someone bumped into the record player and pushed the needle back a bit.
    This is indeed an odd album. But never so odd it becomes an obstacle to getting through it. In fact there's a certain flow and weird logic to the album that makes the transitions between the songs quite smooth and after the initial what-the-fuckness of the first sitting, you get used to it and start noticing all the little details and nods and winks that are buried in the music. It is an outstanding piece of music we get here, but it's definately not for everyone. Alongside the new Old Man Gloom album (yet another one of Turner's projects) this is one of the few truly unique and way-out-there albums so far this year.

Midnight Madness and Beyond: WILD//TRIBE

Wild Tribe - Endless Nights
2012, Rescued From Life, Punkalive, Under The Surface

Wild Tribe is a six-piece out of Fort Worth, Texas, created out of Unit 21 and Tolar, which were basically combined into one huge-ass  hardcore juggernaut.The preview streams on the bandcamp site of their debut record (collectively released on Rescued From Life Records, Punkalive Records and Under The Surface Records) had me all worked up and itching to get my hands on a copy and now that it's finally here, I can say without a doubt in my mind, that this piece of vinyl is one of the best hardcore albums released so far this year. Combining a metallic sound with aggressive, simplistic d-beat style hardcore is nothing new in any way (Anti-Cimex, Totalitär, GISM etc), and neither is having dual vocalists duelling and doing a call-and -response-type singing, but what these guys do is way way beyond that, even if the basic structure to their style owes alot to Swedish and Japanese hardcore. Alot of the power from their music comes from the fact that they simply fucking rock! And they aren't afraid to let their metal influences shine through, either. They play with an intensity that hooks you from the first few bars of the opening intro and they write really catchy hardcore with lots of memorable vocal parts and riffs. I keep hearing shades of RKL, Broken Bones, Rancid, Christ On A Crutch and World Burns To Death in Wild Tribe's music, as well as tons of Motörhead or Diamondhead-style riffing, often laden with quick guitar licks tossed into the mix whenever possible. The production is close to fucking perfect here, all the elements are given lots of space and everything is clearly audible, which is awesome because it lets us hear those amazing bass runs that would otherwise be lost in the cacaphony. The really cool thing about this  record is that it captures so many of the good things about hardcore that is often lost in other bands/recordings: we get aggression and speed without the muddiness of shitty recordings, we get the complementing dynamics and force of dual vocalists (both of whom have really distinct and personal voices), we get the melody and catchiness of hardcore/punk while never losing any of the intensity and we get alot of truly rocking singalong-parts and the youthful exhilaration and rush of honest, passionate and well-played rebellious music that defiantly extends two middle fingers to the powers that be. Shit does not get any better that this.

Stream parts of the album from the bandcamp site here.