Hey everyone, remember me? I forgot my gmail password for 3 months or more, but I have it again and I've got a lot to share.
Here's the band that burst my crasher crust (blown out Japanese d-beat) cherry and still remain my favorite practitioner of the genre. Listen to Wargasm and Decay and pump your fist.
Full disclosure, I'm not very "cool" in the traditional sense of the word. I wear the same thing almost every day, I don't party (unless getting drunk in a park counts), I watch Two and Half Men reruns and I work the counter at a gas station that belongs to a billion-dollar corporation.
Having a job like this means I get (have) to interact with the largest possible cross-section of people in this city. Entitled people who yell at me when their credit card is declined, angry people who threaten me through bullet-proof glass when I'm working the night-shift, smokers with no patience for my attempts at small talk and the worst: people who refuse to follow instructions clearly written on the pumps so they don't have to talk to me. Those are just the assholes though. One bright spot is the location. We're right next door to one of Vancouver's busiest and most-popular rehearsal spaces so I get to talk gear and music nerd stuff with the occasional stranger. One such stranger I've become acquaintances with is a man named Bubba.
Bubba walks with a cane, has a massive mane of greying hair and a beard to match, always buys orange juice and has Sleep and Winter patches on his vest (A+). I assumed he just lived in the area but one day he came in and had a bag from a nearby music store with some swank new mics in it. I asked him about recording and that got the ball rolling. Bubba is the singer for an awesome new hardcore band here in the city and their name is Write Off. This is straight up, in your face 80's styled hardcore with modern vocals that remind me of Look Back and Laugh. The real spike in this punch bowl is that the guitars are tuned to drop-D, something totally foreign to retro-hardcore, and it adds a subtle modern touch to the music that sounds slightly unlike anyone else currently playing this style. Anyway, Bubba gave me the demo the other day and it kills. Ten songs in nine minutes. Enjoy!!!
p.s. the above video is Write Off jamming in their rehearsal space!
Ffffftttt- and a low whistle... Another flare shot into the gaping webby void...
Well heya folks. Thanks to the invitation (and grooming) of Sensei Cam, I'm here to toss my borrowed cents at the feet of all you bloggist taste-makers / recommendation-takers. Nice to meet you.
Let's kick it off with something current: Edmonton's MAHRIA. I seriously can't get enough of this record. A punishing, tortured, female-fronted work sitting at that perfect intersection of emo and post-hardcore. Soul-crushing primal yelps, wickedly melodic guitar interplay, and some of the hugest production I've heard in a long time. The track "Justification of an Old Man" is particularly devastating. Available for free on Bandcamp.
Oh yeah, and I just found out that THEY PLAYED IN VANCOUVER YESTERDAY AND I HAD NO IDEA. FML. If you went to that show, post here and tell me how awesome it was so I can feel shittier about myself.
If later Flag still makes you scratch your head then look no further. This is what later Flag is all about right here. Just before Kira left and Greg Ginn had his bong fused to his lips. If you don't like this, then you don't like late Flag... Hey! don't worry about it man!
Disclaimer: If you do not like loud, angry, dissonant, and punishing music then it's very likely you won't like this.
Now, first things first... HOLY SHIT! I slept on this band for so long and I have no idea why. I listened to this album on the way home last night and it is so perfect. Not perfect in a broader sense of music, just perfect for what it is. The music made by this two piece is so perfectly untainted by any aspirations of success, popularity, notoriety, or any other desire that can often compromise the important aspects of good extreme music. I really got a sense that these guys are only doing this for themselves. This is pure modern powerviolence with such a perfect dose of harsh-noise and slower-parts to break up the wall of fury. PERFECT! PERFECT! PERFECT!
The songs totally bleed into each other but it's in such a perfect way that it feels like one continuous piece of music. The riffs are so atonal and percussive that none of the songs have an identifiable key or even a melody and alternately, could all be in some magical, imperceptible key that normal humans can't actually hear. The playing is flawless, the vocals are perfectly angry and they never veer too far into metal territory. This is exactly what modern powerviolence bands need to look to. No more angry frat boys taking off their shirts and playing grindcore with more tempo changes and calling it powerviolence. THIS IS POWERVIOLENCE!!! All hail the Iron Lung!!!
Just some raging powerviolence. fast, slow, heavy, harsh... definitely one of the genre's best records, of which there are many. Sorry for the lack of posts and the lack of depth in the posts. Life still sucks... just now it sucks worse than the last few times I used that as an excuse for a lack of posts.
Last night some of my friends played a joke set as a 'conservative-punk-band' and it reminded me of this album cover... not the album, just the cover. This album is a staple of 90's hardcore. Sludgy bits, distorted bass, almost complete dissonance. Good shit to get mad to. Yeah, it's on other blogs but maybe some people haven't heard it yet!
I've been lazy and since I don't upload any of these albums myself, most of them seem to have been taken down from mediafire. I was just going to discreetly re-up all of them... but the number kept getting bigger and I don't want to sit at my computer all day. So I'm just going to leave this here and let people comment if they want something re-upped that has been taken down.
p.s. google it first! someone else probably uploaded it!
I know this album doesn't need to be discussed among people who already love hardcore but there are people that aren't crazy about hardcore who probably haven't heard this. Some say this is the best hardcore album ever recorded. Some say this is the best album ever recorded!
If you play guitar, bass or drums and you haven't listened to this album before, then you need to right now. These guys were one of the few hardcore bands that actually PLAYED. They didn't just show up, plug in, count to four and hope for the best. The consensus among hardcore fans from the early 80's seems to be that The Bad Brains were right up there with Black Flag as the best live band on the planet in their heyday and the few early live videos don't indicate otherwise. You seriously need to listen to this if you never have because it may change the way you think about punk, your instrument or technical-proficiency in music. Also, it just fucking slays. Even the reggae tracks are A+
The worst part of getting hit by a car (Aside from the swelling) is not being able to bedroom mosh. Imagine the immense bitter sweetness of Noose posting their new 7" The War of All Against All the day after I stopped an SUV with my butt.
I remember the sheer excitement I felt before I listened to their demo: a philosophy professor fronting an east coast-style hardcore band. UGH! I was not let down. It's so refreshing to see and hear some challenging lyrics and PC baiting imagery from people who understand what their talking about and are willing to discuss any issues raised by detractors. Soundwise this recording is raw as fuck. So raw it's dripping (Sweat, that is. From moshing). Think Antidote's "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Mining the creme de la creme of the North East hardcore sounds. From Negative Approach to Siege, and the aforementioned Antidote. All the crucial aspects of scary, righteous hardcore are thrown into the mix. From the philosophical references being used to serve hardcore to the bulldozing riffs, this EP has something for everyone. One day I'll see Noose again, and I'll watch in amazement as a bunch of hardcore kids pile up to yell "Conceptual gerrymandering"
VEGANISM... OR TOTAL ANNIHILATION.
before you download this, please consider grabbing the real deal from their big cartel or react!'s webstore. support the moral law. DOWNLOAD
Jock this band before the real hype starts. 80's NY revival hardcore for fans of Warzone and Youth of Today. I love that this demo has all the modern mosh parts and breakdown bases covered while the recording is still nice and raw. Bands like Backtrack and Minority Unit are tight and all but hardcore is still hardcore, and that super produced sheen just feels weird. Their singer Dereck played/plays guitar in alot of bands in Calgary and so does their drummer Stu, notably (for me anyway) were Runaways, who played their last show a few months back. Not before they were able to make a trek out west and play the Vancouver Island Hardcore Fest. we crashed at the same house and watched Death Race way too late into the night. Tight dudes, tight jams.
Catch them at Van Isle Fest this year!
This is some great punk right here. Nuclear Family broke up and finding info on them is tough because, at least according to Discogs, there are seven other bands by the same name and I'll bet at least one of them plays punk. To help distinguish this I will say that it has super melodic female vocals that remind me of Kathleen Hanna's singing (not screaming) and that really nice not-quite-distorted-but-still-dirty-sounding guitar sound that colors every good punk record released between 77-79. LOTS of minor chords! It's only eight tracks and they all rule. This might be hard to find on file sites but it's available for cheap from the label's Discogs page!!!
High res album art of this is elusive, so here's a photo of the record because it's badass.
Two crushing songs from Ampere on the A side, total 90 seconds. Ampere is a really fast and violent band that has Will Killingsworth from Orchid in it, these songs are two of their best. I've always found it odd that I prefer only hearing about a minute of music from a band that fast, you'd think you'd be hungry for more but no.
The other side of this is one of my favourite songs, though it's pretty teenage in hindsight. It's called I Was The Sword by Funeral Diner, a band that broke up in summer 08 as I recall. Sounds like it's a song about Seth Babb's ex girlfriend, but it's spiced up with that tragic hero mythological bullshit that you find in emo music. I mean I like it, but maybe you know what I'm talking about. Seth Babb is the singer of Funeral Diner.
Ghostlimb is a pretty popular (I think) band from LA. They're made of the living singer of Graf Orlock and 2 other guys. Super good emo/hardcore type stuff, their half of this split is good. The reason I'm posting this, however, is Fischer. They don't seem to have much material, in fact the dark side of this record is the most they have in one place.
Basically Fischer is a 2 piece emo band. They have really good guitar playing with some melodies, but the singing is the angsty shouting I like. Think Tiny Hawks but less noodly guitars and less screaming, or 1994! kinda. One of those two piece bands that you don't realize is only two guys and then when you do you go WHOAAAA.
Sometimes you just wanna listen to some pissed-off, breakdown-obsessed hardcore that doesn't do anything fancy, doesn't change anything you already love about hardcore and is just catchy as shit. This is perfect for that!
This is one of those rare examples of a joke record that ended up being completely awesome in its own right!
Members of Nunslaughter and Midnight come together to record songs based around Minor Threat riffs but change all the lyrics to be about hating christianity! The thing is, these guys prove to be infinitely better at 80's HC worship than a good 75% of the bands out there that are actually trying to do this. Every song is a killer and it's all catchy as hell. Enjoy!
It's been awhile since my last post, I've got some things queued up but I can't find the means to turn vinyl/tapes to mp3 yet.
In the meantime here's a hype band: Boston Strangler.
Members of Mind Eraser and Social Circkle and sounds like combination of both of those bands (omg.)
Imagine Negative FX with a grind influence, or a much better recorded SSD. You can't lose here! This is their debut LP, Primitive.
City of Caterpillar was a band from Richmond Virginia that had some guys from pg. 99, and some of them went on to form Ghastly City Sleep and Pygmy Lush. I'm not going to pretend to know what was going on in a scene from 10 years ago and 3000 miles away, I'll just talk about the music.
It's maybe my favourite album. I think I've listened to this one hundreds of times, or maybe just one hundred of times if that's a more realistic figure. If you've ever heard an "emo" album that sounded like Explosions in the Sky but with a teenager screaming in the background and ruining it, well you know what to expect I guess. This is the finest example of that sound I've ever heard. It's honest, dynamic, got good musicianship, takes you on a journey, is badass, etc. Everything good I could possibly describe about a hardcore album with 8 minute songs is in here. What they mostly sound like is the Japanese band Envy, except without that quality that Japanese bands have. You know, where they've perfected a sound but it's kind of devoid of emotion, like maybe they sound like that because that's how it should sound? These guys sound like this because it's what's inside 'em.
My favourite song is the second one. It's also the shortest so maybe if you decide you hate this you won't waste much time, but I hope you all like it. I dunno how to buy this album anymore else I'd share a link to that.
No Trend are my preferred proponents of that ugly, arty branch of 80's hardcore. This 7" is so fucking weird and so fucking angry but not in a macho way. More in a school shooting way. Apparently the band were very weird kids and basically hated everything... I dig.
