This introductory sentence is being written during the first week of 2021, or what the Gregorian calendar claims is 2021, and because there is no real reason to feel any positivity over this changeover, no-one of note has dropped any underground punk or hardcore releases in this particular window. This Straight Hedge, then, is a further mop-up of neato shit that came out in the last couple of months of 2020, such as this spindizzyingly good five-song EP by Soul Glo from Philadelphia.
Songs To Yeet At The Sun (Secret Voice) also happens to speak to something I observed in my end-of-2020 column, regarding Zulu from LA: “Acts whose lyrics and outlook are for and about the Black community have a very marginal presence in pretty much any hardcore scene.” Zulu, and their two glorious EPs, offer an exception, an escape perhaps; Soul Glo likewise, through their broad iconography and the lyrics of Pierce Jordan, which fair deluge the listener over 12 minutes and harbour much caustic hilarity in his babbled delivery.
The quartet’s releases to date, a miniature jumble of cassettes, comps and songs given numbers instead of titles, have in a musical sense tended to resemble the desperate scrabble of 90s/00s emotional hardcore more than anything, with the odd youth crew-y mosh part sprinkled in. This hasn’t been vanquished on Songs, with the likes of ‘Mathed Up’ flying by in a blaze of screwy drum fills and tremolo guitar (TJ Stevenson and Ruben Polo, respectively) – but Soul Glo benefit from chunkier production, a ripe bottom end afforded to Gianmarco Guerra’s bass parts, and on EP centrepiece ‘2K’ a full-bodied dive into the rap influence that Jordan’s cadences frequently hint at.
This one also gives a guest spot to Archangel, a QTPOC artist from Richmond: “I ain’t seen nobody look as good in a crop top!” enthuses Jordan of his co-vocalist. When hollered solo, Soul Glo’s lyrics touch on the racist dimensions of weed consumption in America – and how legalisation has merely exacerbated this – reliance on SSRIs and refusal to snitch (“When they brought me to the car I swear to god I didn’t tell”). It’s consistently verbally inventive yet topically direct, much as the music is off-centre and slippery yet stacked with riffs to get absolutely stupid to. A truly joyful release!
Twisted Thing’s debut 7-inch, nearly three years after their debut tape, comes via Corpus, a new label of indeterminate genre focus, but the Brooklyn group are deep in the district’s subterranean punk mire, with members racking up credits in bands like Anasazi, Pox and Terrorist. Vocalist Lulu Landolfi was also in The Prettiots, a Rough Trade-signed whimsical indie-folk duo noted for their ukulele-led arrangements, but forget you just read that because the five-song Sacred Cement is a 100% twee-free quasi-hardcore slapdown indicating there’s still life in the scene that formed around Toxic State Records, the Dripper World shop etc. Rumbling toms and an ignorant guitar tone render ‘Calamity Jane’ a choice gothcore opener; Sasha Stroud from Firewalker was on mixing duties for this record, and you can detect that band’s muggy, pummelling aesthetic on, especially, ‘(I Don’t Wanna Go It) Alone’, where NYHC at its most brutally tinny has an almost shoegazey blanket thrown over it. ‘Promise Of Penance’ closes out with a foreboding creep-chug, choice grunge-goth soloing by guitarist Nitaya Simms topping it all off.
When I started writing these columns, their contents were largely comprised of records I’d paid money for, from labels who didn’t really do PR lists, or know I existed. This still applies to a lot of these reviews, but I do get more downloadable promos these days, for which I’m very grateful. What I’m trying to say here is that my copy of …Makes Me Cum! (Muddguts), the debut release by Devil’s Dildo, does not include the marital aid in appropriate red and black offered to purchasers of the EP – which, at 14 minutes, answers a common complaint of mine about bands’ unwillingness to test the dimensions of a 7-inch.
The Devil’s Dildo duo, Summer Perlow and Austin Burkey, are resident in New York and represent the American half of the notionally Melbourne-based Soakie, whose class mini-LP I reviewed last year. Perlow, or Dee Dee Dildo if you feel inclined to get into the schtick (g’wan, live a little) changes up her ear-icepicking screech for a deeper, dramaturgical intonation, sounding like PiL-era Lydon gone fully deathrock on ‘Rotting Erotically’. Likewise, with Burkey – sorry, I mean Debbie Dildo – handling all the music, …Makes Me Cum! is a conflation of rattling budget-industrial drum machines and hysterical bass thunk, another addition to the latterday canon of machinist NYC OTT alongside L.O.T.I.O.N and Blu Anxiety. Deployment of anarcho glower across the EP, and vaguely indieish navelgazing on closing song ‘Silence Master’, makes this one for fans of anything from Nachthexen to Rubella Ballet.
More Melbourne rock action, although this lot actually live there (I think). Plaza (12XU) is the debut album by Voice Imitator, its four members having whooped it up in a wide array of bands previously. Accordingly, this is a rangy half hour and change: if the clammy drone-plus-spoken word of ‘A Constellation Of Contractors’ or ‘Deregulation Dreaming’ represented the typical sound of Plaza, I would find myself morally unable to tell you about it in a column that clings to the burst dinghy of ‘punk’ the musical style.
It’s cushty, though, because Voice Imitator also plate up Wipers/Metz powerchord-offs (‘Algorithmically Mandated’, an arresting LP opener), rakish post-Crisis snarl with an EBM undercarriage (‘Sweltering In Leather’, as fine a title as Leather Towel, one of drummer Per Byström’s other groups, is a band name), electrically fizzy headsdown psychpunk equal parts Gnod and Institute (‘Vetting The Best’; ‘Go Ahead, Catch’) and bad-dream muttering over one-note ATV/Hawkwind/Oh Sees sustainability (‘Vilification Brunch’). ‘Adult Performer’, the closing track, is afforded a bonus post-techno remix by Hemlock Ladder, Melbourne scene peers of VI, and to stick here geographically, Plaza pushes some of the same buttons – taut yet bombastic – as Constant Mongrel did on 2018 album Living In Excellence.
Hey Melbourne, I’m still fuckin’ here! (Christ, if only.) Two-thirds of Red Red Krovvy live in or near the city, the other in Sydney, though the band all grew up in Cairns, a tourist trap type place reliant on its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef. “Broken bottles on the beach / From the mouths of the dirty rich … THIS / IS WHY / THIS IS WHY I DESPISE THE RICH,” insists Ash Wyatt on ‘Despise The Rich’: track four of ten on Red Red Krovvy’s second album Managing (Helta Skelta), and the sort of song bands both aspire to, and fear, writing. It’s enough of a soaring uberpunk banger, primed for mass shoutalongs of its chorus (no doubt involving people of the plummier persuasion themselves, like all great class-warrior anthems), that you can envisage it defining them, to the detriment of the rest of this very good record.
It’s tough to pin Managing down to any strict style, era or scene of punk rock. RRK kick it at frantic, proto-HC pace on ‘Company Job’, the latest addition to the modern canon of sarcastic-voiced ‘employment punk’, and ‘I Just Got A Dog’, whose cod-canine chorus could most plausibly be a nod to Britpunk numpties The Jerks. Slowing their roll on ‘My Father’s Dream’, with its entertaining if superfluous psych-wobble outro, and ‘Despise The Rich’ itself, I reckon this’ll sink its talons in ya after a few plays.
Nada Es Sagrado is for sure not the first thing on the Iron Lung label I’ve reviewed, in fact I think it’s about the eleventeenth. Mentira are apparently the third ensemble from Kansas City to rock up herein, after Warm Bodies (who I think still exist but can’t promise) and Wet Ones (who appear to be keen to return to action, unless lockdown snuffed ‘em). I should’ve probably leeched onto Mentira’s 2018 single on Thrilling Living, seeing as that imprint too endures my crawling praise on the reg, but these 18 careering minutes will more than suffice.
There’s a big streak of Midwestern USHC oddness to the tunings and time changes on Nada, with the likes of ‘Dexmotivacin’ and ‘Esperanza’ sporting that Die Kreuzen/Tar Babies method of thrashness, but Mentira also lump hefty, 80s mainland Euro-style echo on Ricardo Flores’ vocals – which are all in Spanish, something you don’t often find with American hardcore bands outside the bigger cities. Flores also handles guitar, making for a ballistic dual strikeforce with the presumably pseudonymous Diyana Xross, and drummer Tony Manganaro is additionally credited with synth – not positive of all the gluey freakery here’s source instrumentation, TBH, but there’s a whole lot of gluey freakery.
Pus also do their thing en Español on their debut demo tape, which shouldn’t really be surprising as they’re from Peru. They feature the lion’s share of Lima’s Perra Vida, whose boozy punk orthodoxy I bigged up the Christmas roundup before last; PV singer Diana Matos is the departed member, and it’s a shame to see her go, but wherever Pus dug up replacement vocalist Parasito, who like the other four members favours a cheerful black metal-esque stage name, he is on a right mad one here. Distinctly more hardcore-centric than Perra Vida, these five songs are evasive about their inspirations – excepting ‘Eres Una Pose’, originally by 80s Peruvian punx Guerrilla Urbana. Otherwise, it’s a maelstrom of bloodthirsty toms, death-howl goth-metal guitar solos, a mix job that’s blown out but powerful, and – following various arguable nods to the Japanese/Swedish/Cleveland canon of old – tape closer ‘La Pus’ comes on like some evil, marauding son of Oi! (with a minute of creepy noises at the end).
Another cassette, and with three songs in under six minutes probably not enough tape to mummify a hamster, yet Golpe from Milan smuggles grand reserves of mean muggin’ and yobbish tirades against the arseholes into that narrow space. Released by US label Sorry State, though available from the Golpe bandcamp at the time of writing, this is billed as a promo for an LP due later in 2021, again on Sorry State. Golpe is in fact a person, not a band: Tadzio Pederzolli plays everything on here, having previously served in several actual groups (vaguely recall Holy getting pushed on me maybe a decade ago), so I guess you could invoke Tom Pimlott’s Violent Reaction or Bryan Suddaby’s Rat Cage as similar one-dude concepts in the field of no-shit stompcore. There isn’t a slow moment on here, or a subpar one really, although one doesn’t get the impression that Golpe is big on variety – ‘Sei La Tua Prigione’, ‘Nato Colpevole’ and ‘Propaganda’ all chunter along at turbo-Oi! Negative Approach/86 Mentality kinda pace, with gigantic riffs and tastefully restrained vocal FX. Pederzolli clearly knows this niche like the back of his fist, mind, so fuck it, gimme a whole album.
It’s always nice when the first Straight Hedge of the year is crawling with spicy fresh new UK bands, but because the UK is a miserable failed state propped up by spite and ready meals, there aren’t any. I can however offer you the latest album (some might say debut album, given that at 25 minutes it’s longer than their two previous ones combined) by Lancastrian grindcore experimentalists Evisorax. Ascension Catalyst has been out digitally since the spring, but recently pressed to vinyl by 7 Degrees, and it’s a damn fine, techy-not-wanky blizzard of blasts and burden.
Its first and last songs are the longest and noisiest outliers. ‘Gayatri’ opens bearing static gurgle and what sounds like a news broadcast, vocalist John White presently entering with his obligatory wounded shriek as the song builds through sludgy riffs and, finally, 20 seconds of lightning grind. Seven-minute closer ‘Irkalla’ is driven by its on-edge bassline for long segments, but explodes into Discordance Axis-worthy jazzgrind chaos in due course. In between are 13 textbook-yet-not ragers averaging about a minute each and collectively nailing this style to the wall with splattering precision. I co-promoted an Evisorax gig in 2011 – pretty sure they were good, but happened to be tour support for Wormrot, hands down the most impressive grind band I’ve witnessed live – at which point they already had several years of toil behind them. Fair to call Evisorax veterans by now, so medal ‘em up!
