“Nothing good can ever survive! It dies! It dies!” Fans of levity, mirth, goofy behaviour, comedy hats with little propellors on… your desires have been ignored this month in favour of ten frowning bales of intemperate earslaughter. Some people out there call that fun! And I’m betting the house on you being one of them.
The second album by Subdued from London, released on La Vida Es Un Mus four years after the first one, is titled Abattoir and has lyrics about actual abattoirs. It has even more lyrics about death, piss and blood (most of these songs mention blood), as well as the sentiment at the beginning of the last paragraph, because Subdued are the most perfectly executed contemporary anarcho punk band in, I’m going to say it, the world. Their type of anarcho is the stuff that manifested from the mid-1980s onwards which had fuckoff-sized riffs, shrieky solos and the leaching influence of Discharge, foreign hardcore and fast (or slow) heavy metal.
The four-piece also bat their eyelashes at goth/deathrock at times: ‘Who Dies If England Lives’, a title Subdued correctly realised was good enough to use for a stage banner, is a black-eyed drain-swirler powered by Nicky Rat’s martial drums and given identity by Jack Sabbat’s dropped-aitch vocal soapboxing. ‘Abattoir’ the song has a tense chorus pedal-y intro from guitarist Ralph Simmonds – the closest the band come to breaking character, in that it reminds me of Nirvana as much as anything – and proceeds at a dragging tempo that accounts for much of the sinister feel. ‘Finish’ and ‘Nothing Good Survives’, conversely, are chestbursting sprints with the tempo and stinging tone of US hardcore, and amidst all of this the bass playing of Jyoti Wariyar is a constant in a very real sense: I’d assume the waveform of it to be the type of wall you can see from outer space. Appropriate business for an immense release.
Although the Brighton scenefrom which Imposter sprung seven years ago remains strong, pretty much all the bands in their immediate family tree have since called it a day. Moreover, Imposter themselves are a fairly different beast to the one heard on that 2017 demo, which I bought at the time and didn’t get a huge amount from even as a fan of minute-long Oi!-tinged hooligan hardcore. Most obviously, on spending time with debut LP Oblivion Opens (Quality Control), the four Imposter musicians have got a taste and/or aptitude for metal, drenching these eleven songs in axe-chucking chug and sword-sharpening harmonic squeal. Rory O’Neill’s voice has also accrued a greater barbarian character, sounding like he’s itching to sack Carthage rather than get in a fight outside a takeaway.
With intros that sometimes approach the 60-second mark on their own and a smart way of dictating the mood via shifts in tempo, Oblivion Opens carries hallmarks of blackened punk (thinking of a really good set I saw, the week before writing this, by Final Dose from London), Power Trip and other crossover thrash revivalists, Stingray’s Fortress Britain LP and the knowingly demonic metallic hardcore of Gehenna. Save for an interlude – near the end of the album, slightly oddly – which seems to gun for a misty ‘RPG soundtrack’ vibe, and the outro to ‘The Cell Bound’ sampling ‘Prison Trilogy’ by Joan Baez for no obvious reason, the Imposter of 2024 are brutish, maximalist and evocative of such derring-do that the long-contentious case for injecting hardcore with metal feels inarguable during Oblivion Opens’ runtime.
Here’s a release that also goes the ‘hardcore, but with a relentless barrage of metal leads’ route, while demonstrating that variety is possible even within these descriptive parameters. It’s a self-titled LP by Austin’s Peace Decay, released by Beach Impediment and following up a six-song debut from 2022. It opens friskily enough with ‘Peace Decay’ (we love a ‘band, album and song are all called the same thing’ situation, don’t we folks) and its lateish-80s Poison Idea grandstanding; when Dexter and Patrick, the band’s two guitarists, lock horns it’s so mutually beneficial as to be almost homoerotic. And how Maidenlike is the melody that introduces ‘Lights Out, Hell In’?
Not dug up anything specifically confirming Peace Decay’s influences, but my semi-assumption is that these include the strain of Japanese hardcore known as ‘Burning Spirits’ and replete with outrageous metal solos. There’s also the suggestion of American crust bands like Tragedy who are/were fond of the same thing, and with the five members having properly done their time in the Texan HC trenches (drummer Chris Pfeffer co-founded Scorched Earth Policy in the early 90s), it seems fair to imagine that as an inspiration in itself. A couple of Peace Decay’s ten songs, namely ‘First Order’ and ‘Security By Sacrifice’, are sufficiently straight-ahead as to (inadvertently?) echo the wheedliest fringe of skatepunk/melodic hardcore, but overall this is high grade painted jacket/patchwork jeans music, as opposed to wallet chain on big shorts.
Recall seeing Vancouver band Bootlicker play in 2022 and having them ‘click’ with me for the first time; they also came off like more a cleancut 80s melodic hardcore band than their feral, bare-brick recordings suggested. That includes 1000 Yd. Stare (Static Shock/Neon Taste), their second studio album – polish? Eeh, they can’t have flicked a duster round the place in years. Their guitars jangle, certainly, but in a migraine-inducing sense – like if campanology was an extreme sport – rather than a wistful indie pop one. Lewis Podlubny handles them as well as the vocals on this release (Bootlicker are a five-piece live band but their recordings seem to feature whoever’s available) and comes off like a gum-chewing hoser contracting laryngitis from Discharge’s Cal Morris.
‘State Property’, 1000 Yd. Stare’s opening song, is probably its slowest, and we’re speaking in incremental terms here: Bootlicker don’t ‘do’ self-indulgence of any stripe, really, so you don’t get guitar solos but you do get drums-only invitations to mosh, with ‘On All Fours’ harbouring an especially potent example. Podlubny isn’t pulling up too many trees as a wordsmith, I don’t think, but has a golden ear for choosing phrase combinations that hit just right in his voice, over this music.
From Novato, California comes a debut LP of misanthropic delay pedal hardcore by Late Shift, which started life as a solo project by Patrick Baxter of Spam Caller and has now doubled in size by virtue of Patrick getting someone called Alex in to play drums. Perception Is Reality is co-released by Phage Tapes (who I repped in my other tQ column last month, thanks to them also having a taste for Mancunian industrial techno) and Damien, and like the Late Shift demo and previous Spam Caller tapes has some neato sleeve art by Mark McCoy.
The music and general vibe on display here also have a touch of the McCoy about them, which is to say the various bands he plays in and/or releases on his Youth Attack label. Bellicose and claustrophobic, with lyrics which point the finger at Baxter’s circle of acquaintances and his own mirror in equal measure (if you keep encountering shitheads, clowns, vampires etc in your life, maybe these are your people?), ‘Hit The Deck’ starts the album off with an intro that could be Swiz or somesuch 35-year-old band, but veers closer to powerviolence by the end of the song. There’s a tad more musicianship on Perception Is Reality than was evident on the Late Shift demo, mainly coming through in the guitar textures on songs like ‘You Are Disposable’, but this in no way dilutes the curt impact of this strong release from USHC’s dank corners.
Slobbery words about Australia’s Extortion,21st-century standard-bearers for fast hardcore punk, are well overdue in Straight Hedge, but they’ve hardly released anything new since the early 2010s so I’ll be kind to myself. However, after a 2022 comeback, Seething, shovelled 15 songs onto a 7-inch, the Melbourne band return with Threats (Iron Lung), and the precise same songs/format ratio. (‘Shoplift’, an instrumental and comfortably the longest track at 80 seconds, is also its most superfluous.)
Common is the band who, long into their career, tell the press corps how their new record is their heaviest, hardest, strongest one yet, better than the one(s) which built their profile in fact. And we all roll our eyes a bit, give it seven out of ten and move on. So when it turns out that the band are not chatting breeze and after (in this case) 20 years are more raging than ever, damn it feels good! Threats has a thick, granite-hewn guitar tone, 250mph drums which avoid blastbeats or artificial-sounding triggers, and placed-to-detonate incidents of slowness, notably ‘But Nobody’s Home’. The Iron Lung guys rarely deign to release music that bears much resemblance to their own band, so when it happens you know it’s going to bang. Which brings us to…
…the third release on Iron Lung by Brain Tourniquet, a split 7-inch with Deliriant Nerve. Featuring ten and six songs respectively by these two Washington DC bands, this time out there are most certainly blastbeats, especially on the DN side. To address matters alphabetically, though, BT would give any band palpitations about sounding puny, so ceaseless is their high-alert blizzard – an amalgam of proto-powerviolence (notably Infest), fast 80s hardcore (maybe Void) and maybe a dusting of grindcore (hold that thought), it’s all very methodical, in its own way, but also in the way some of the most devastating actions are.
Distinctions between subgenres can often feel largely vibes-based to the less initiated, and the best explanation of the difference between powerviolence and grindcore I ever found was, “you’ll know it when you hear it”. Annoying in its truth! Deliriant Nerve and Brain Tourniquet share a member, drummer Aiden Angelo, and his playing style is a big part of what makes one band one thing and the other the other. There’s also Charlie Flack’s death metal-influenced vocal growl and the trio’s propensity to move from a chugging gallop to devastating thrash-speed, with the pimply elan of late-80s Napalm Death. Both these bands will have just played grinders-delight Czech fest Obscene Extreme when this column is published – colour me envious.
Leeds-based tape label Brainrotter has been a highly efficient production line this spring, with five releases within a few weeks of each other (three currently for sale online). I’ve singled out the self-titled tape by local debutants Tormented Imp, partly so I can reuse the description “lateish-80s Poison Idea grandstanding” from earlier in this column. As Tormented Imp are named after a song from that era by that titanic Portland band, to not deliver on this front would constitute flagrant false advertising, but they go about their biz a little differently to Peace Decay all the same, ramping up the low-end barrage a la Swedish käng punk and, when they do throw in a solo, giving little impression of having ever bought guitar mags with Steve Harris on the cover. With that said, ‘Ur Done’ verges on crossover thrash so it’s not like this band are metal-agnostic, and vocalist Jake Sainty, also a member of The Reflecting Skin, leans into the ‘gibbering madman’ role like a seasoned pro.
Mostly or entirely in their late teens, Narkotyk arealso from Leeds and bustin’ out with an eponymous demo tape (released via Scottish label Pogo Til You Drop), which I picked up on one of their recent tour dates with Motive. The two bands share various members and a fair bit of musical common cause; neither band gave the impression of conserving energy, but Narkotyk seriously go for it, with the most oppressively fucked guitar sound I encountered in a busy month of gig attendance – and, it turns out, among July’s list of Straight Hedge subjects too. Total skull-throbbing post-Disclose noise punk abomination with moments where you marvel at how this isn’t all shattering under the pressure: the bass is pretty revolting, too, though I don’t think I could distinguish most of it in the mix. Heck, I’m not certain which bits are drums a lot of the time. Vocalist Cole Dunnachie is never anything more or less than a fantastic screamin’ drongo, and in chuntering about “spiky leather hotties” on ‘Blame’ may have provided the single occurrence of frivolity this month. Not that I’m saying spiky leather hotties shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Weo started playing live nearly five years ago, released two songs on a benefit tape in 2020, disappeared, started playing again in late 2023 and have just released their first demo. A moderately clandestine operation – master of mastering Will Killingsworth gets his credit on the inlay for making these seven songs sound good, but no other personnel is listed – it does however seem that Weo’s revival goes hand in hand with that of One Hand Clapping, a DIY collective based in Shrewsbury. This cassette follows one by Half Brick from the turn of the year; I’m going to guess both bands share members, and more certainly a shit-fi sensibility, but Weo’s delivery colours outside the lines more wilfully. Gurning hardcore that drives a quad bike through the supposed geek/yob dichotomy, fretboard and whammy bar are both given a right seeing to during these eleven minutes. When they play slow I think about writing ‘a faster Flipper’, when they’re faster ‘a slower Bootlicker’, and while being unsure if either of those really get to the kernel of why Weo are ace… they are ace.
