I'm doing something a little different tonight. Allow me to explain. Something that used to bug me before I started writing reviews was how flat-out dismissive writers could be of the bands they cover. The phrase "nothing new here" was dropped a lot when a band was identified as playing in an established style and it would completely piss me off. Like, why are you writing about a band if you have nothing to say about them? This always struck me as a problem with the writer rather than the artist they were writing about. Because the writer is acting like their lack of understanding, imagination, and perspective was the band's problem and not theirs. There are mercifully fewer of these now than there used to be, but I'll still read a review that basically implies that all hardcore/death metal/ black metal sounds the same, and it never fails to make me mad. So I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to compare two bands with very similar styles and explain how different they are, and why that matters. If you think this is a waste of time- it is not. And I think that opinion says a lot more about you than you realize.
80HD is a hardcore band out of Brooklyn, NYC. They don't sound anything like Madball, though. They actually play in a style that I find more common in college towns and minor-metro areas out in the hinterlands. Places like Louisville, Nashville's suburbs, or DeKalb. By which I mean they play a loose and noisy style of punk that is reminiscent of, and clearly inspired by, classic d-beat and '80s Japanese hardcore. Bands like this never quite stay in the pocket of their influences though. A fact which always plays to their benefit. 80HD released their 2021 Demo back in April and the record fizzles and burns like a bottle rocket fired directly down your throat. There are some straightforward RAWK guitars on this baby that help to put grit beneath its treads and gives the whole sweaty, psychotic, slip and slash affair on its feet and moving with a red-eyed momentum. Delivering one headbutt to your gut after another for a total of six and a half minutes. 80HD sounds like Warthog on a bad day, when they've been self-medicating with a cocktail of paint-thinner and discontinued pesticides. Sloppy, sorted, and sensationally weird.
Impede is also a hardcore band whose sound is heavily inspired by '80s Japanese hardcore. Like 80HD they also prefer very loose grooves and rough production. Unlike 80HD, they are far more spot in capturing the sounds of their influences, which include unhinged, d-beat Italian groups like Negazone as well as black metal that rides the line between the first and second wave. On the Australian group's Digital Hell, serrated speed metal grooves press forward with relentless resolve, cutting a wake through the noise feedback into which a ferociously vicious vocal performance invades, a wrenching howl that emerges somewhere between Fugu of Gauze and Tom G Warrior during his Hellhammer days. The band also has a flair for the dramatic, which is extremely rare in the world of Japanese hardcore influenced bands. This maudlin verve manifests in the form of eerie interludes and intros that seem like they might be a better fit for a death rock record, but which are very effective when combined with Impede's overall approach, and which gives Digital Hell a cryptic and unsettling ambiance.
Both 80HD and Impede are Japenese inspired hardcore bands from English-speaking countries, but each represents a dramatically different approach. 80HD takes the rough framework of music that inspires them and uses it to feel out their own way of expressing themselves. It's looser, less constrained, and more willing to include elements from the milieu of underground Americana, like hard rock and power-pop, with just a hint of SSD. Again, this is a band that sounds wild that they should be from Nebraska or something. Someplace where they could have a lot of open space to let their anger out. Impede is similar in this respect, in that they also sound like they have a lot of rage they need to regurgitate. In contrast to their yankee counterparts, Impede is more studious in their adoption of influences, finding routes to individual expression through strange combinations, synthesizing Japanese and black metal vocal work and integrating it with speed metal, d-beat, and gothic atmospherics.
Similar starting points. Drastically different outcomes. Each is exciting and fearsomely bedeviling in their own right.
