Hardcore runs in cycles. Constantly in creative motion. You'd think this would tire it out, suck the air from its tires, and leave it languishing, fatigued and broken on cinders eventually, but somehow the laws of physics and the inevitability of decay don't apply to the hardened essence of this enduring style of underground music, which if nothing else, seems to always thrive on the cutting edge of chaos as it teeters on the precipice of entropy. The clearest example of the genre's various vacillations is the turnover from tough-guy takedown to frank, inflected introspection, illustrated starkly by the transformative revolution from 108 to Texas Is the Reason. But by the time that the big hardcore rally crested between 2018-2020, both of these styles had more or less come to exist coextensively and simultaneously in symbiosis, culminating in the success of a group like Turnstile, who while still claimed by many in hardcore (and describe themselves that way as well) have quite simply empirically evolved into the world's loudest and rowdiest pop band. Title Fight is considered canon alongside Inside Out and Turning Point in a world where a band like Knocked Loose can be the musical guest of a tragically untalented skinsuit's network talk show- a move that would have flat-out ended their career in decades past- what am I to make of these irreducibly, and often unacknowledged tensions, where there are clear oscillations, but no enounced ebb and flow? It feels like it should be my job to decipher these headwinds, but really I'm just thankful that this strange state of suspended demarcation can produce a band like girlsbeinggirls, a group with a mid-'00s electronicore name, but who sound like a pageninetynine after surviving a Botch'd trephination, or fallingwithscissors with, well, a pair of scissors forcibly making inroads towards their trachea. Definitionally, these guys are without many fucks to give, with song titles like "Feeling Down (Question Mark) Call 1-800-TALKSHIT," "Menthol Meltdown Take Me to the Freak Bar," and "Prohibition in the Trap House Kitchen," evidently taking their naming conventions from brain-sweat-soaked rambling of a Gibby Haynes psilocybin-induced psychic episode, as opposed to the typical beefs and brooding pissing matches that typify the genre. But the fun doesn't stop there either, girls -oh no- "IDFMAHAMEASMFSIWK" (real title) sounds like a Mouthbreather gasping for air as a spew of bitter tidings wells up in their throat and spills out between their infected fangs, while "There's a Problem at the Wig Factory Are We Nair Yet" sizzles in an acrid stew of fumes uncertain if it should actualize as a deathgrind scourge or plasticize into a powerviolence push and plunder with a side of Southern hospitality on the deep-fried, cancer-culturing skids. "(P)harmacy" is a skin-broth of oily, elastic pulses, with a numbing texture of foaming toxic adverse corollaries complemented by a harsh, chalky aftertaste, numbing you mercifully before "Are You Out of Chicken and the Parm?" performs a mathy, slam strut over your spine, dislodging and rearranging the vertebrae into a punished pearly cobblestone trail and rachialgia mosaic, making the thick and sassy groove of "No Pad Thai… Kick Rocks (36 Dollars a Bottle)" feel all the more oppressive when it lands on the shattered remains of your formerly functional cadaver. A whirlpool of caustic angst without shallows of safe harbors. It seems to break all the rules while forgetting why the rules were there in the first place. Sugar and spice, thumbtacks and vice, listen to girlsbeinggirls, they're ever so nice (not)!
Flexible, fillable, flammable (Wax Vessel).
