Album Review: Ruckus - Ruckus

It's very rare to hear a band with a barrel-aged Bowery punk vintage sound these days- so rare that I frankly thought this was a recovered session tape from an early In the Red co-signed troop of slag-heads attempting one last pull off an already entirely ashed career. But would you believe this is really a bunch of NYC-by-way-of-Boston hardcore dudes attempting to rekindle the city's roots with little more than a bad attitude, a handful of hacksaw riffs, and a foggy memory of a shadow world of culture-rich slums slicked over and streamlined into dull strips of social mausoleums comprised of vacant tax-write-offs, tourist traps, and vintage-upcycling boutiques (also existing primarily for tax purposes). Ruckus's 12" self-titled is entirely decoupled from the city that is, as a revelation of what was, a draft of stale beer with a couple of snipes floating in it, that while bearing no nutritional value, pulls the mind down a drift of bitter nostalgia to float down the gutter of good tidings like a stream of sick, summoned by the galling purge of last night's libations. An unrestrained and hardy gamble of half-recollected depositions from a rash, degenerate mingling that started with a bottle of aberrant abandon, a hitched ride downtown, and a determined lack of remorse, with the premeditated ambition to spend down every dime in your pocket just to see what the night will furnish in return. It's like the soundtrack to some second-hand studio exploitation flick, where misrule is the only rule at an urban high school, the water fountains are filled kegs of lite beer, the principal is in deep debt to the mob, nerds run DARPA-funded psychological experiments on classroom pets, and a ragtag crew of punks keep the authorities in line- a story of distinguished debauchery, grainy lo-fi affairs, and kicking school dances turned riot that culminates with the captain of the football team coming out as gay, the head cheerleader hooking up with a 6-foot NIMH rat, and the whole school having an orgy on the quad before the army calls in an airstrike and the credits roll. The End...? A burnt hand punches through the still-burning limestone and concrete rubble of the flattened former learning institution, gripping a still partially intact Gibson Flying V just before the final fade-out. Maybe not... But you'll never know. The ushers are clearing the theater seats of anyone who didn't pay for the double feature (next showing Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer), and you've gotta mosey. The sequels will all be direct-to-video and/or be lost in a warehouse fire. But man, that soundtrack will live on in your head forever, an amp-fed Ruckus whose resounding echo can't be suppressed by the temperance of time, or your real life's demands for moderation. Remember, it's always hot in the city, and if you know you're way, you can always tag along on a night cruise through these steaming, love-sick streets in search of satisfaction.

Point blank in your ear baby! (Under The Gun Records)

Interview: Sallow Moth

You might think you're busy. You might think you have a lot going on. You might even think you're a productive person. But you're a couch-rooted potato compared to Garry Brents. Garry has so many projects that I'm not even sure I could name them all with any level of confidence and accuracy, even with his Metal Archives page open in a tab in front of me. On the bright side, it doesn't really matter where you enter his repertoire; you're likely going to find something boundary-pushing and tending toward ecstasis- literally out of this world- which actually brings us to one of his more recent releases, Hydrophilous Brood for the project Sallow Moth, an exploration of alien planets and extraterrestrial life in an Outer Limits-esque anthology centered on the powers of a cryptic object that can transport and transform living things in alarming and confounding ways, rendering the mundane enigmatic, and the eldritch inevitable. I attempted to interview Garry to better understand the mysteries of his creation, and I made some progress, but we mostly nerded out over card games and John Carpenter films. Take it for what you will. Our conversation is below:

Hydrophilous Brood is out on Willowtip Records. 

Album Review: Hong Kong Fuck You - 1978 - 1981

                         

The first time I saw Weekend Nachos was at a shitty bar on the Southeast side of the City, near the port where international freighters offload all the foreign-sourced iron ore, grain, and cement, and other stuff that keeps the City's industry turning. Not a lot of drugs though- that's really more O'Hare's business- but you wouldn't know it by how raw the strip of humanity that crusts around the rim of that mooring strip of mercantilism is- boarded-up bungalows, barred-up liquor stores, and burnt-out blade-wielding courtesans as far as the eye can cast its gaze- not that you could see much in the haze and dusky smog of that late November night. The club was a classic shitcan, it was both narrow and long, and there felt a lot like drinking inside of a cardboard refrigerator box, which, wouldn't you know, there were plenty of out in the parking lot since a bunch of bums had moved in and claimed it as their turf. Not Monday Appetizer's set was pretty short, as I recall, as this was before they had officially released Unforgivable, and most of their material was still in the demo phase- they were also still working their way through that awkward early Stryper, To Hell with the Devil phase, which was pretty rough going, so the whole thing was about as thrilling as a shot of Malört poured directly down your ass crack.

So, anyway, Burrito Guts Sunday wraps up, and the next band is setting up, but really just arguing with the sound guy, and all of a sudden there is this commotion from the back of the club and a lot of smoke. They let you light your sin sticks in bars then, so the decreased air quality really wasn't that noticeable at first; that is, until you could feel the sear of the blaze spreading across the booze-soaked walls on your flushed cheek and bare scalp. Somehow, a half dozen other greasy leather rats and I squeezed out of the gasifying gallery of that landlogged sinking ship, only to find ourselves out of the literal fire and into the central sizzle of a backstreet skirmish's frying pan. At some point during Week's End Tacos on Tostitos' set, someone in the parking lot got shorted a 5th of hooch, and that sparked an ECW-style a-brawlin', and then the paying customers of the club started cheering on and instigating the brawlin' bums, and before you know it someone touched a lit cigarette to the drapes of the old tinderbox and the accumulated spillage of alcohol and alcohol-infused tears over years of neglect sent that tinderbox up in a blaze so high it singed God's nose hairs. Now I'm more of a lover than a fighter in these types of situations, and since no one looked like they were in the mood to make out, I embarked on a series of ducking and weaving, and managed to make my way through the melee to my car- reaching it just in time to witness one man drive another man's head through my windshield... I had a lot to think about as I watched the highway stretch out before me in the golden light of morning, through the new skull-shaped aperture punctured through my front window and the streams of drying human blood that glossed it with a rosy hue.* Maybe it was the human viscera clinging to the chips of shattered glass that encircled my sightline that filled me with a certain naive optimism, but for the briefest moment, I wondered what it would be like to start over- someplace warm, someplace welcoming, someplace where I could hold a chalice of overflowing tequila in one hand and a ripe and ready-to-ravage avocado in the other- a place I could sling my arm around the first wide-hipped, dimpled-cheeked woman I met, and call her my wife. A place like Tijuana!

Of course, had I made the mission that my imagination proposed in that moment of lamentable, grey-lighted daybreak, I'd probably end up getting my ass kicked by Christian Hell of Hong Kong Fuck You at some point for showing up in his City unannounced and then overstaying my tourist visa... or maybe because I spilled a drink on him or something... ordered extra guac with my meal someplace a friend of his works and then left without tipping, I don't know... The point is, I don't know the when/how/why it would happen, I just know IT WOULD HAPPEN, because he's the lead singer (drummer/bassist/el hefe) of a powerviolence band, and you just KNOW he's angling to butcher an American-bred, pasture-raised lummox such as myself while perfecting his lop sao or some signature variety of hook kick. I'm satisfied to admire his work from afar while retaining my face's current skeletal structure up here in the frigid north of the Midwest.

And admire it I can! Their three-bass, one-kit, and no-common-sense approach to grind and hardcore is truly something out of a music theorist's nightmare- crude, insolent, and indomitably groovy, despite their perilous tendency to up the velocity. They can punch through a room full of pink, peachy eardrums in half the time it would take a bubble of gum blown to the size of an average human auricle. The group was quite prolific during the lockdown but has downshifted the manic pace of their output in recent years, spinning up their nerve only periodically to sonically bash the occasional Nazi or skinhead with a single or two before absconding back to the shadows. Their latest release, 1978-1981, shows they still have a riotous fire burning in their chests, though- a three-song EP of call-and-crush, death-ball volleys, and wild animalist fury, feeling both ferally industrial in its relentless concussive zeal, and competently chaotic in its equipoise of erratic exultation of excessive energy and general suppression of restraint, wrapping the three-chamber, savage sortie with a suitably soused send-up of "Seeing Red," a Minor Threat cover. In fact, all three songs here are covers- the first track being a Gang Green song, and the second originally having been done by The Middle Class- but as you'd expect HHFU puts enough of their own scabby spin on these ugly little dandies that you'd be forgiven for not picking up on this fact on the first listen. One final thing that I appreciate about this particular release is the compressed, cavernous quality of the production, which makes these tracks sound like they were recorded in one take from inside an oil drum with an active fire burning in its center, something that is very reminiscent of the era that these songs are from, especially a lot of early GBH singles and the like. What else is there to say about HHFU before someone points out that it'll probably take you several times longer to read this review than to listen to the entire album it's discussing (total runtime, just over three minutes)... I like that they use Peko-chan on the cover (as well as a bunch of other covers for their albums). It's funny. Even if we all know killing, maiming, and listening to harsh, grating noises aren't things Peko-chan is canonically a fan of, it's still very amusing to me. That makes it even MORE amusing, to be honest.

* To be clear, NONE of this actually happened to me. This is a bit inspired by an anecdote John McEntee of Incantation tells in Jason Netherton's Extremity Retained. 

Album Review: septemberistheonlytimeidontthinkofyou - scars like kimberly

Just to flip the script a bit, I planned to write about scars like kimberly back in September. "Like, yeah, it's September, and guess what, I'm thinking of you!* What are you going to do about it, baby?" Being on the road all that month, though, left me with about as wide a gap in my schedule for writing as the shoulder of an overpass overlooking the Dan Ryan- so, about the width of a DoorDash cyclist's mustache, and then I'm roadkill. Not a lot of margin to mess around, is what I'm saying. Fine, fair. No complaints. Pour out the whine; it's cider season anyway. I'm not here to mess around, after all, and neither is septemberistheonlytimeidontthinkofyou! Shades of light, shades of dark, mixing and mingling, opposing and dependent, painting portraits of pain and regret, dodging dilution while remaining virtuosically permeable, pungent. Raw emotion, welling as if to replenish the empty dissonance of an abandoned opera house and displace the stale air of its interior with stratified sheets of tears tinted with the charcoal tincture of crumbling black eyeliner. Scraping and screaming like a skateboard deck grinding off the rust-dusted rim of a dumpster and into the windshield of a parked suburban Subaru while its operator is elsewhere purchasing kneepads for their preteen pest's intramural pastime- the immediacy of their blend of mall screamo and metal melocore is instantaneous, clangorous, and intrusive, even if its impact on you isn't fully cognized until you've had a talk with your insurance broker. Like Saosin shaved into helical streamers of unpolished steely corrugate and woven into a chainmail wailing shroud, or Pierce the Veil applying a splash of lip gloss at the end of a glowing-hot brand which a witless bystander attempts to smother with a lap of acetone- it's resiliently melancholy and iridescent in execution- a rebirth through the carnage of cesarean, dragged from the womb through still-open wounds carved in past selves. Needless to say, I will be thinking of this one tomorrow, the day after, and every day, well into the next year, and all the way to next September (or however long it takes them to conjure its sonic next of ki(m)n).

* "You" being... well, just keep reading... or look at the title of the review. Whatever!

Album Review: L'epee - Diabolique

L’Epee is hard-pop psychedelic* project formed by Anton Newcombe of Brian Jonestown Massacre and actress and songbird Emmanuelle Seigner, backed by Lionel and Marie Liminana of The Liminanas (whose last album Anton produced). Their only LP, Diabolique, is named after the 1968 cult suspense thriller by Mario Bava, Danger: Diabolik. With lyrics alternating between French and English, the band traces a timeless thread of jangly hypnotic affected pop through the LSD soaked 60’s up through the psyche revival of the 90’s and beyond, dredging up the bones of Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, Melody’s Echo Chamber, and everything in between. A great place to start is the tight and scintillating “Dreams” with its slippery rhythms, curling melodies, and heart-stopping beat. “Une Lune Étrange” is similarly striking while landing closer to a BJM a-side in execution. “Springfield 61” is a charming folk-pop interlude complete with chiming church bells, while “Last Picture Show” wraps things up with a foreboding Velvet-indebted, tension-ramping rhythmic build cut with sweeping pastiches of reverb. Pierce the doors of perception with the sabor of Damocles as the cool breath of a quietus flows through one's fingers, grasping the fateful steel in a determined trust, rending the shroud behind which the soul interned is revealed to the prism of discernment in a glacial parapet of fathomless splendor.

A Record(s) is the most basic and common type of DNS record that maps a domain name or subdomain directly to an IPv4 address. To learn more, please say into the microphone, "I'd like to learn more."**

* Which I recently learned literally means "mind-manifesting" from a very strange place. And if I told you where, you'd agree, it was a very odd place to intersect with such information indeed. And now you may ask, "Did he hear this from Anton himself?" The answer to which is- no. No, I didn't. Of course not. My life's not THAT interesting, c'mon.
** Aton's label, and the one that released this record, is called 'A Records.' And if you try to look it up in a search engine, it will get extremely confused, and I suspect that this is intentional.

Album Review: 行方不明者リスト- セカイ系症候群末期患者へ

If you died today, as in the next 30 minutes, how long would it take for the wider functioning society to notice? An hour, a day or two, a week... longer even... Long enough for your spirit to be absorbed into the wallpaper in your bedroom or diffuse into the fibers of the carpet under your bed—roving like an air bubble trapped below the skin like a migrating cyst of lonely contrition. Just another missing person, only now permanently, consigned by fate to exile in the vestibule entresol of the abyss, still able to view the plane you sweat, and bled, and cried in all those years from the recesses of tenebrous hovels and through the veil of still night as it pools, suffusing spaces the sun has quit, but unable to make one's presence known or affect the events that transpire before you. Very much like life, a pale shade, an outline with a deep pitted center several yards deep, absence in essence, imposed now rather than elected. Had you known that the delineation between existence and expiration was so subtle, would that have made a difference? Maybe you'd simply have made more noise while you had the chance. Been more willing to be mistaken for a yanari during your short career as a human specimen. Pipped up, even if it meant getting pushed out as a nuisance. Maybe you would have cut an album like 行方不明者リスト. A wire-haired, skittish sonic-beast thriving in the underbrush of neglect and imbalance of the humors- a whisper in an empty house, a din of supple footsteps racing down the hall blinded by dusk and cobwebs, the echo of an airless sigh- panicked, maze-bolting chords, barely setting soul to soil before propelling into the next phase of a nimble rebound, pruning the tips of its fingers to write scarlet poetry on the interior vessels of a condemned cadaver. Could you find it in you to make such a statement? Or maybe you'd be even braver... venturing into the wilderness of the world, baring your heart to the one you were meant to love, and project the light of your union into the sky like a blazing-hot saber, fresh from the forge, to cleave the threat of an incoming extinction-inducing meteor into a manageable grist of marbles... Or maybe you'd remain the same breed of inert, domestic effigy you've always been- heart too big, eyes too wide, mind too busy, mouth too small. Another victim of intoxicating delusions and the torpor of passivity, lulled by stories, projections, and fear into a cradle of self-expulsion. セカイ系症候群末期患者へ was made for you, but I doubt it will make a difference in the end. Prove me wrong.

Interview: Defeated Sanity

 

The world is a crazy fucking place, and sometimes the only thing that seems to make roughly any kind of sense in it is music. Thankfully, we have German technical death titans like Defeated Sanity to match the chaos of this living, calamitous panorama of a planet, manning the lighthouse of lucidity with their ever-daring quest to breach the farthest meridian of abstruse fury. I was able to catch up with the second most senior member of the band, Jacob Schmidt, just before he took the stage at Reggies in Chicago on their latest tour with Revocation. Jacob has a pretty insane story from this most recent cross-country jaunt and you can hear it as well as other points of intrigue by checking out our conversation. 

Defeated Sanity is currently on tour in support of their latest LP Chronicles of Lunacy out on Season of Mist. You can pick up tickets on their website (I think they still have two dates left so if you miss it you'll have to wait until their next record drops to see them tour the states again)!