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 landlocked 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.
