>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Everyone has at least a few bands that they just don’t get along with. For me, one such band is The Ataris - whether it’s fair or not I have a long-standing perception of the band as being far too wishy-washy for my tastes, and far too stuck in a rut of only writing songs about how fucking sad they are. If you’re going to do that, at least have a sense of humour or rock out about it, eh? Like The Ergs? In fact, my favourite Ataris song is actually ‘Song For a Mixtape’, because it has a Descendents sample at the beginning (‘Silly Girl’, if you’ve not heard it).

Another such band is A New Found Glory, who – if I’ve got my banal genre stickers the right way up – qualify as both a mallcore pop-punk group and the progenitors of something that grew up to be called easycore, at least until people got bored with the label. ANFG never resonated with me; although I dug a lot of those driving melodies and anthemic sensibilities I found the slick sound a little suspicious and the band’s image too goofy to take seriously (yes, I know that is pretty much the point).

Although it’s patently obvious that this is so I should emphasise that the above is wholly subjective, and I really have no objection to people disagreeing with me or even outright saying I’m wrong, even though I’m not. This is all just a roundabout way of establishing my prejudices before I drop the now blatant bombshell that I don’t dig Handguns mini-album Don’t Bite Your Tongue. For my money ANFG and the Ataris are the late-90s early-00s bands who laid the groundwork for contemporary outfits like Handguns, The Wonder Years, Set Your Goals and their ilk – see also Transit, reviewed here, who I didn’t get along with for similar reasons. It just ain’t my thing.

The elements of Don’t Bite Your Tongue that I do like are those rich melodies and some of their vocal harmonies; plus there are a few rougher edges and a bit of buzz here and there, which I appreciate. » Read the rest of this entry «

When faced with grind as ridiculously fast as this, the reviewer has a few options open to him or her. The first is to plump for abstract or ridiculous analogies and hyperbole:

Paint-blisteringly fast, The Ergon Carousel are punching you in the face ten thousand times a minute with their unstoppably intense hyperspeed velocity noisecore. GRRind! It’s like being chased down an endless corridor by a ceaselessly screaming cyborg bear with fists for eyes and lasers for teeth.

Another is to pursue a fairly staid biographical approach:

Midlands grind outfit The Ergon Carousel are composed of ex-members of Narcosis, Beecher, Carmen and Mechagodzilla, are have been kicking around since 2008′s The Ergon Carousel EP. Dead Banks is their first album, and with seventeen tracks powered through in under twenty minutes it’s clear they’re not slowing down any time soon.

A third option would be to talk about how they fit into the grand scheme of grindcore, which you’re unfortunately not going to get from me because I don’t know much about grind. Outside of the bands I already mentioned above, the obvious candidates like Brutal Truth and Anal Cunt and a few weird outliers like Xfilesx and The Afternoon Gentlemen I don’t really listen to it much either.

So instead I’ve gone for the fourth option, which is to deconstruct the music review a bit as you’ve already seen. I’m having some fun here, and The Ergon Carousel’s relentless aural violence is an ideal soundtrack for it.

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Del.icio.us links for September 21st through September 25th:

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It’s safe to say that Hold Tight! are deeply embedded in the contemporary US punk rock aesthetic, from trivial markers like the exclamation mark in their name (seriously, those have been a thing for a while now) through the endearingly sloppy qualities of the vocals all the way to the way the band string together their fat, chuggy, distorted melodies and multiple vocal lines (replete, of course, with eternally fun “woahs”).

There’s a certain magical x-factor (not the TV show; as an aside, I despair that one day all short-hand phrases such as this may one day be robbed from us and put to work promoting some cynical, banal and short-lived commodified shit) that makes this style of punk rock really work, at least as far as I’m concerned. Essentially it’s a fusion of music and lyrics that walk a casual line between sweetness, melancholy, passion, driving energy and relentless force, all with enough honesty to resonate in the tough lump of scar tissue that is a punk rocker’s heart.

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Slabdragger play music that belongs firmly in the “as fuck” category. You know: loud as fuck. Heavy as fuck. Sludge as fuck. Stoner as fuck. In fact, I’m kinda bummed that I’m not writing this review whilst baked out of my mind, but in fairness taht cluoc krow tuo yldab rof uoy ,eht redaer.

So yeah, what we have here is a collection of nine songs with a few scattered vocals; they’re mostly instrumental and there are quite a few tracks that extend past the four or five minute boundary. It’s best enjoyed with a decent set of headphones to really bring home the sense of volume and riff bombardment that drives it.

First track ‘Bab el-Mandeb’ is a chuggy number that uses quite a few vocals; you’ve got the usual dual-vox metal pairing with one guy using a higher, snarly voice and another guy bringing the gruff lower tone. It’s a strong advertisement for the power of a good riff pumped through a good amplifier: it settles into its chuggy groove and more or less sticks with it for nine and a half minutes. And ah, there’s more going on than that, but it’s all embellishment around that central chug: a bar and a half of palm mutes and then half a bar of hanging chords. Simple, yet effective. As fuck.

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Del.icio.us links for September 12th through September 19th:

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Hailing from Michigan’s Grand Rapids and the fantastically named Kalamazoo, Protected Left play fast-paced melodic hardcore punk rock. They’re far from alone in this, but it’s hard to deny that they do it well. Take opener ‘Nightmare’, driven by an almost unrelenting punk drumbeat (you know, whacking the snares on the 2nd and 4th beat… you have heard this drumbeat a thousand times!) that only pulls back for the song’s bridge; the meat on the song’s bones is composed of fast and simple power chord progressions with a vocal line that faithfully follows along.

The band have thoughtfully sent me the lyric sheet for these three songs, and I can say that all three opt for articulations of self-doubt, fear of ageing and failing; that kinda thing. That there’s such a consistent lyrical theme speaks well of the passion and honesty behind these words, but they’re so cloaked in ambiguity, and lacking specificity, that they never really stick in the mind – despite nice turns of phrase like “resolve became rigid / and in the end he’d crack”.

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Dutch outfit Antillectual recently lost their bassist, Tim van Tol, so I’d guess that Start from Scratch is the last record on which he’ll play. It’s a shame but the band have been around since 2000 and changes to line-up are hardly going to stop them at this point.

The band hail from the Netherlands – Nijmegen / Utrecht to be precise – and play melodic punk rock with a hardcore slant. It’s poppy, sure, but there’s chuggy palm-muting and fast-paced aggression aplenty. It’s a bit of a predictable comparison to make with a Dutch punk band, but I get a definite Undeclinable Ambuscade vibe – perhaps it’s just the Dutch accent singing in English over melodic punk – but Bad Religion are also a likely inspiration. Antillectual are more earthy and less abstract or ideological than BR, but they back up their hooky and melodic tunes with a mix of lyrics exploring both the personal and the political.

There’s little obvious filler present among these twelve tracks, although there are a few tracks which are a little weaker or make some odd choices. ‘The Hunt Is On’, for example, is a little bland and unmemorable, and ’Some of my best friends are meat eaters’ – a riff on the old “some of my best friends are black/gay/etc” cliché, I assume - bizarrely namechecks Pamela Anderson and Weird Al Yankovic. I concede that Weird Al’s career covers many decades but regardless those are two heavily 90s-esque names to drop. Then there’s ‘America’s Worst Role Model’; I suppose pop-punk is a fairly US-centric genre but it’s odd that Antillectual choose to tackle American social issues rather than those of their home nation.

Still, these are pretty mild criticisms in the face of what they do well. » Read the rest of this entry «

Del.icio.us links for September 4th through September 11th:

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There have been no genocides targeting people who like Dungeons & Dragons. Liking comic books does not mean you are at a vastly higher statistical risk of domestic violence or rape. Playing video games will not result in your being legally disallowed to marry your partner, and nobody has suggested a constitutional amendment restricting the rights of people who read fantasy paperbacks. Nobody has ever murdered a sexual partner and subsequently given, as the legal defense for said murder, “I found out that he liked Doctor Who.” America is not built on a history of enslaving people because they attended Comic-Con.

I could go on here, but you get the point. Social snottiness is all over; there are jokes about nerds, there are jokes about hipsters (and whole blogs based around goofy pictures or mean blog posts about hipsters), there are jokes about frat-boys and bros and Dave Matthews fans, there are jokes about Goths and metal doodz and everyone else. People judge each other on grounds of taste. That’s life. But — crucially — these are jokes based on choices. Nobody chooses to have a marginalized, oppressed identity. And the historical consequences of having a marginalized, oppressed identity are far more serious than belonging to a subculture that people make jokes about.

(From the comments)

TigerBeatdown.com is my new favourite blog. It is the best. I cannot get enough of funny, right-on feminist writers.

That is all, thanks for reading.