In late 2009, one of my favourite hardcore punk outfits in Brighton called it a day: the Offcuts. In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I’ve been friends with the band for years and have lived with most of them at various addresses!
Essentially, the band ended when Alex (bass) decided to leave. The others opted to continue as a band but to make some changes. These included one of the band’s two guitarists adopting bass duties (at the moment Chris and Pinder share, swapping over on stage for different songs), Alec adding keys and synth to his distinctive vocal slurs and screams, ditching all of the old tunes and writing entirely new ones, and changing the band’s name to WW2 vs Dinosaurs.
If you’d like to hear masterful Toronto-based hardcore hardcore experimentalists Fucked Up covering Katrina & the Waves’ 1980s hit ‘Walking on Sunshine’, I suggest you click here.
Just a quick post to point at a couple of mp3 blogs that I think are pretty cool and you might want to check out. If you’ve got some favourites, feel free to share ‘em in the comments.
Note – none of these are blogs that are likely to post high-profile releases. They’re more about offering exposure to obscure outfits. If you want to know where to download the new Deftones, use Google. I’m not enabling you. You might alternatively want to go listen to something you’ve never heard before instead… in which case, knock yourself out!
Anyway, obviously you’re gonna do whatever you want to do, but if you find some tunes you really like and it’s still in print, go buy a real copy of it. Give something back to the artists and the labels who support them, huh?
I’ve lately become a little obsessed with the pop culture junkie blog Stuff You Will Hate, which is mostly written by some of the guys from Metal Inquisition and some teenage scene girls. You’d be right in thinking that this is not something that would traditionally be up my proverbial alley and you’d be spot on with that assessment. That’s partly why I like it so much.
So just what is SYWH? To quote its own blurb:
The meaning of “Stuff You Will Hate” changes depending on the installment, and often during the course of a single column. It can mean “stuff I love, but that you, the reader, will dislike.” Sometimes it means “stuff you will hate, and I hate it as well.” And sometimes, it means “stuff you like, and I might actually like it, too, but I’m going to pretend to hate it in a way that will infuriate you because it will be written as a parody of a typical idiot hating something great, and you’ll quote the fake blurb to your friends and say ‘what an ignorant dick’ when in reality it’s intentional and now we’re laughing at you, you gullible fuck.”
Yeah, pretty much. A lot of the blog’s content is about contemporary pop music – the scene stuff that the kidzzz are into, right, rather than the shit that sells the most units. It’s often written in a way that’s simultaneously derisive and loving; evidently the writers have a fondness for their subject matter at the same time as they realise the essential absurdity of pop culture. In a vague sense it’s simultaneously ironic and post-ironic, which I kind of get the impression is the nature of contemporary teen/pop culture.
A lot of posts poke fun at ‘oldz’; older fans of music like hardcore or metal who like to criticise the shit that the kids listen to these days. SYWH slaughters some of the last sacred cows of the pop music machine; the idea that what came before was somehow better rather than, as is actually the case, just a different sort of music made by and for young people that responds to or is a product of the culture from which it emerges.
Gimmicky but cool. No doubt somewhere out there a Hollywood futurist is working out how to drop something similar into the background of a near-future thriller.
(If only more science fiction writers could capture the faddish yet creative nature of popular music and performance aesthetics half as well as incidental detail in big-budget film regularly manages. Call me controversial but most futurist fictionists are very bad at this.)
It’ll be a bit of a Holy Roar-themed week as I’ve decided to review a few of their recent-ish releases – although this first one is a co-release with Hassle. I mentioned this 7″ in my 2009 Best of the Year round-up among the “hon. mention” EPs. It’s clearly not an EP, though, offering just two tracks even if one is a medley.
It’s a split based on the classic concept of two bands covering songs by each other. There’s a risk of these records becoming an exercise in pointlessness if bands sound too much alike, or their covers are too slavishly devoted to the original, but this is not the case here. Rolo Tomassi’s stop-start dynamics, creepy and distorted keyboards, and dirgey feminine roars, set them apart from the unstoppably brutal hardcore onslaught of Throats’ crushing, riff-heavy approach.
Both bands approach one another’s tunes determined to imprint them with their own personality. Rolo Tomassi combine ‘Headclouds’ and ‘Reign of Low’ (both from their split with Maths) into a single track. It starts similarly to the original version with loud and low distorted strumming, but soon kicks into something more Rolo-flavoured with staccato keys and dual vocals from Eva and James singing and chanting respectively. From there it launches into a comparatively clean lead guitar riff with guttural growls before seguing into the brutal drumming frenzy of ‘Reign of Low’. The heavy metal riff that sees that song out is mostly unchanged, which is no bad thing.
Throats, for their part, cover ‘I Love Turbulence’ from Hysterics. The sinister synths and keys are gone, retained is the breakneck pace and violence – ramped up to 11 in Throats’ inimitably aggressive, confrontational style. The guitar lead at the end is a nice change from the original, and I’m not usually much of a fan of widdling; elsewhere Rolo’s haunting electronic breakdown is replaced with a guitar-based segment. It’s a more faithful cover than their counterparts went for, but hearing a Rolo song played entirely on strings and skins with everything sounding louder and heavier is impressive in itself.
Where “best” is used in the subjective sense of “what I liked the most”. You want analyses of what was most finely crafted or most significant in terms of pop cultural trends, go read Pitchfork or a music postgraduate’s dissertation. Here’s what caught my imagination, heart, and desire to put my fist in the air this year. » Read the rest of this entry «
There’s a new page on the site (replacing the somewhat pointless ‘gubbins’ page) that I’m using to list upcoming gigs here in Brighton. I got fed up of writing about shows I wanted to attend in intermittent posts that became out of date really quickly. No doubt this static page will also be out of date quite a bit, but at least it won’t keep showing up unwanted in RSS feeds. Pow!
In late 2009, one of my favourite hardcore punk outfits in Brighton called it a day: the Offcuts. In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I’ve been friends with the band for years and have lived with most of them at various addresses!
