CRUCIFUCKS

 

It's not as if I never appreciated Michigan's realest punk export, and it's not like I didn't understand them. But it's interesting (to me) that I didn't really get CRUCIFUCKS until I was a fifty year old adult. Their I Am The Establishment demo from 1982 is one of the punkest recordings I've ever known and when I was bumping the murky Das Boots tape earlier this year everything just....clicked. And I understood. 

I AM THE ESTABLISHMENT

I estimated your worth today 

And I'm not gonna listen to what you say 

And I'm never going to go back to work 

You're not my boss, he's a fucking jerk 

• 

You can go out of business for all I care 

Your way of life isn't going anywhere 

I'm not stupid and I won't be led 

By pricks like you who'd be better off dead

•

You're pathetic, you're disgusting

You make me sick

I estimated your worth today...you're shit.

DANIEL LETZ

DANIEL LENTZ made a visit to these pages very early on with 1985's Missa Ubrarum but I never really dug much deeper...and then this popped up as a reminder that should. Lentz lands somewhere between new age and outsider modern composer, described perfectly as "abstract and difficult but not unpleasant to listen to." Massacre Of Lions And Lambs is six movements - voices and synthesized sounds captured in live in France and Pittsburgh in 1988. It makes me chuckle that a composer of much renown can appear as a new and exciting "discovery" when it's crammed haphazardly in a box full of punk tapes (as this was)...but it shouldn't be important how you discover, only that you do. 

MASSACRE OF LIONS AND LAMBS

 

HARHAA

 

The formula is brutally simple. If you do it right, then it works almost every time. And all power to HARHAA, because motherfukkr this shit is right as rain. Primal, teeth gnashing raw hardcore punk, tinged with (but not obsessed with) kång, they stick to the script and I'm eating up every riff. The assault lasts less than six minutes...someone want to hook me up with the Future Disorder tape?

HARHAA

COMPRESSIONS

 

Chicago's COMPRESSIONS were but a blip, and I believe they had vanished before I knew the blip had blipped. PEDESTRIANS, LOSER LIFE, PILLAGE, MANIPULATION personnel teaming up for an eight song kick in the gut that doesn't sound anything at all like CONVERSIONS or COMPLICATIONS or any other band I can think of that starts with a CO. COMPRESSIONS are born from the POISON IDEA by way of CAUSTIC CHRIST school of USHC - the sound of determined sonic nihilism. "You Do Not Exist" on fukkn repeat all day. 

COMPRESSIONS

CLAY MAN IN THE WELL

 

For those needing help finding directions towards (or from) introspection, I suggest opening the door to Kupe's Sail from CLAY MAN IN THE WELL. For residents of the Northern Hemisphere who are settling into the season/s of depression, these sounds recorded in New Zealand might do little to lift the darkness, but may serve as a reminder that someone was here before you. Haunting, innocent and honest sonic meditations give way to utter cacophony and then all coexist and then the cycle repeats. And again. 

KUPE'S SAIL

VARIOUS INTERVIEWS

 

On this side:

• Darby Crash interviewed after the release of the GERMS LP.

• Adam Ant talking about CIRCLE JERKS and reading lyrics to a couple of songs from Group Sex. 

• CIRCLE JERKS talking about rock 'n roll and punk...it get's really good just after the 2:00 mark. 

• Sid Vicious (and a little bloated carrot top) interviewed by Rodney Bingenheimer on KROQ, supposedly Sid's first interview as a member of SEX PISTOLS. 

===

There's a pretty hot BLACK FLAG set from 1982 on the other side. Hats off to the punk who put this together and to the next punk who passed it on instead when they were finished with it instead of throwing it away. Tape trading rules. 

DARBY CRASH • ADAM ANT • CIRCLE JERKS • SID VICIOUS

1/4 DEAD

 

Chaotic and demonic mid-decade hardcore from...from Delaware. 1/4 DEAD are too weird to fall in with the punk stomps that dominated the era, but they're surely not trying to get lumped in with some mysterious guy revival...which is all why I keep pumping the demo. Still can't figure out where they're supposed to fit and then I remember...they're from Delaware. They don't fit, and that's the whole damn point. Maybe that's why their 2014 tape is (still) a killer. I hope the guitar played is still in bands because that wild style should not go dormant. 

1/4 DEAD

BLOOD BROTHERS

 

Just a(nother) reminder that 1990s DIY punk and hardcore was inventive, interesting and just generally not typical - if only because folks hadn't decided what typical even was (yet). Sometimes not following the rules resulted in unlistenable drivel and sometimes not following the rules meant inventing your own shit, figuring out what was which or which was both...? That was the whole point. Seattle's BLOOD BROTHERS were surely a combination and/or consolidation of concepts, and I have a hard time imagining a band like this (or the 2022 version of this) forming in the post-internet era if only because everything you hear here can now be collected and mutated in the space of an afternoon...but this shit is marinated, not regurgitated, and you can tell. You hear Revolution Summer crashing into the San Diego bands that were influenced by Revolution Summer - layers of vocals and chaotic all over the place riffs and it was never really my thing exactly but this record intrigued me when it came out. I think I only grabbed it because it was on Hopscotch - the same label responsible for this (the tape has the four songs from the first EP) and MURDER CITY DEVILS had also released the SUBMISSION HOLD/SAKÉ split and full lengths from APEFACE and RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE and I'm not saying that present day hardcore doesn't rule (because it does...it really does), but sometimes it's cool to look back and just go....damn, you know? Also, I doubt that's still Mike's phone number on the tape, but if someone calls him, tell him thanks for inviting us to play that fest in Tijuana in 1998, because that shit was wild as fuck. Saw my first kidnapping that day. 

BLOOD BROTHERS

VÉRTIGO

VÉRTIGO's first release from 2014 is different in almost every way from yesterday's STINKHOLE post. Key word there is....almost. Punk is punk, and VÉRTIGO is catchy, addictive, forceful, masterful, innocent, confident...punk. File closer to LES THUGS and OBSERVERS than cacophonous shitnoise, but punk is still punk and quality can not be denied. 

VÉRTIGO 

STINKHOLE

 

Someone want to try to figure out what these German freaks are doing here? All I hear is chaos...manic, beautiful chaos. They stomp and flail around these songs like a gaggle of toddlers throwing a tantrum - even the instruments themselves seem designed and engineered for children and STINKHOLE don't so much "play" them as they damage them. When there's a punk remake of Gremlins, this is the music that will play during the montages when the little creatures fuck shit up. Fuck your shit up. You can imagine CUNTROACHES dressed up like MUMMIES and doing a MINUTEMEN cover set for Halloween, but I think their sound (and approach) can be summed up with the song titles on the B side: "I'm An Idiot" into "I Hate Humans" into "Ideology Vomit," and the full length they released last year is called Mold Encrusted Egg. You need more? Blast "Emancipated By Hair" and consider yourself lucky to have STINKHOLE in your ear hole/s.

OUT OF THE GUTTER, INTO THE STINKHOLE

LIMBS BIN

 

LIMBS BIN have made several appearances on these pages, and the cassette is just another example of their power. The Bliss Tech side is an exhausting studio session that finally gives in just before the five minute mark - reading that, you might think that it's "short," but when "Sky Seems You Fall" closes you may find yourself exhaling as I did, hardly aware that the sounds had you on the edge of a very (very) steep cliff. The flip side, Live In Laramie (For Denver), crams twenty two outbursts into a sub-four minute assault...with little bits of irreverence as an apparent to keep you grounded. Total brain fuck, volume yields results. Lose yourself, you deserve it. 

BLISS TECH

FRANK'S ENEMY

 

I confess that I wasn't expecting FRANK'S ENEMY when I popped it in. Florida death metal from the mid 1990s? Sure, I got this. Then "Human Reich" launched its putrid assault and I felt the skin slowly peeling off of my face as they blasted and...and here we go. "Torturer." "Cauldron." "Imbecile Factory." The sonic timbre is a constant warning that FRANK'S ENEMY are only going to get filthier, and they get weirder too - "Cannibalized" has a nauseating churn, and I feel like the sounds have as much in common with IMMORTAL FATE as with standard Florida death metal...then check the guitar in the 7+ minute "In Answer" and know that you're listening to sounds from another realm.

NEOBLASPHEMIES
•••••

Worth Noting:

1. The tape ends with a truly bizarre funk / metal / grind number.

2. FRANK'S ENEMY are still active today.
3. The band was, and is, Christian. 

LIVE AT VÖNS

 

Hard to decide where this one *should* go, but I make my own rules here at TEHQ so I decided that it's gonna live with the compilations, mix tapes and various artists recordings that tend to pop up on Fridays. Could just as easily live over at Escape Is Terminal since the recordings are live, and all three bands are absolutely raw and wild enough to justify a Monday appearance on this page...but I make my own rules here at TEHQ, so this is the place. A hand-me-down from Music Not Noize (thanks for the sounds), Live At Vöns captures three manic Latvian bands annihilating a rehearsal space 28 years ago today - it was my first exposure to all three, and I immediately wanted to dig into all of them. VONOSONOLOPPUS blaze through 18 songs in just over a quarter hour, manic blasting hardcore that would have been right at home in Redwood City, while REPTILS are a rock band but...weird. I can't place them and even though their songs are probably my least favorite they're the ones I keep returning to, if only because I want to contextualize them. A scant ten minutes from ČAPAJEVS VAGONS; neanderthal pogo stomps that sound wasted and mean...like a party that's always teetering on the edge of violence. They made their own rules over at Vöns, and I'm grateful.

LIVE AT VÖNS • 18 NOVEMBER 1994

•••••

•••••

SLAG

 

There's a lot of SLAG in your life (or there should be) and it can be hard to keep all of the SLAG straight sometimes. There was the Chicago SLAG. There's the Arizona SLAG (their Fetus Records EP is likely in your local $1 bin right now, just waiting for you).There's the San Jose SLAG. Pretty sure there's a crossover SLAG from Brasil and I swear there was an English straight ege SLAG but I might be making that up in my brain. I'm sure you could do some research and find more SLAG, or you could just get into this recording from the Oklahoma City SLAG, captured wild and raw late in the last decade - their set was recorded, duplicated and distributed all on the same night, which is pretty sick. This tape is all you get, so savor your SLAG. 

SLAGAGAGAGKH

 

MARTIAL LAW

 

I was chatting with an old(er) English punk rocker a few weeks ago about the time before my time. His band split up in 1986 and he said they all pretty much felt that punk in general was finished - not that they were finished with punk, but that punk itself was just....done. A few of them dabbled in other bands for a while (some embarrassing funk rock experiments that I'll keep in their collective closets). In retrospect, this seems wild to me, especially considering the flood of punk and hardcore exploding on the British Isles in the mid-1980s, but I wasn't there and I didn't have his experience so there's no judgement. Maybe this MARTIAL LAW demo would have made a bigger splash had been recorded a few years earlier, maybe the anarcho sounds (and...politics?) were just passé by 1985, or maybe that old head I was chatting with had temporarily reached maximum punk capacity after a few years of constant gigs. Regardless, Angry Songs clearly demonstrates what we already know: punk did not die in the '80s. 

ANGRY SONGS

THE NEW FAULTLINES

 

Sometimes it lands when you least expect it...and sometimes it lands just right. Got this one on loan from a pal in the neighborhood and didn't know that I needed a dose of indie tinged country/rock until I popped THE NEW FAULTLINES into the deck, but it sure did hit the fukkn spot. You hear VU, you hear THE BYRDS, you hear them swing like Billy Mure and bash like THE SONICS, but Drawing A Blank listens like a throwback to the sounds of the (read: my) early 1990s with bands like TEENAGE FANCLUB, GLUE (the Oklahoma one), FOR AGAINST - probably because those bands were all weening themselves from the same sonic teat. "Shadow" (the clear stand out on this tape) would have been a lauded smash in that bygone era, even while the rockin' desert twang on tracks like "When I Leave For The Country" and "Does She Know" is what really helps THE NEW FAULTLINES stamp their own imprint on the sound. Sometimes...it lands when you least expect it. 

DRAWING A BLANK

RAAMATTU

 

Classic Finnish hardcore sounds on a steady diet of DROPDEAD and broken glass, every second of RAAMATTU's 2018 debut sounds like it's about to implode. The lone DBeat number "Tradition," which would be the "obligatory mid-paced track in the middle of the record" for any normal band....descends into madness before the band tries desperately to reign it back in. "Ei Oikeutta" does manage to stay slow (or slower) and the result is a dark and damaged COC vibe that burles its way into "Hyväsyntä" and then it's just....over. This is the ugliest seven minutes of your day even, or especially, if you're on your way to work just so you can get fired. 

RAAMATTU

FRENTE NORTE

Still can't figure out what exactly sets FRENTE NORTE apart from the pack. Tough and gruff punk that lands somewhere between CRIMINAL DAMAGE and Deluxe Bias, followed by a track that sounds like 2004-era FUCKED UP reinterpreting an outtake from Rio Grande Mud. There's one more cut after that, an Oi! inspired mid-tempo groover that makes you really question what is happening. Guitar leads are constant and squirrelly, and the vocals are the perfect combination of tough 'n gruff. For the folks who need a little more stripped down rock 'n roll in their punk or bit of ramshackle COCK SPARRER in their FOGHAT perhaps - FRENTE NORTE sound like no one else, maybe because they're from....Ohio.

 

DEMO 2

PETER KATER & R. CARLOS NAKAI

 

Check your cool points at the door and just sit with Natives for a while. Let Peter Kater's improvisational new age piano take you by the hand and lead you into the world of Navajo flautist R. Carlos Nakai. It's a world they share on this 1990 release, and while it's not a world that I want to live in all the time (let's be honest: no riffs)....it's a world I don't mind escaping to. Old person new age recordings are kinda for the birds, but if you look closely you will find more than a few that are well worth you time (and submission). You dig bird sounds? You dig heartfelt instrumental montages? Then this might just be one of those few. It's Saturday and if you're in the northern hemisphere it might be a little chilly so....fuck it. Relax. 

NATIVES: AN IMPROVISATIONAL EXPLORATION OF THE SEVEN DIRECTIONS

IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

 

Y'all want to do this again? Well, you should. The second offering from the Acts Of Defiance folks is a killer romp through mid 1980s DIY European punk - THE NEXT WORLD, DROWNING ROSES, THE LUMPS OF MERDE, ROSTOK VAMPIRES, FINAL BLAST, THE DISTURBED, AGEN 53 and a couple of others. Sixty minutes of rough and raw hardcore and primitive punk...I still need more tapes from this series (Are You Still Ready To Follow Your Leader?, Where Is The Freedom?, You Can Be A Victim Of Their Authority, and the others too) because they are all so fukkn good. 

IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

褜

 

Japanese death/black metal the pushes the boundaries of fidelity, 褜 (ENA) take just eleven short minutes to make you question everything you knew about sound and presentation. Distorted and blown, digital and distant noisecore blasts that almost make you try harder because they sound so fukkd. This is not for the casual listener. 

視​肉​の​檻

CONVERSIONS

 

CONVERSIONS have got to be one of the most under appreciated bands of the '00s. The song construction is erratic, the guitars are 'too' clean for a hardcore band and Terry's vocals are straight fire. They are just so fast, so all over the place, so in your face and so weird...but it's Strunk's drums that will make your face melt, dude is one of the wildest humans I've ever seen behind a kit. CONVERSIONS could have "just" been a hardcore bend if they had chosen to do so, and they would have been an incredible "just" hardcore band...but are a completely different animal. Both of the full length releases are screamers, and you can hear when they were after the instant the first demo (this one) starts.

THE CONVERSIONS 

XEN

 

XEN were a truly bizarre DIY experimental prog duo from Tulsa, Oklahoma in the early 1990s. Even after several listens I'm at a loss for other ways to describe or contextualize the group and 1992's Unresolved Games so I'll repeat: XEN were a truly bizarre space/art prog duo from Tulsa, Oklahoma. This shit is coming from (and headed towards) another realm - true heads only. 

UNRESOLVED GAMES

STIMULUS

 

It's all about the (re)presentation with STIMULUS. Is it amped up garage rock? Is it sped up Spanish language Oi? Is it raw as fuck Japanese hardcore stripped of all of its sonic tonnage? The way they deliver these four burners it's hard to tell what they meant to do, but it's easy to tell what they did because they did it right. Blast "Letargo" and you'll see what I mean - just an all out raw garage hardcore assault. It's as if they traded fidelity for intensity...and that's always a good move. 

EL ESTÍMULO PREVISTO

03 OCTOBER 1987

This hour is exactly what you hope the golden age of free form college radio would sound like. Damaged funk stomps, classic country, space prog, political folk music, Nuggets-era artifacts, traditional music from the far corners of the world that seemed so much further away in 1987. So take an hour out of your day and spend an hour with the folks from KALX in Berkeley - they were doing it right. 

KALX - 03 OCTOBER 1987

SUBHUMANS

 

No introductions of explanations required here - SUBHUMANS live in Paris in 1983. Great set list, even with the unnecessary crowd participation on "Wild Thing" (noteworthy that "Religious Wars" appears early in the set here). Probably should have plopped this in the live blog (though there's a stellar CRUCIFIX from 1982 set there today), but I'm not really that into rules...especially rules that I've imposed upon myself.

ONE MAN'S FISH IS ANOTHER MAN'S POISSON
For Southern California residents, I'll be with SUBHUMANS at Teragram Ballroom in LA tomorrow evening. Will trade guest list spots for punk tapes. Good punk tapes, preferably old too. And for the nerds in the audience, we made a criminally small run of DIY covers for some cassettes leftover from the box sets SUBHUMANS made for the summer tour. Probably not going to last long...

=====

SUPER STREET 11: DEATH ELECTIONS

 

I'm not sure what you think you should expect from a 60minute Fag Tapes live compilation, but Death Elections is what you should prepare yourself for. Because that's what's waiting for you, and that's what you get. Bleak monotony from KVLTS, a harsh wall collaboration that joins PRURIENT, AIR CONDITIONING, and FFH for the sole purpose of torture - SICK LLAMA sound practically tame by comparison even though their offering is arguably more disjointed and disconcerting. GRAVESIGHTS are almost music (don't worry, they aren't quite), and the hypnotic rumblings of RAVEN STRAIN do not end the sound collection on any kind of note that could be described as "relief." If anything, the Super Street series is an exercise....

SUPER ST. 11: "DEATH ELECTIONS"

PKG

 

I still can't understand why someone hasn't unearthed and re-issued this shit, because these recordings and the Roadtrip tape are absolutely worthy of credit that they don't seem to have ever received. Fancy? Nah, not really. Ripping and sometimes unhinged '80s California hardcore? Definitely. Check "Getting Away" from the demo - wild early SUICIDAL vibes with 7 SECONDS caliber hooks, and the rest of the session is right there too. "Summer Poison" deserves to be comped at least - absolute unappreciated classic. 

The rehearsal session from 1987 is understandably more raw, but listen to fukkn "12 Pack Syndrome" and the almost-but-not-quite drums fills. Twenty two slammers (including a few doubles) between the demo and the rehearsal, and all of it deserves to be blasted. This is likely from the collection of Noise Addiction (like any of the live posts at Escape Is Terminal)...so let's just take a minute to appreciate the work the people who came before us put in. Blast "Don't Blink" all day. 

PKG: DEMO + REHEARSAL