SHARKPACT

A glorious cacophony made with just drums and keyboards, this Olympia duo creates a racket that should by all rights drive me insane with aggravation, but instead I find myself returning to these songs over and over again. I'll fall back on my initial impression to prepare you for what you are about to get yourself into: ANDREW W.K. meets THIS IS MY FIST. Yeah, it's weird, and yeah, it's that good. This multi gender duo creates a fantastic racket, and any song that starts with the line: "Haven't laughed this hard in a long time // my face is turning red" gets my vote, even (especially) when the song appears to be about people we love who are dead. This is great, and I recommend it highly.

DITCHES

This was released as a 12" by Rumbletowne.

NÖ PÖWER

This is exactly what you people want from me on Mondays: chaotic and frantic reverb drenched thrashing hardcore from the backwards ass woods of North Carolina, where the ponx make this music because they need to, not because it's cool. NÖ PÖWER payed Terminal Escape a visit a few months back, and now they are gracing you maniacs with a second session filled with blazing distorted guitars and chanted vocals manipulated to the nth degree...fortunately underneath all this chaos - if you are willing to look - are some fukkn brilliant hardcore songs. Side one features seven jams (including one of the most simplistically crushing intros to have graced my ears in recent memory), while the flip has their first demo, which you can get into by going here if you need more (you do), since it seemed silly to rip the damned thing twice. Seriously killer shits.

NO AXIS

Band is here.

4 MINUTES

Mid tempo and catchy melodic Scottish punk from 1982. This is a rehearsal tape from one of the hundreds of bands that sprouted up in the second wave of UK punk and then faded away just as quickly as they appeared. No information available, no track listing available, but a companion post on Escape Is Terminal of a live set from the same year is this is what tickles your pickle.

4 MINUTES

VACUÜM

Second (and final) full length from VACUÜM, Holland's weirdest '80s drum machine bizarro punks (though I imagine Jos might be able to contradict me on this point). While this one didn't grab me as immediately as their self titled debut platter, these songs are excellent far beyond their sing-song exterior. I wish that the soul nice enough to copy 1985's Feest onto this cassette had been nice enough to include song titles, but we punks are used to making do with less, so I'm sure you will have no problem overcoming this obstacle.

FEEST

UNDERGROUND TAJIKISTAN

A baker's dozen from a place you have probably never been to, and likely know little about. Yeah, there are punks there. Admittedly, some of these bands have little appeal to me aside from the "Holy shit, where the fukk are they from?" factor, but RAGNAROCK and ZAPADNY are legitimately great (the former in the "whisky, beer and fist in the air" department, and the latter in a perfectly Eastern European anarcho punk manner) and ZLO are brilliantly intense bedroom/drum machine punk suffering from a painful mix. Noise punk madness from SLUM and Tajik psych pop from ZVUKOVAYA complete the circle of weirdness that came to me in cassette form years after Tian An Men 89 shared these sounds with the world (vinyl version still available, and totally worth the effort). Nothing short of eternal respect for Luc and the effort he continues to put in exposing the (western) world to third world punk. Amazing.

UNDERGROUND TAJIKISTAN

MEN AS WITCHES

Droning, ugly and menacing sounds punctuated with bursts of pained and distorted sludge. There is nothing attractive or appealing about the next 16 minutes of your life. MEN AS WITCHES are just plain nasty.

MEN AS WITCHES

STILL HAVE A FAITH // MAKE A CHANGE

STILL HAVE A FAITH cranked out their demo in 1992 - ultra high energy US influenced hardcore, the kind of attack that countrymen TOTAL FURY would master a few years later, but still packed with all of the adolescent enthusiasm required to take this rapid fire HC to lofty plateaus. Brief flirtations with melody, and if this were a few years newer I might think that these punks owned a few early NOFX records (fortunately, I think the time line is off and this ill advised comparison is just a coincidence that resulted in a little bit of speed picking on "Oneself").  Predating fastcore (or the term) by nearly a decade, STILL HAVE A FAITH rip through their tracks like they are running from a fire. Killer.

Three of the four dudes cranked out this demo a year later, more youth crew influenced, but rawer and with more of an edge to the vocals. The breakdowns (and the YOT cover) suggest that someone had been listening to a bit of NYHC, and the resulting demo has more teeth that their previous effort. It's pretty cute that they named their demo after their old band. Also killer.

STILL HAVE A FAITH // MAJOR LEAGUE

Just over ten minutes for both demos...it seemed logical to share them together.