CRACKS

 

I've never heard another band like CRACKS. I've heard US hardcore punk bands before, for sure (and so have you, I'm assuming). I've heard misanthropic outsiders trying to break down the walls that separate them from the cool kids and the taste makers. I've seen great bands that no one gave a shit about and popular bands that sucked. But I've never heard a band that sounded so incredibly and completely like themselves. A background steeped in the classics, a sound that owes to VOID and FLAG and early Touch & Go and sounds completely not at all like any of those things. CRACKS were from Illinois - Roselle, Champaign, Bloomington, Peoria, maybe Kewanee - and always featured Philip Knowles. I tried to join the band around 2006 but I couldn't keep up with Philip (and I lived two hours away) so he recruited a full lineup and kept cranking out primitive awkward hardcore punk recordings well into the 2010s. This is true freak punk...still and always. 

STAB

MARSHSTEPPER

 

It's been quite a while since MARSHTEPPER paid us a visit. Haunting as always, distant as always, transfixing as always, I have seen very few bands conjure internal demons like they can (could) and do (did). This live transgression from 2013 should perhaps be shared on Escape Is Terminal (it is live, after all), but no one decides what we should or should not do....except us. 

THE TRANSGRESSION CONTINUES...

SVART KATT

Dreamy, perfect power pop packaged like a crushing ScandiCrust demo? Yes, please. Stockholm's SVART KATT unloaded this recording a few years ago (Sabotage released it on vinyl if you can find one, while this gorgeous package is from the fine folks at Pissed Off) and it's FUN PEOPLE and BUZZCOCKS and FOR AGAINST and RADIOACTIVITY and it's just blissful and...well, it's perfect. If you need an escape (and a lot of the time, a lot of us do)....there's nothing wrong with taking a break. Just come back. We miss you. 

NÄR ALLT ÄR ÖVER

D.I.Y. CONSPIRACY VOL. 1

The DIY Conspiracy folks spent the year of Covid cranking out some serious mix tape heat, and I was happy to get the first six installments in one hefty batch. Hardcore, crust, DBeat, punk, doom from Bulgaria, Brasil, Italy, Austria, Chile, Greece, Russia, Australia, Singapore, Portugal...this is the kind of conspiracy I can get behind. 

 

DIY CONSPIRACY VOL.1

Defend DIY Punk indeed - especially from thieves and charlatans. 

But that's for a different post. 

SFN

SFN were just starting when we moved from Wisconsin back to SF. The kids were around at shows in Madison and sometimes Milwaukee (they were from Stoughton, the birthplace of Naugahyde) but I had no clue that they were on the cusp of unleashing this when I met them. 2008's Fouled Nest is an absolutely brutal document (625 later slapped it on wax); churning blasting PV/HC with a perfect groove on the slows and perfect adolescent desperation in the vocals. An absolute killer. 

FOULED NEST

PUNKTURE

 

I've taken up more than a reasonable amount of space on these pages talking about the 1990s. When there weren't as many rules and guidelines about what was "good" or "punk," when bands seemed more free to explore their own sounds instead of sounding like someone else, when what and how you were (as people and as a band) sometimes mattered as much (or more) than whether or not you "rocked," and opinions about what rocked and what didn't were all over the map anyway so who cared. The further I get away from the decade, the more I appreciate it - it's not only nostalgia (though of course that is a factor) but a genuine acknowledgement of the wide swath of sounds and people who created them who all existed in the same spaces together - before social algorithms and live feeds (and blogs, of course). PUNKTURE is not one of bands that comes up when I have those reflective moments. This tape kinda sucks, and basically embodies all of the tropes and trappings that people think of when they reference shitty '90s whiny pop punk. History is hard. 

10 MINUTES AND SAFE

30 June 1987

I know that some of these recordings just turn into white noise in the cacaphonic din of sounds available on the internet. But some enjoy time travel. And 1987, for all of the abstract fear of nuclear winter and very rational detestation of the foundation that the yuppie class were laying (and even so, we seriously had no idea)...with 2022 hindsight, 1987 seems like a fucking dream. So step back and fall in without falling in line, and check Pat Wright ruling KALX on an evening in June, 35 years ago. Spinning WIRE, THE RUB, TIN STAR, THE EX and a new (to me) should-have-been anthems from RYAN RAYA ("Don't Give Up") and THE RUB ("My Life Is A Downer"). You can step back into current reality when "12XU" cuts off after 22 seconds....but you don't have to. It kinda sucks right now. 

30 JUNE 1987