Tag: punk
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Fews – Means LP
Even at first sight – before a note of music is heard from the Means LP – those who happen upon Fews‘ debut full-length will get the sense that they’re about to bear witness to an important musical EVENT. The front cover poses a bunch of very tantalizing questions. On it, a camera captures a…
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Ancient Shapes – Ancient Shapes LP
While Daniel Romano has found great success exposing his Country & Western inspirations over the last few years (both 2011’s Sleep Beneath The Willows and 2013’s Come Cry With Me got longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in those respective years), it’s refreshing and relieving to hear that the singer has elected to turn up…
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VENOMOUS CONCEPT – KICK ME SILLY – VC III
Venomous Concept is a supergroup built upon the backs of some of grindcore’s forefathers, but aside from several blasting passages, as with the accelerated latter-half of “Neck Tie”, the band is much more in tune with eighties punk rock and hardcore, not unlike the band which their own namesake pays homage to with a play…
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Harrington Saints – Pride & Tradition (reissue)
Now that the band has reached out a bit and found some fresh and receptive ears (the Fish & Chips EP which came out last year helped toward that end) it’s no surprise that Harrington Saints‘ next step was to reissue their Pride & Tradition album to help reel in the new recruits who are…
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Hopeless Youth – Devil, Walk with Me
Vancouver has seemingly got the Canadian market cornered when it comes to sludgy hardcore, so I was somewhat surprised to see that this band hails from Montreal. And while the name Hopeless Youth recalls so many of the “youth-oriented” 80s hardcore outfits (Youth of Today, Youth Brigade, etc), their sound is much more aligned with…
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Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
by John Doe with Tom DeSavia and friends (Da Capo Press) While the stories are (almost) never the same, it’s pretty surprising how consistently structured and formulaic most rock bios and scene expositions are; be it the story of one artist or the collected stories of many, the authors of such books often attempt to…
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Joe Strummer – Gangsterville 12-inch single
With the benefit of hindsight, the first thing listeners will notice about this single’s title track is how well it dovetails with the final days of The Clash, and where they were when the wheels finally fell off with Combat Rock in 1982 [this critic does not recognize Cut The Crap as a real…
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Wrong – self-titled
This Miami noise-rock outfit features former members of Torche and Kylesa, but musically, Wrong are more like Unsane or the Melvins’ old-school slowcore, with just a dash of punk rock fury. Either way, you can’t really go wrong… Their self-titled Relapse debut has 11 tracks clocking in at an even half-hour; when it comes to song…
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Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables LP
How does one qualify an album which is almost universally considered a lynchpin release for the musical genre it occupies and has incited a seemingly endless stream of arguments and upheaval on personal, political and social levels IN ADDITION TO causing a host of legal battles among the men responsible for creating and releasing it?…
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NOFX and Jeff Alulis – The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories
NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories NOFX and Jeff Alulis As “Fat” Mike Burkett says himself in the final chapter of NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, “I guess when a person tells one fucked-up story it sounds believable, but a series of fucked-up stories back to back sounds to weird to be…