No Comply

Reviews

No Comply East Coast Powerviolence LP

Holy shit, this fucking shreds. This 42-song collection gathers tracks from the Florida band’s storied history. Like GODSTOMPER, this is bass-heavy powerviolence with noise interludes, threatening samples, and absolutely unhinged shrieking vocals. I don’t have a lyric sheet, but the songs have a meanness to them that can’t really be translated anyway. The production varies a little from track to track due to the different source materials, but all the tracks sound thick, blown-out, and filthy. Some of the songs venture into near grind/noisecore with brief bursts of screech, while others stretch out into doomy breakdowns, and we even get a few STIKKY and SPAZZ covers. “The Noise Set (9 Songs)” is like a Whitman’s Sampler of the band with furious PV, emoviolence passages, and jazzy bass. It all rules, and if you like powerviolence, consider this essential.

No Comply / They Live To the Max split 5″

Due to some technical difficulties, this review is late, as the format is a unique 5” I could not get to play on my turntable. Well, the wait is over, and it was worth it. NO COMPLY play bizarre-core, as if the brood of RIGOROUS INSTITUTION played more like SWING KIDS, or if MAN IS THE BASTARD teamed up with ASSHOLE PARADE. Two tracks to grease up the wheels. THEY LIVE take a much more blasting hardcore approach, and it is awesome. Think DEVOID OF FAITH, or PLUTOCRACY in terms of distortion, but a little less crusty. Straight-up powerviolence HC with palpable tension. I’m pretty sure the last song is about Animal Chin and this all has an aggressive skate vibe to it. If you see this, get it. It’s a novel 5” and it’s great.

No Comply / Sidetracked split EP

The SIDETRACKED side will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with their erratic start/stop, no time to breathe approach to powerviolence—seventeen tracks in three-and-a-half minutes, taken from different recordings and different sessions, so it sounds even more fucked-up and weird than they normally do. But speaking of old heads, NO COMPLY is still in the game after more than twenty years, and still they sound like they just crawled out of the grooves of a 1994 dollar bin score. Treble-heavy and bass guitar-driven, classic PV in the West Bay tradition—there’s nothing polished here, but there’s a lot that’s pure. This split needed to happen, and it didn’t disappoint.