This is a beautiful slab of fastcore: five tracks in the blink of an eye recorded down n’ dirty in the band’s rehearsal space that indeed thrash, with just a taste of powerviolence to make things interesting. Party-violence? Is that a thing? This Budapest crew makes a pretty strong case for it, with a sound that’s equal parts SPAZZ and A.N.S. coated in about a foot-thick crust of grime. Perfect for basement beers and slamming your head into the wall.
It’s always respectable when something is accurately labeled or identified. If you see a red MAGA hat, you can make some safe assumptions about the person wearing it. With the album title In the Name of Thrash, you can expect unrelenting speed and melt-your-face riffs. Straight out of Budapest comes 23 tracks of mosh-pit power-ups in the vein of early DRI, NUCLEAR ASSAULT, and STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH. Every song is devastatingly fast and tight with an attitude of fun and unity throughout. This band does not hide what it’s about under layers of nuance or lyrical gloss. Take the track “High on Thrash,” which asserts “Thrashing is my drug / I’m wasted with my riffs / Bashing myself / With a killer song that rips.” After nearly two dozen thrashcore classics, the album closes with a hilarious send up of power metal pretension and bombast, “P.M.A. (Power Metal Attitude.)” It’s all big hair, knights with swords, and soaring falsettos that had me grinning ear to ear.
Everything to be said about CRIPPLED FOX is in the lyrics of “United Mosh Pit,” the fifth track of eight on this EP. “Long-haired thrashers / And skatecore punks / Hardcore kids / Blasting the show as one.” That is the entire text of the song and could be the band’s manifesto. Occasionally punctuated with out-of-nowhere samples from DE LA SOUL, the TV show Married With Children, and others, this album shreds with fun, blistering, thrash-soaked hardcore. DRI’s Dirty Rotten LP is an obvious comparison to make. Close your eyes and you see nothing but kids in flannel shirts and bandanas zooming up and down half-pipes. The choice to record live in a rehearsal space was inspired. The resulting spontaneity and energy makes these good songs great. CRIPPLED FOX puts out some amazing crossover thrash and are now 95% of the reason I want to visit Budapest.
Budapest’s CRIPPLED FOX’s latest release is a fierce, energetic fastcore explosion. Fast, start/stop, relentless punch of shortcut hardcore tracks. A raw-quality recording that isn’t crap-sounding, but not overly produced either. No lousy parts or boring breakdowns, focusing on fast speedcore intensity at its finest moments.
Absolute ripper in the form of an Italian fastcore split. CARLOS DUNGA inserts weird chuggas, unnecessary but awesome solos (and they open with a straight classic rock guitar solo intro that had me scratching my head before the ’core started) but basically deliver face-melting fastcore of the highest order. EAT YOU ALIVE are more metallic and “pro,” they look more to MUNICIPAL WASTE than to ___, but ultimately both bands just want to rage. And so they both rage. Also, I think this came out a number of years ago…
I imagine it’s probably pretty high up on every powerviolence band’s bucketlist to do a split with Tokyo PV legends FUCK ON THE BEACH—Italy’s DOUBLE ME can now cross that one off of said list. DOUBLE ME has them beat in the song ratio (six vs. FUCK ON THE BEACH’s two), but both sides of this slab rip pretty hard. One of FUCK ON THE BEACH’s tunes is quite a raging take on CHAOS UK’s “No Security”—songs both rip hard, but DOUBLE ME’s bass-heavy sound is this reviewer’s favorite. It’s certainly worth the time investment, that time being just over four minutes. Depending on how stupid you are (which, if you like powerviolence, is probably quite a bit), it might even take you longer to read this review than listen to the record.
From Trento and active from 2000 to 2004, this now-defunct band offers the world a compilation of their material in LP format. This is Italian hardcore that proved to be highly influential since everyone in their scene wanted to sound like them. They go from fast-paced thrashing parts to more melodic and groovy hardcore. A great piece of modern Italian hardcore history
Supposedly a solo project, New Bedford, MA’s INTERNAL offers a wall of sludgy powerviolence, particularly on the low end. The tracks hit hard and then are over. A track like the title track stands out for its length, just over one minute, and its slower pace in the middle third, which it uses to dish out a different flavor of brutality. The lyrics are bleak throughout, such as with “Pack It Up”—”Pack it up / The choice is clear / Disappear.” The closing instrumental track, “Internal,” slows things down with head-bobbing hardcore. This is the kind of stuff that grows on you with repeated listenings.
Serious contender for my favorite hardcore record of the year over here. Milwaukee duo LIFES have been plugging away with EPs and splits for several years now, and they apparently had been waiting for this one until it was perfect. It is. Sonic destruction of the highest order, with discordant slows and blasts that are nothing short of punishment. Layers of bass tracks are at constant war with dual vocals and drums that struggle to maintain one beat long enough to get you hooked…so instead you just stay anxious. The doses of early ’00s influence come from the chaotic melodies in tracks like “A Four Year Old Contemplates Death,” while the shameless speed and power (and the crushing slows as in “Bitter Cold”) of LIFES that will likely get them lumped in with bands they sound nothing like…well, that’s when they truly sound like no one else. Brutally honest and unforgiving and often uncomfortable lyrically, the voice is delivered with arguably more fury here than the music, which is presented with a fucking massive recording, and any space left in the sound is perfectly filled with sound or samples Á la MOTHERCOUNTRY MOTHERFUCKERS. A completely excellent and very intentional release that I cannot recommend enough. The title track, “Treading Water,” is on repeat all damn day.
Tight and taut, delivered at neck-breaking speed, and detonated with a great recording that front and centers the drums without expense to the rest of the music. Leeds’ ONA SNOP’s debut LP follows several split EPs with a blistering eighteen tracks of chaotically controlled thrash. A blender on pulse of INTENSE DEGREE-styled quick spurts of rabid hardcore, SPAZZ-esque vocal trade offs, stop-start with brute grind style pummeling, and quick rockin’ to weird passages bending on sharp turns before hammering back within seconds into more unrelenting throttle. Songs are short, sharp, but shock with their complexity, played expertly to navigate their quick and oddball turns. Maybe it’s a lack of cross-cultural literacy, maybe it’s a lack of cross-generational literacy, but the LP cover has a cartoonish full-color collage of pastel drawings of celebrities’ heads: Amy Winehouse, Mr. T, Geezer Butler, Sporty Spice…and then a lot of people who I have no fucking clue who they are or why they are important. Dr. Who? Someone from EAST ENDERS? The guy at their local pub? Rudy Guiliani? No clue, no reference. Maybe that inanity is the point, and since PLUTOCRACY and later SPAZZ (or, I guess even before, with SNFU or the STUPIDS), it’s not out of line to have the artwork and lyrics be weird cultural mash-ups and pop culture piss-takes, but this eyesore makes me actually miss the days when the artwork and vision for this kind of music was just raw black ’n’ white brutality of decapitated heads and bifurcated dicks. Sgt. Pepper’s influence aside, that onus for more brute visuals might be out of place for a band that sings stream-of-consciousness musings about BLACK SABBATH disintegrating into zombies, their love of mustard, watching football, hating CDs, and other kookiness. Luckily, the music here is so completely raging that it rises above any visual and lyrical misgivings, and this thick platter is a refreshing blast of fastcore mayhem. Speed freaks take note.
Second straight batch with new SIDETRACKED cuts, so I start with the flip so I can keep myself hungry. Wise choice, it turns out—Montreal’s MAXXPOWER are a ruthless wall of speed-picking fastcore, and all I want is more fukkn fast after I hear their five tracks. Thick, meaty, and subtly metallic bursts that hover around the half-minute mark, they’re my introduction to the band and they are absolute killers. Half-a-minute is like a rock opera to SIDETRACKED though; each of the tracks on their side barely top the twenty-second mark. More nasty start/stop powerviolence manipulations from these Washington stalwarts, overall slightly dirtier-sounding than you might be used to (especially the bass), but their digitally-enhanced breaks that make them sound like fastcore robots are on full display. You might think you know, but no one sounds like SIDETRACKED—they’ve taken the formula and manipulated it beyond recognition…this is truly theirs now.
Here and Now, Thrash Tapes, and Vanilla Thunder compiled this four-way split EP (with MAXXPOWER, BASTARD COLLECTIVE, SICK BURN, and NO COMPLY), assuring that crust powerviolence is alive and well. Flaming fastcore and powerviolence are all to the front with BASTARD COLLECTIVE’s “In Decline,” the track that works as a bridge between ever-ranting songs on this abrasive, corrosive, and sharp split. Suggested tracks: “Fucking Why?” by SICK BURN, and the thirteen-seconds-long “Home Improvement” from MAXXPOWER.
Heavy split between Padua, Italy’s DOUBLE ME and Tijuana, Mexico’s VIOLENCIA. DOUBLE ME gives us five powerviolence slammers in about two minutes. Blastbeats dominate the mix, but there is interesting guitar work and call-and-response caveman vocals à la SPAZZ. This side could have been mixed better. I like the songs, but they sound trebly and lack low-end heaviness, through no fault of the band. Meanwhile, VIOLENCIA shreds with a mix of powerviolence, hardcore, metal chugging, and doomy interludes. Their four songs are heavy and distinctively varied. “Frenesi” opens their side with ripping powerviolence, featuring super-pissed co-ed vocals like the best parts of DESPISE YOU. “Requiem Por Mi Existencia” is straightforward D-beat hardcore done extremely well, and just to round out the genre explorations, the side ends with an instrumental doom metal song. All heavy, all memorable, VIOLENCIA is a band to watch.
