1. Corrosion of ConformityAnimosity
This record is unadulterated brutality with genuine soul. When I hear this I know it’s from the heart. I believe every word Mike Dean is screaming. This is gospel music, spreading the sermon of mid-80s hardcore to the masses. I don’t know any of their records after Animosity – they went like super commercial metal, but this is my all-time favourite. This is it for me.
It’s mesmerising and incredibly tight sounding, some of the most merciless and savage hardcore ever recorded. It might even be more biblical and fundamentally important than Reign In Blood. Yes. I will go on record saying that. People are gonna be like, "Blasphemy! How dare you!" I never thought I’d say it, but if I had to choose between the two I’d go with Animosity.
I like that Animosity is 26 minutes long, the Minor Threat record is like 16 minutes or something – I like how they’re so short and to the point. It’s one continuous song, basically. It gets right to the meat of the matter. Animosity was a big record. In 1985 it was huge. I was in bands, actively, I’d say, from maybe ’86 – for a while I was in a band called Rapid Deployment Force, and in ’89 I was in a New York hardcore band called Crawlpappy, for a little bit, while I was also in Helmet. But that wasn’t for that long. I did one 7".
