I saw a guy in the supermarket the other day, wearing one of those red caps that are in ‘the MAGA style’ but saying “CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE”. We were very much not in Canada, and unlikely to encounter anyone who could turn this slogan into discernible action, but it’d be perverse to oppose its sentiment, certainly.
There is, though, the wide-angle lens view, that asinine trade spats between the two halves of North America are secondary to them both being neoliberal death machines whose dismantling, likewise that of the West as a hegemonic concept, is essential for any future model of global peace and equity. Now I’m not saying that’s going to happen! But it does lead me into Days Of Smoke And Ash (Static Shock), the very good debut album by Toronto hardcore band Siyahkal, and in particular the song ‘A Camel And A Whip’. It’s about being in Tehran, where Siyahkal singer Kasra Goodarznezhad is from, and riding camels around the city centre with his friends, because that’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? “This song is an appreciation of what the West has done for us and for letting us live in their homeland and pay taxes like other citizens,” he adds, drily.
Siyahkal have been on the Ontario scene for nigh on a decade, but this nine-song LP is probably going to introduce them to a wider audience. It’s a real heavy hitter, with psychedelically-treated guitars swirling like a storm drain and songs sometimes stretching out to three or four minutes, even while the frantic pockmarked stomp is equally close to the band’s default mode: fellow Torontonians S.H.I.T. could serve as a beacon towards Siyahkal’s sound, though the blazing guitar on ‘Evin Fire’ seems in the Burning Spirits hardcore lineage. Song titles are mostly in English but Goodarznezhad sings in Farsi, and not only does it seem to suit his phlegm-summoning vocal style, there is some brutal and poetic imagery in these lyrics.
I wish I had an audio handle on what Septembre, the vocalist (and everything elseist) for Fleckentarn, was chatting on Feu Du Ciel, Feu De L’esprit: it’s in French, which is less of a problem than his commitment to the raw black metal aesthetic ensuring every syllable is buried by grime and must. There’s as much punk – lumpen, outrageously primitive punk – as BM in these songs, though, which is why this album, Fleckentarn’s third, is in this column. That plus I saw the Parisian project’s first ever full-band live show, at delightful extremities-of-metal fest Life After Death, a few weeks ago and it was just my sorta medicine.
French blackened punk label Croux had some tapes done for that show which I think are all gone, ahead of an LP that’s out later this month, so for now revel in this tin-can clang converted to a digital signal. The opening title track, though instrumental, is maybe the zenith of Septembre’s way with a seven-league-bootboy monotonous stomp: Ildjarn and Akitsa might have the intellectual copyright, but Fleckentarn is no ineffectual copycat. ‘Amer’, ‘Émail Contre Émail’ and ‘Dédale’ continue in this vein, adding muzzle-chewing vocals, but ‘Une Lame De Flammes Et De Rancoeur’ offers a mid-album pivot to far-gone psychedelic folk, and ‘VIII’ is like The Dead C with a purple-nosed French busker on vocals. High praise!
We continue down the highway of ripping blackened punk with the debut LP by Athens’ Fell Omen, another one-man band. This one calls himself Spider Of Pnyx and is an occasional collaborator with Spectral Lore; Invaded By A Dark Spirit (True Cult) seems to be conceptually based on the RPG series Dark Souls, which might mean something to you. These seven songs, a riotous assembly of dungeon synth, folk-steeped melody, true metal tankard-hurling and corpsepainted crust, don’t need that much further context for full enjoyment if you ask me.
Self-produced and judiciously so – nowhere near as shit-fi as Fleckentarn, the better for the metal to gleam, but just as ruff as it needs to be – there are both acoustic and electronic drums on Invaded, a combo which tends to come off a bit funny but works well with the gobliny keyboard intros and echo-soaked vocals. ‘Warrior Jar’ is about as fast as Fell Omen get, and the derring-do inherent to the guitar tone and style ends up not unlike Tragedy, though perhaps unintentionally so; ‘Don’t Go Hollow, You Have Steel’ and the title track are more like (recentish) Darkthrone meets Poïson Ruin. There’s a hurdy-gurdy on here somewhere, too.
More Toronto rotters in the shape of Black Iron Prison, a two-piece whose first release was in 2015 and their last, until now, in 2021. That one, which was covered in this column, documented a live performance as part of a larger ensemble with Gas Chamber, an experimental hardcore band from Buffalo, meaning this eponymous 12-song collection is Matthew Carroll and Eric King’s debut LP proper. It’s compellingly ugly, with spartan arrangements that can nonetheless suck the oxygen out of a room, and positioned at a nexus that would likely be rejected by (dull) purists of a few different genres.
BIP drummer King goes back a couple of decades or so with The Endless Blockade and Column Of Heaven, combos who treated powerviolence as a launchpad for their own ideas. Alongside vocalist Carroll, he’s less orthodox still: these songs are essentially drum solos, of a punishingly efficient rather than masturbatory type, given some electronic embellishment (I think using triggered samples or similar) and paired with his bandmate’s wounded, reverbed-up throat. On ‘Black Iron Prison’ the song, it sounds like there’s a massed rank of percussionists giving it some, while in terser mode I’m sometimes moved to imagine Godflesh if Justin Broadrick had been intending to build on his tenure in Napalm Death rather than move away from it.
The four members of Charred Atlas have a strong cumulative pedigree in the UK grindcore scene. In the case of vocalist Seeduardo Primero and guitarist Chris Catterall, it stretches back to the previous century; drummer Dan Malik and bassist Pete Fulton are slightly greener, and – as the names of their other active bands, FilthXCollins and Horsebastard, might indicate – come from a more buffoonish pocket of the genre. The title of their debut cassette How To Pick A Fight With A Planet (Eggy Tapes), and its 90s videogame homage artwork, prepares you for an unseriousness that Charred Atlas sidestep and eclipse through implausibly compressed pellets of heavy invective.
Most of the 20 songs on HTPAFWAP are under 30 seconds long, but manage to be deeply efficient rather than throwaway, with Malik giving his snare a proper seeing to and Primero hollering like he’s in a D-beat band as opposed to the common grindcore grunt. Charred Atlas don’t grind on this release, exactly, landing on a fastcore/quasi-powerviolence/extreme hardcore sound with echoes of Germany’s Yacopsae and Australia’s Extortion, but if you subscribe to the ‘short, fast and loud’ credo you ought to get plenty from this group.
The Reflecting Skin, from Leeds, released a noisome tape of black metal-curious dirge punk three years ago, and then another one, then ground to a halt. Salute, though, the present scene’s endless appetite for reinvention because two of that band are back with something not wildly dissimilar, Video Evidence. Chris Robinson and Alex Pearson are joined by Tom Shuff, drummer in another of Robinson’s bands Coded Marking, and a bassist called Tom who isn’t (I don’t think) the bassist called Tom from Coded Marking.
This newly assembled quartet debuted with a two-song tape just before Christmas, and return here with three more, again on the trusty Brainrotter label. Their 15-minute discography to date, then, marks Video Evidence out as some highly worthwhile hairy-pawed hellions whose musical niche is not opening up new musical frontiers – yet does offer something different amidst the mid-2020s UK HC scene. It’s blaring and sludgy, especially on ‘Group Dynamic’, but unlike sometimes-likeminded bands such as The Shits and Louse, goes at a canter just as often, with ‘Fluid Exchange’ – the opener from their new tape – getting in and out in 51 seconds.
In a genre susceptible to schlock and outrage, not that we’d have it any other way, Brooklyn trio Pyrex don’t demand your attention like some. Body (Total Punk), their new LP, follows up a self-titled 2023 effort, and other than its song titles being intriguingly body-themed doesn’t betray much about their lives, laughs or loves. None of that is a problem, though, because Pyrex are a devastatingly good band who flutter their lashes at Stoogean protopunk, latterday NYHC (as in the sort of grody stuff that the Toxic State label might release), hard psych and the friendlier end of noise rock, before turning it all into something with their own essential motif.
Ian Rose’s recording, while maintaining a healthy instrumental separation, is loud as heck, and the band go at it in a way that makes it clear they’re maximising this tendency: Joe Hardwick’s skree-ing guitar coda on ‘Nerve Ends’, for example, or the almost UK82-styled thud of Steven Fisher’s kickdrum on ‘Coma’. A turn towards the gothic on ‘Vertebrae’ is then ramped up for ‘Reflex’, which concludes a fine LP in bombastic style and on a blessedly well observed Killing Joke/Rudimentary Peni axis.
Visions is another band name which doesn’t strike me as an attention-grabber, nor Decay a terribly inspired album title, and the Portland group are by no means the first from the city to arrive at gothic post punk from an anarcho starting point. Members’ pre-Visions bands Vicious Pleasures (singer Sara Heise) and Dead Cult (everyone else) add up to handy proving grounds, nevertheless, and though this newest group’s second album has more of a sheen to its sound, it’s got a good thing going on, and spikey heft that leaves no debate this is a punk record.
It’s issued through the semi-dormant Ebullition Records, which was the last word in emotional hardcore during the 1990s – certainly, they didn’t release records like this during that decade. ‘This’ being eight cruising-pace blowdried rockers whose rhythm section – bassist Kerrie Preston and drummer Mike Ruehle – are as crucial a collective component as any given live reggae unit, and whose imposing robustness is countered by Ben Taylor’s shrill guitar tone, sometimes almost electric folk in its breathless jangle. Heise is pretty identifiably post-Siouxsie but projects like an arena rock vocalist, and a late cover of Blitz’s classic ‘Warriors’ is interesting in joining some extra dots vis a vis Visions’ influences, albeit I’d have preferred another of their own songs.
Buscando La Muerte (La Vida Es Un Mus), the debut LP by Mallorca’s Puñal, opens with the same song, ‘Odio’, as Huye De Nosotros, their 2017 demo and previous release. The band have recycled a few more of its tracks for good measure, though you could look at this vinyl debut as giving their razor sharp melodic slammers the treatment they deserve – I mean, a demo is pretty much by definition not supposed to be the finished article, and this newer version of ‘Odio’ is a huge upgrade on the 2017 one.
There’s also the context that Martí Verí, who drummed on that demo, died two years later: this incarnation of Puñal dedicate Buscando La Muerte to him, other bands of his such as Orden Mundial having previously done likewise. 10 songs of springheeled aggro about crime, boredom, hippies and punks is surely the tribute he deserves, rattled out in a quintessentially Spanish style that sounds like various other things (Riot City Records second-stringers; late 80s South America in general; the sort of bands who appeared on comp LPs like Hell Comes To Your House, when a guitar solo is busted out) but is also ran through its own cultural filter.
This self-titled compilation of recordings by Bag People, a Chicago band who moved to New York and dissolved there after about 18 months, will be the first time their music has been meaningfully distributed: a two-song 7-inch from 1985 exists, but supposedly the easiest way of hearing it was by going to their local in Brooklyn and selecting it on the jukebox. Drag City have done the honours here, bundling that single with a demo tape, a CBGBs live number and some entirely unheard stuff, and it reveals a band who approached no wave’s challenging jitter with the frantic energy of hardcore and the severe wallop of what would come to be called noise rock or, briefly and ribaldly, pigfuck.
Taken as a 40-minute whole, Bag People teases the possibility this band would have developed into something generationally good and found an audience to match – say a Sonic Youth-sized one – if the members had existed in less straitened circumstances. Gaylene Goudreau and Carolyn Master were killer guitar twins, fashioning a wall of noise but one where every brick has a distinct quality, and Diane Wlezien’s vocals, weathered as a harbour wall, further accentuate the already-lurking blues element to a good few Bag People songs – a majorly damaged reading of it, natch, not wholly unlike what Royal Trux had waiting but sounding like speed instead of heroin. Most of the band would remain creative after this project went to the wall, with three-fifths regrouping as the equally forceful Of Cabbages And Kings and Algis Kizys toughing it out as Swans’ bassist for nearly a decade.
Straight Hedge Mix April 2025 Tracklist
Siyahkal – Evin Fire
Fleckentarn – Amer
Fell Omen – Don’t Go Hollow, You Have Steel
Black Iron Prison – Black Iron Prison
Charred Atlas – Customer Surface
Video Evidence – Group Dynamic
Pyrex – Digits
Visions – Sickening Feeling
Puñal – Jodido Personaje
Bag People – Instrumental
