Speaking as a pig-ignorant monoglot with a computer, there’s nothing I enjoy more than knuckling down with a hot new record sung in one of the many languages I don’t speak, pasting its lyrics into Google Translate and critiquing the malformed English results. No doubt all manner of subtle linguistic and phonetic excellence went into these words from the heart – I wouldn’t know, but in the moment I still feel like I’m ‘doing the work’ and so can bask in a glow of self-satisfaction.
So it is that the lyrics of Dorota Stochmalska, vocalist of Warsaw’s Traüme, are interesting as hell in English, probably far better in Polish, and a component of what might be my favourite punk release of 2024, their vinyl debut Wrzask (Quality Control). They released a demo tape a little under two years ago, which evidently escaped my attention, but better late than never when it comes to gleaming, gothic post punk played at hardcore tempo with anarcho stridency.
Introduced with a minute of moody synth, thereafter Wrzask is urgent and hammering, fat-free guitar downstrokes and bass-driven verses giving way to moshable mushroom clouds of powerchords. Piotr Królikiewicz’s guitar yowls in the grand Bauhaus/Killing Joke tradition and producer Rafał Wiewiór applies post production with enthusiasm and care in equal measure, Stochmalska’s vocals often left to echo right across the bridge. On ‘Mogłabym Zabijać’, the record’s shortest and hardcore-est song, we find her reflecting on her potential to murder in unusually baroque ways: dragging the victim behind her car, or setting off a firecracker in their anal cavity.
Over and out in under 20 minutes, indeed barely 15 if you’re listening digitally (the vinyl includes a bonus track, a cover of ‘Wstyd’ by 90s post punk Poles Post Regiment), Wrzask ought to be eaten up by fans of contemporary acts like Bad Breeding, or 80s innovators like The Proletariat. Quality Control, a London label with Polish heritage, namecheck Cold War-era bands Siekiera and Zbombardowana Laleczka, so time for this ignoramus to brush up.
Brendan Reichhardt plays or has played in a lot of bands, even for a 2020s hardcore musician, and two of them have released boss records in recent weeks. Both Black Button and Cicada are nominally based in Richmond, a hundred miles or so south of Washington DC where Reichhardt lives, and are each weird, ugly and intense in differing ways. Internal Life (Dynastic Yellow Star), Black Button’s second 12-inch, clangs belligerently, with a guitar sound at the midpoint of Sonic Youth and Die Kreuzen (peep ‘Bliss In Vain’, especially about the two-minute mark) and a vocalist who doesn’t really either sing or shout but rather talks extremely brusquely, akin to Brendan Wells from Uranium Club if he’d had an especially bad day. The results sometimes wind up as close to no wave as hardcore, but there’s nothing arty (in the pejorative sense of the term) or insouciant about this six-song ranting dispatch.
Cicada, who as well as Reichhardt share bassist Kevin McCormick with Black Button, release their vinyl debut Wicked Dream via Unlawful Assembly. It has nine songs and sounds like a musical interpretation of one of those cartoon drawings of a fight with some hands and feet sticking out of a dust cloud. The foursquare oompah beat that opens the opener, ‘Epiphany’, is a red herring, in that basically everything which follows it is far weirder rhythmically. Most commonly running at a frantic pace – save for the majority of the title track, whose menacing rumble is a cue card for pit mayhem I’ll wager, and ‘In Life…’, which devolves into some experimental and, again, Sonic Youth-y guitar tinkering – Cicada’s racket is studded with micro-bursts of tangible melody. This lot can really play, but they don’t pause for long enough to get self-congratulatory about it. Vocalist Jordan’s black metal pukebark style might be a downer for some listeners, likewise it being mixed so low he sounds like he’s outside the studio, but does encourage comparisons to their early-80s Virginian forefathers United Mutation. Very positive comparisons, at that.
Got plenty of time for this new EP by Punitive Damage, whose four members variously live in Vancouver and Seattle. Hate Training is available on 12-inch via Denver’s Convulse or cassette via northern English label Conviction, the latter a handy option for anyone who likes physical media but baulks a little at paying the thick end of £20 for eight minutes of music. Cost of living woes aside, that’s the perfect length for Punitive Damage to say their piece and peace out, leaving us with some lean, righteous brickwall hardcore embellished with fiery metal solos.
Steph Jerkova is a great vocalist, too, not so much projecting her voice as plugging it into the MSG Sphere, and if it’s easy to envisage this sound going over like a charm with fans of zoomer-beloved single-syllable hardcore groups like Gel and Scowl, I’d think Punitive Damage could hold their own on a bill with scuzzier, deeper-underground HC acts too. Billed, admittedly not by the band itself, as “a set of songs that directly address the Israel/Palestine conflict,” this strikes me as a different idea of ‘directly’ than the one I’d use: save for one line in ‘Blight Of Apathy’, the last of Hate Training’s six tracks, Jerkova’s lyrics could really be referencing any historical genocide. There again, that might tell its own story, and there’s no ambiguity over where the band stand on this matter.
Kill Someone You Hate (Brainrotter/Unlawful Assembly) by Bobby Cole’s one-man band Total Con comes adorned with sleeve art of a feral punk – or is it Mick Jagger in a spiked jacket? – decapitating a hapless policeman with a single swish of a pocketknife. This is the second Total Con tape, the first (released in spring of this year) having featured a song named ‘Kill A Cop’ among other knowingly shopworn hardcore themes.
Cole, from Essex and now Yorkshire-based, has had a few bands on the go at any given point in the last few years, each burrowing into a different corner of international hardcore history: in this case, really fast stuff from the mid-1980s that foreshadowed grindcore but shunned metal. The bass sounds like a nest of hornets and the guitar parts have that uncontrolled quality where everything could feasibly be a solo, but also possibly nothing – apart from ‘Again And Again’, where Omar Raja of Leeds grind goons Ona Snop is credited with a solo specifically. If you’ve seen Ona Snop live, you’ll be able to visualise Raja pulling rock-gawd poses while playing it, which can only be a bonus.
Two big scoops of noisy American d-beat now, occupying the midriff of this column like a bullet belt. Yellowcake come from Phoenix and on A Fragmented Truth (Not For The Weak/Total Peace), their second seven-inch, they play fast – by the standards of this hardcore subgenre – and sound desperate. Or, at least, vocalist Genesis Noemi does, her chosen style a hoarse cry for salvation from the stairway to hell itself (which I’m not sure instruments can do). Drummer Mike McAllister, who changes up his beats more than this sort of music obliges him to, has some past Straight Hedge form as a member of Extended Hell from New York; if you liked that band there’s every chance you’ll like Yellowcake, though I don’t hear much of Extended Hell’s American HC influence in A Fragmented Truth, rather a hefty saluting of Japan and Sweden’s pooled noisecore/crasher crust history. ‘Mind Scabbed Over’, which closes the EP and has a fadeout to boot, runs to all of three minutes and 15 seconds, though is effectively two songs glued together.
Atomic Prey, meanwhile, live in Portland (as do all American d-beat bands, in a spiritual sense), and on their self-titled, Iron Lung Records-released debut 12-inch they shoot for psychedelic heights. Successfully, I think, which is to say that I’m indisposed to get in the dosed zone and so can’t judge it as a soundtrack to an altered state – but Atomic Prey is festooned with the tics and tricks of high-intensity guitar-based psych music, hitched to the thud and blunder of boiling mad hardcore punk.
‘Glue’, a song about doomscrolling one’s way through a life of shite, has phaser effects you will gladly chase around the room like a cat following a laser pen; the guitar solo on ‘Human Expression’ is High Rise multiplied by Disclose, which has to be a few people’s niche idea of perfection. Aba Asantewa, possibly fronting her first band, yaps like a rusty steel-jaw trap but writes varied and interesting lyrics, with ‘Fear’ reducing the textual minimalism of Discharge down further to sage aphorisms. Great stuff, and a quick return to this column for Atomic Prey’s Alix Beyer and Ian Makua, who also play in the noise rock-leaning Daydream as reviewed in January.
I caught Coded Marking of Leeds on tour last year, opening a bill that was crusty and mulletheaded at its upper end, and while their motorik gleam and glower offered little for cider-swilling stereotypes, it did the job for me. Even better, they now have a self-titled and self-released cassette album that feels decidedly brisker, more energetic and – yes! – more punk than I remember that set being. A three-piece, for this listener it’s singer/guitarist Chris Robinson who’s the entry point of interest: Coded Marking doesn’t sound like Cattle, Soft Issues or The Reflecting Skin, groups in which he features or has done, but puts an individual spin on preexisting styles, as those groups do.
Robinson, Tom Bradley (bass) and Tom Shuff (drums) dig repetition repetition repetition, the effective contrast of herbert-toned vocals and hypnotic guitar parts – ‘Last Floor’ is like Michael Rother trying to keep pace with Motörhead – and recording songs of between nine and eleven minutes in length, namely ‘Predissolve’ and ‘Fade To Ground’. These slot into the lineage of punk classics of the form, such as the Wipers’ ‘Youth Of America’ or Drive Like Jehu’s ‘Luau’, where the vibe is less “hey guys, now we’re gonna do our epic” and more “we’re having a blast playing this and we’ll finish when we’re done”.
A late turn towards pop music, all things being relative, with two releases on the rarely uninteresting Drunken Sailor label of Staffordshire. The first, by Loosey of New York, is actually a reissue, as per its title Winter Promo ‘23, but you probably didn’t buy a copy first time round and this one (co-released by US label Roachleg) is on vinyl with seven more minutes of music. Loosey have Oi! scene credentials thanks largely to vocalist Fizzy, best known for fronting The Royal Hounds – whose glam leanings leach into these songs, albeit outfought by an apparent taste for mid-70s powerpop and Faces-type alehouse rock. Improbably, ‘There You Were (Alligator Song)’ is the second time in 2024 I’ve likened something reviewed in this column to ‘Disco 2000’ by Pulp (the other one is on the latest Cock Sparrer album), and that extra seven minutes I mentioned is a ‘Special Dance Remix’ of it which brings in congas and flute in its latter stages. Very mid-2000s beardo disco and quite a distance from 100mph skinhead glory.
Referenced artists
United Mutation
Straight Hedge! Noel Gardner Reviews Punk & HC For June
The early-autumn Drunken Sailor schedules also bring another self-titled debut LP with ill-disguised heartland rock tendencies, by the three-quarters Texan Rowdy. The odd quarter out, Scot Bryan McGarvey, appeared on this label a few years ago as part of Goldie Dawn, whose solitary single was lots of fun and not stylistic aeons from what’s happening here. You’ve got garage rock, power pop, proto punk, punk punk and outbreaks of soulfulness which sorta threaten to get slushy but turn it around each time.
Rebecca Whitley, ex of various garage turkey groups over the last 25 years, handles most of the lead vocals here, a semi-frazzled huskiness her calling card (I even get a Jennifer Herrema vibe from ‘Cost Of It’) but with a dash of 60s girl-group sugar left to dissolve. I must though warn readers of this family website about ‘Just The Tip’, on which Whitley describes the startling penetrative potential of a male organ in such lurid terms you are advised to banish your servants from the house before settling down to listen.
Straight Hedge Mix November 2024 Tracklist
Traüme – ‘Mogłabym Zabijać’
Black Button – ‘Bliss In Vain’
Cicada – ‘Wicked Dream’
Punitive Damage – ‘Hate Training’
Total Con – ‘Again And Again’
Yellowcake – ‘Blood Soaked System’
Atomic Prey – ‘Fear’
Coded Marking – ‘Neon Cross’
Loosey – ‘There You Were (Alligator Song)’ (Special Dance Remix)
Rowdy – ‘Cost Of It’
