Ta2reeban released their debut EP in digital form last September and have just given it physical immortality via a cassette release. So far, so typical. That initial drop, they note, was “the day before Israel blew up thousands of pagers in Lebanon”: one of a literally incalculable number of crimes against humanity which continue to fire the spirit of punk bands like them worldwide. Very few of those bands live in Lebanon, as Ta2reeban do, making this a pretty incredible artefact to have existing in the tactile 2025 world.
Titled صاحب الموتور بيستند عليكن, which I have a hunch loses something in the direct translation to English, this seven-song affair is joy-sparking hardcore punk in excelsis. It demonstrates the potential for brain-drain pogothrash and groovier, almost Fugazi-esque moments to cohabitate in harmony, likewise for an amazingly crude stuck-finger solo (‘شروق’) to be followed in short order by the clearest evidence of the three-piece’s stated Bad Brains influence (‘شروط واحكام’). ‘Psychopaths’ (a token non-Arabic title here) is 38 seconds of early 80s style raw hyperspeed; ‘قتيلة اطفال’ a multifaceted dose of metalpunk riffing, solemnly hench bassline and berserker vocals. All that and it’s part of the return of inspiring Quebec-based tape label A World Divided after a sabbatical of nearly two years. This one’s off to a flyer folks!
Rome, as a home, isn’t primed to generate quite as raised an eyebrow as Beirut in the context of this column; mind you, it’s not like I feature bands from there, or Italy in general, month in month out. Either way, it’s where Rogo are from, and their debut album In Un Mondo Senza Violenza (Symphony Of Destruction) knocked me sick in January.
It’s the sort of hardcore I probably cover more of than anything else in Straight Hedge, and harbour no shame in that might I add: mostly fast as fuck but with moody slow bits (including churning industrial noise intros and outros to the LP), drowned in distortion and reverb, giving the impression of metal fandom without copping metal moves and evidently knowing their shit when it comes to the freekier end of the worldwide 80s scene but presenting it all in an ineffably modern way.
Arturo Jesus’ vocals are a low bilious rumble, not unlike Nicky Sarnella of Arms Race and more recently Turbo, while his three bandmates go for it with a fervour that compares to 2020s HC hotties like Muro, Public Acid and Permission (who Rogo reminded me of more, and more immediately, than anyone). So we have a pleasantly familiar conundrum where a band are, ostensibly, not bringing a whole lot new to the game but whose existence is not just worthwhile but vital as long as there’s a possibility that you (meaning me) might get to see them bang this out in some windowless sweatbox TBC. Oh and the LP booklet is styled after an Italian passport – crimson-coloured, natch, for all you Remainiacs.
It’s such a tonic to have an album by Netherlands hardcore lifers Seein Red to review. Refuse Resist (Way Back When/Autoreverse/Armageddon) is their first properly new one since 2006, in a history that goes back to the late 1980s, and then several more years again with pre-Seein Red proto-grindcore band Lärm. So while these cats have to be knocking on the sexagenarian door if not already granted entry, the energy that rises off this LP is flabbergasting. It’s not quite as fast as Lärm, but it’s not far off.
You get stuff here that you don’t get too often in modern hardcore, like 27 songs on an LP (shortest song ten seconds, longest 114); sampled speech intros (and sometimes outros, as with the sizeable excerpt of Mick Lynch in full flow which concludes ‘General Strike’) amidst a sequencing job that otherwise positively slams one track into the next; songs titled ‘Animals Killed’ and ‘Tired Of Religion’ amidst more noncommittal expressions of gloom like ‘Nightmare’ and ‘Bleak Future’. The last named of these songs is preceded by ‘Links AF’, on which Dutch jazz saxophonist Benjamin Herman adds some freerange honk – something of a ‘modern hardcore’ gambit, you might say, although as a band whose first ever release was on a 1988 Palestine benefit comp alongside The Ex, I doubt much of this is new to them.
Oldies hour – a statement made in only the most admiring terms – continues with For The Dark by The Brood, who have been kicking around Philadelphia since the early 2010s and finally release their debut album here, again through Providence’s Armageddon label. Members have totted up a cumulative century-plus in various long-gone crust punk and hardcore ensembles, with that first-term-of-Dubya era thrash scene a common proving ground – guitarist Bill Chamberlain’s Caustic Christ feel prominent to me here – by which metric The Brood are almost tuneful.
More objectively, For The Dark is a savage rocker and a heavy hitter, its players’ grounding in classic American hardcore evident but with signifiers pulled from various other enclaves. Chamberlain and Shawn St. Clair make a tasty guitar team, their metal-plated solos leaving lingering tastes of Anti-Cimex and Poison Idea. At its most bombastic, this LP warrants the ‘Motörcharged’ (that’s Motörhead and Discharge, for those at the back) portmanteau, while other, gluebaggier moments like ‘Outsider Life’ feel of a piece with the early 80s Riot City Records set. When bassist Janine St. Clair (Shawn’s wife) sings lead, as on ‘The Best Parts Of You Died’, I’m specifically reminded of Nottingham’s Blind Eye and their vocalist Annie Spaziano: a dot of light, though only a dot, amongst Ned Wells’ unfailingly gruff delivery.
NYC punk perennial Gage Allison has been involved in some smashers this decade – my opinions on Porvenir Oscuro and Lathe Of Heaven are available via the search function top right of your screen – but when he cooked up a plan for Cathexis, a mudflap-filthy metalpunk band, enlisted members didn’t gel as hoped (in his telling). Thus it became a solo project with Allison playing everything, and adopting the alias Neuromancer into the bargain; a four-song demo tape on the Roachleg label is the result.
Though armed with the knowledge that this is not a recording of a group of people performing together, Cathexis has properly nailed that boombox-in-the-corner-of-the-room studio aesthetic. Allison’s drums often sound like they’re falling into each other in the back of a van as much as being played per se, with a taste for guitar breaks that rise like sharpened swords from a bed of bass-chugging speed metal sludge. His vox are sub-Tom Warrior exhortations of scorn that could be in any language though I assume English, and after nine frantic minutes this project takes its place alongside Berlin’s similarly inclined Desintegración Violenta in the pantheon of proto-black metal dabblers with probable GISM and Zouo influence.
Mugger, from Austin, are pretty clearly not bowling from the tough-guy end of the hardcore pitch: ‘All Time Tough Guy’, song six of 15 on debut album Luck Forever (Quiet Panic) ends with singer Anna Troxell adopting a famous old refrain, “Girls to the front!” They’re also not above using a bit of that brute sonic force and dangerous looks for their own ends, and the results are refreshing like a jet of pressure-wash water. The back of this album’s sleeve depicts six people (notably, there are only four people in Mugger) variously crouched around a manhole cover or looking at something on the floor: the sense from Luck Forever’s music is that they approached it more seriously than the photoshoot.
Guitarist Daniel Fried and bassist Lisa Alley (who has a stoner rock past) tune down, often exhibiting a NYHC-spawned ‘whoops! all mosh parts’ approach to tempo, though when Mugger crank it on ‘101’ and ‘I Just Wish’ you don’t miss the moody chuggage. John Brannon joins Troxell on vocals for ‘Find Out’, also a pre-LP single, and the frontwoman’s seeming attempt to go toe-to-toe with the Negative Approach icon pays dividends: put another way, I’m not sure Brannon really adds much to the song. Lyrics mix up the personal and political, most self-evidently on ‘Dear SCOTUS’ but more drolly on ‘I Just Wish’ – “…that somebody wanted me the way the cops do”.
It would be stretching a point to call Reno, NV’s Rotary Club a political punk band. They are however a punk band obsessed with telephone landlines, and landlines are political. It’s only a few years since polling companies stopped using them exclusively to canvas the populace, having accepted that only geriatric hermits with ‘colourful’ social views still have a home phone plugged in. Time was a ringing landline, expected or no, could be picked up with gusto, but expanded communication channels and sociolinguistic evolution mean that lots of people are only likely to phone their nearest and dearest if they have terrible news to deliver. Isn’t that sad?
Seeing as Rotary Club’s Sphere Of Service (Iron Lung), their debut album, is probably my favourite release of this issue, I guess I’ll write a bit about it. A mysterious unit – four in number, I think – their beat is obscure regional punk from the late 70s and early 80s that sometimes pulls the same sort of moves as, say, the first crop of Dangerhouse Records bands (peep ‘Touch Tone’ and its bassline) and is occasionally almost fast enough to be hardcore (‘ITU-D’, ‘Convenience Attractor’) but often approximates toughened-up new wave/powerpop (the entirely daffy ‘My Landline’). You can call it the Killed By Death sound, as Iron Lung do, if you wish. There’s a pleasantly mechanical stiffness to their rhythms that’s almost Devo-like, though I don’t think there’s a keyboard to be had herein, and an almost overwhelming charm factor that makes Sphere Of Service perfect for your next sock hop.
The time is right to catch some rays with Merienda, described by drummer Arndt (aka Aahnt, also of Pissy, Mülltüte and Lavender Hex) as “a little summer band” and existing for, it seems, three weeks during 2024 while singer Violeta Hinojosa was on holiday in Berlin following a European tour in her ‘main’ band, Mexican duo Cremalleras. I saw Cremalleras on that tour and they were great, plus it was my birthday, which was thoughtful of them.
Anyway, Merienda recorded – and have now released – 1243, a four-song cassette available to purchase for a recession-reversing €2, that’s two euros, plus German postage to your cursed nation. Completed by bassist Clara, whose activities outside this band are unknown to me, the trio hit a seam of Spanish-language diamonds in their short life. Less turbocharged than Cremalleras but packing comparable ramalama energy, ‘Pestaña’ and ‘Espejo’ are like the Avengers crossed with Bratmobile and impersonating the Lurkers or some other middle-shelf UK77 band – which I mean positively! ‘Pared’ is slower and weirder, bass-driven playground-chant garage, and ‘Gallinero’ is spiffy goth-punk gone pop-punk like Madrid’s Rata Negra do so well, every so often.
‘Slower and weirder’ gets clung to like a child’s novelty inflatable as Leeds foursome Solderer step into the light with Normal Style, their (late) summer 24 debut EP released in January by Peroquébien, a French tape label. Solderer are, in personnel if not in practise, recently disbanded post punk trio Beige Palace – Ant Bedford, Kelly Bishop and Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe – with Theo Gowans on guitar, making sounds slightly less baffling than his surrealist noise quacking as Territorial Gobbing but only slightly.
As much as Normal Style is in many ways an abrasive and unrefined introduction to Solderer, its sound also owes a lot to Vinehill-Cliffe (who also sings in another Leeds band, Thank) and his in-studio whims. Songs like ‘Childhood Home’ or ‘Sanctuary’ which are, on their face, forward-marching post-punky anarcho gear are treated to thickly applied layers of post-production: ‘Sanctuary’ relates a tale of volunteering in some sort of ape house, to overt hostility from the inhabitants, and cuts up (what I think are) Bishop’s vocals so they resemble a sort of angry simian gibber. Away from punk qua punk mode, Solderer’s arrangements skate somewhere around Polvo and This Heat, with Gowans – not often seen lugging a guitar – spreading deliciously atonal tones across songs about nightmarish hotels, ersatz seafront rollercoasters and the experience of being seen as someone’s “favourite fat shadow”.
This month’s final band, Steatopygous, are from the Wiltshire market town Devizes, which is a nice place to spend an evening drinking Wadworth 6X before walking along the canal further into south-west England (other activities not specifically based on the writer’s life are probably also available) but not renowned for its music scene. [Bar also housing 50% of Luminous Foundation, Ed] That hasn’t deterred Eliza, Ewan and Poppy, Steatopygous’ three teenaged members, or Simon Smith, who lives in nearby Trowbridge and started a tape label, Sketchbook, to release their demo.
Its three songs are inspirational DIY clatter, played with noisy insistence and bearing the hallmarks of classic punk and canonical alt-rock – but upholding the ideology of one subgenre above all. “My mother’s a bitch and she taught me how to be / Riot grrrl’s not a trait, it’s the dominant gene!” says ‘Cassowary’, and if I were to quote as many lyrics as I’d like from this, ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Marie’s Wedding Song’ I’d be here all day. Suffice to say I hope the little boy has heard this song, cleansed himself of his manipulative male feminism and got a haircut, and that Marie left her fiancé at the altar as recommended by Steatopygous.
Straight Hedge Mix February 2025 Tracklist
Ta2reeban – شروق
Rogo – Esclavo Del Producto
Seein Red – Vastgoed Maffia
The Brood – Outsider Life
Cathexis – Deadly Reign
Mugger – All Time Tough Guy
Rotary Club – ITU-D
Merienda – Gallinero
Solderer – Going Mad In A Hotel
Steatopygous – Little Boy
