For whatever reason, or more likely no particular one, every few years there seems to be a cluster of new UK DIY punk bands releasing demo tapes within weeks of each other. This month’s column has no fewer than ten of them, the filling in a sandwich composed of four 12-inch slices of circular vinyl bread. Sort of thing.
The La Vida Es Un Mus label have just released Love & Revenge, the second album by Kriegshög from Tokyo. A revered institution in Japanese hardcore despite or because of their sporadic schedule – this is their first full-length since 2010, with two singles also released in that time – these eight songs meet plenty of expected stylistic targets but rock, swing and groove more palpably than older Kriegshög records, and most of their domestic peers.
Scarcely demure as regards instrumental tone, with the bass of Shingo (all four Kriegshög members are mononymous) especially gnarly, this is nevertheless an album driven by riffs over distortion. The title track gives me Damaged-era Black Flag vibes as much as anything, while songs are often long enough to allow for expansion, crescendos and all-round sonic grandstanding. The title of LP opener ‘虚空’, one of four songs in Japanese, translates as ‘void’, and vocalist Masaki sounds like he’s shouting into one, or perhaps imploring a tornado to turn around and leave. Everyone in this band is a crucial unit, though, with Love & Revenge’s drum style skewing closer to John Bonham than trad D-beat and ‘冷たい人間 ’ closing things out with near-post punk rhythmic brood and guitar like a district of blown-out shop windows.
Both ur-punk and pre-punk, having formed over half a century ago, albums by Cock Sparrer have often been once-a-decade events, although Hand On Heart (Captain Oi!) arrives a mere seven years after Forever, its predecessor. Billed as the London band’s last or “most likely” last release, depending on which sales notes you read, the finished product is spirited and energetic – if you listened to it without knowing anything about Cock Sparrer, you’d surely never assume they were mostly of retirement age and supposedly ready to take that option.
A canonical band in the history of Oi! despite operating at a degree of reserve from that scene, from brilliant 1983 album Shock Troops onward Cock Sparrer have built their sound from glam, pub rock, music hall standards (or Cockney pub singalongs of them) and something like power pop, all played on big crunchy punk rock guitars. There has, it seems, been a concerted effort to make Hand On Heart the group’s most polished album, production-wise: this includes the presence of, quote, “string arranger Simon Dobson (Bring Me The Horizon, Mike Oldfield)” on penultimate song ‘My Forgotten Dream’. An addition I doubt most Cock Sparrer fans were crying out for, although the song is serviceable enough, and has a guitar part that sounds like ‘Disco 2000’ by Pulp of all things.
Grit is generally lurking in these ten songs, though, with ‘Mind Your Own Business’ and ‘One Way Ticket’ sporting distinctly heroic solos and drummer Steve Bruce keeping tempos at a rolling boil. The first of those is vocalist Colin McFaull’s aggiest moment; more often the frontman’s long-developed sentimental streak fuels his lyrical content, along with a habit of speaking almost entirely in idioms. It says much about Cock Sparrer’s hard-built legacy that these songs sound entirely earnest and genuine.
Ten UK demos, one paragraph each, alphabetical order, let’s go! ASBO are from Brighton, debuted about six months ago and have released a live tape and, via Glaswegian label Pogo Till You Drop, this five-song demo. Their influences, as listed by vocalist Oli Dunk (previously found in London’s Zek), can all be summarised as ‘American hardcore bands who borrowed from British skinhead bands’, and there’s definitely a sense of a transatlantic tennis rally with ASBO’s grody blare, which sports the mutant clatter of early 80s NYHC but – thanks in large part to Dunk himself – some distinctly southern English menace.
Bristolian goths Bruxism have been doing the rounds for just over a year, and their summer ‘23 demo has recently been made physical via Eggy Tapes and Noise Merchant, although both labels have sold out. It’s sterling, swirling stuff, replete with buzzing bass and keyboards that lend heavy texture without getting to the point of oppressiveness. Don’t see much point in throwing in a Joy Division cover (‘Warsaw’), personally, but hey it’s their demo not mine, and the four Bruxism originals here are what seals the deal, glowering with ill-disguised glee and landing somewhere between Clan Of Xymox and Rakta maybe.
Also from Bristol and with the patronage of Eggy Tapes for this two-song effort, Chewing Glass Collective have been around for maybe three years and sling sludgy metallic hardcore. ‘Blood Bleacher’ has death/grind tunings, cookie monster vocals and pitworthy breakdowns; ‘Anaesthetic Attack (Destruction Redux)’ drags itself along concrete for one minute and blasts up the road for the other. Odd fellows out in their local scene, sonically speaking, Chewing Glass Collective do however have a highly Bristolian asset – their own soundsystem – and use it for clubnights which seek to explore the common ground between extreme metal and bass culture in its myriad forms.
Dead Name is a great band name, just waiting to be used, but you’d want it to go to a good home wouldn’t you. Happy to report that on the evidence of these four songs of fuzzed-out queercore rippage, to say nothing of the members’ qualifications in the field, that’s very much happened! London-dwelling and comprising personnel from Woolf, Brighton anarchos Ättestor and hippypunk veterans Omega Tribe, it’s only Dead Name singer Jade who’s an entirely new voice to this listener, but an impeccably forceful one for their bandmates’ midpaced attack – expounding on topics of vibeless Tories, murderous coppers and foxhunting wankers (and resistance to same). Its focus is distinctly British but outwith the lyrics I could well believe this had came out of South or Central America.
Thought I’d be really annoying and review a tape that isn’t for sale any more and whose music isn’t online anywhere. It’s by Hellscape, who live in London; this two-song promo was purchased with haste after seeing them play the Damage Is Done fest earlier this year. The last song they played that afternoon, ‘The Grave’, is the first on the tape and it’s absolutely class if you like slow-burn deathrock with hooks big enough to take back in time and sell to some 90s grunge chancers. ‘Traitors’ Gate’, which follows, is shorter and more hardcore, blessed further by a sample of Kat Slater off of Eastenders calling someone a slapper. Plan seems to be for these songs to resurface on a 7-inch co-released by the Donor and Advanced Perspective labels.
Moist Crevice titled their debut cassette Psychic Violence after what they were attempting to do to me, personally, when choosing their name. However I rose above it and am now hailing this London band’s zesty no wave-y dramaticism. It’s something like Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth meets the more compact flailings of Perfect Pussy and a big spoon of goth rock: the title track has a riff that starts about 40 seconds in that’s as good as anything featured this month, and Irene Montemurro is a compelling frontperson. Wearer of elaborate, high society ball-type costumes onstage, the vocalist – Swiss-born, Italian-raised – sings three Moist Crevice songs in English and one, ‘Rodni Grad’, in Serbian.
If you flip for crossover thrash then don’t waste another minute not listening to Nerve Agent, who come from Birmingham and just dropped their Game Of Death EP on Noise Merchant. This is an absolute bastard! Not only was Nerve Agent’s debut show as recently as February, it was directly before Helsinki’s Foreseen, who I suspect have influenced these Midlanders at least partially. Game Of Death opens with a sample of Vera Lynn, for unexplained reasons, and clamps its jaws around the chew toy for 19 solid minutes thereafter. Dan Warren is a great vocalist, with just the right amount of hardcore in his holler and lyrics clearly from that side of the tracks too.
More than a hot streak of metal in Ruined Virtue’s sound, as evidenced on this demonstration tape: it’s another oceanic linkup, with Pogo Till You Drop this time assisted by Contact Minimal of Montreal. Ruined Virtue are from Sheffield and while I’m not entirely au fait with their backgrounds – frontman Harrisen Jacques’ seems to mainly be in straight-edge bands – they strike me as fitting in neatly with, and measuring up to, likely local lads like Rat Cage and Stray Bullet. These five songs have bombastic tendencies (a fadeout on ‘Sanctus Bell’!) and cumulatively land somewhere between mid-80s Swedish HC, doomladen metalpunk and recent smashers like Kinetic Orbital Strike.
This edition’s final Noise Merchant tape is by Sex Germs of Leicester. They’ve been going for about two years though seem to have increased activity since members’ other bands Nothing Clean (powerviolence) and Knice (garage rock) hung it up; the eight-song Germcore is something different again but comparably boisterous, mid-to-fast punk with robust hardcore basslines that often feels somewhat ‘2006’ to me in a Shitty Limits or Brutal Knights kinda way. Anna Hazlewood bolsters the whole with pan-scouring vocals and an upfront sense of humour stops agreeably short of wackiness.
And to finish this demo dump we have a band who appear to be operating completely anonymously, which naturally I take as a challenge – but no, Skint are running rings round me (for now). The band were kind enough to post me their tape, with a return address in Vauxhall; the inlay says it was recorded in London and Boorloo, aka Perth (the Australian one). Skint’s vocalist laments, semi-thematically, the “meal deals … and clearance food” which fuel their existence, and lodge an appeal for personal ecological responsibility on ‘Reduce’: “Really need a plastic bag?” That one’s got a ‘forgotten Hackney anarcho band from 1985’ lyrical vibe, but musically it and its three sibling tracks are hyperefficient brickwall hardcore that swings us all the way round to that ASBO tape I wrote about a thousand words or so ago.
Don’t know much about Geo, never heard of most of the bands their five members have also performed in, can’t even list any fascinating facts about their home city of Groningen without cheating… but I can tell you that their debut album Out Of Body (Erste Theke Tonträger) is some finely itchy scratchy post punk eccentrica. Got a vague sense that this sort of music, splicing no wave, funk and disco in variously abrasive and accessible ways like people have been doing for some 45 years now, is a little unfashionable at present, but it’ll always retain a cool frisson, although Geo are – pleasingly – too yelpy and needling to give the impression they care much about that sort of thing.
“The music sounds weird… the rhythm sounds fine,” Jorne Visser sprechgesangs on ‘Sunglasses’, attempting to review Out Of Body with its opening lyrics. It’s his and Michiel Klein’s twin guitar action that gives Geo much of its punk bite, unrolling sheets of Teenage Jesus-type noise as Maud van Maarseveen’s basslines maintain a dignified solemnity and Ype Zijlstra cowbells the heck out of songs like the endearingly dopey-sounding ‘Caught A Cricket’. Visser’s vocal style is sort of a midpoint of G.W. Sok, ex of The Ex, and Ben Wallers from the Country Teasers et al, although less proselytising or noxious than either of those. “Help! I’m a rock!” he appears to claim during ‘Wu Obt Fas’, a very lively one on the evidence of this record.
To finish as we started, an album’s worth of hulking hardcore out of Tokyo: this time it’s Klonns and their debut LP Heaven (Iron Lung). By complete coincidence, they’re scheduled to be playing in London at the exact moment I’m writing this sentence, and though they should be back in Japan by the time you read this I can only imagine some pits got opened up if Klonns can replicate this sort of downtuned blizzard-beastliness in public. Like Kriegshög, they have a few punishingly noisy releases in their discography – Vvlgar, from 2019, is some commendably chewy crasher crust earache – but have tweaked their sound and folded in some non-obvious influences to fine effect.
The electronic intro and outro to Heaven doesn’t actually tell you much about the stuff between the bookends, but does help to back up the group’s intention to make the album “a comprehensive overview of Tokyo and Japanese underground culture”. An implausible speedrun with less than 20 minutes’ playtime, surely, so you might be better off just treating this as a really good screwy neo-HC release with some well-realised embellishments and fleeting features for pals including techno producer Golpe Mortal (death metal vox on ‘Heaven’ the track) and Sailor Kannako (screech owl vox on ‘Realm’), who plays in electrogoth duo Xian with someone from Klonns. There’s a certain type of person who prizes the inherent sonic tics of Japanese hardcore punk – ones which are mostly jettisoned on Heaven in favour of a sound that could have come from pretty much anywhere but stands up as an example of a scene that’s global, contemporary and exciting.
