Renaissance (La Vida Es Un Mus), the debut album by Montreal’s Béton Armé after six years and a fair whack of shorter releases, dropped just after the last one of these columns was published. Still, I don’t think it’s a big stress to review something whose sound is somewhere between four and five decades old two months late, all things considered.
I’m being facetious, slightly: Béton Armé play, in essence, skinhead punk rock in the classic fashion, and being Quebecois (Quebec Oi!s, if you will – though I wouldn’t) also sing in French, which mean they sound somewhat like an 80s French Oi! band, because you can’t not do really. With Renaissance, they are also broadening their horizons a little, which may account for parts of this 11 song album sounding like Stiff Little Fingers, early Bad Religion and pre-punk hooligan glam. (Part of the verse in ‘Montréal’ also makes me think of ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’ by Spizzenergi, which I doubt is intentional.) You might note those are still narrow horizons, collectively, and this is fine and also what makes Renaissance very good.
Danick Joseph-Dicaire is evidently Béton Armé’s singer for a reason, with ample melody in his bark, but if he didn’t have an unruly barbershop’s worth of my-boys-are-behind-me doubling-up then this record would sound very different. It can get a bit much, like when ‘Lève-Toi’ ends with a bout of woah-ohing BVs and, three seconds later, ‘Per La Vita’ begins exactly the same way, but if that’s a full dealbreaker I submit you were never likely to be on board with what Béton Armé are selling anyhow.
Debuting on the 11PM label with Hard Times, a six-song 7-inch, after little more than a year of activity, Who Pays are a New York hardcore band. Not as in ‘NYHC’, strictly speaking, that being a stylistic designation as much as a geographical one. Although you could make a case for them bearing closer resemblance than most of their most immediate New York hardcore peers do. Enough equivocating! I must inform you this EP is a top fucking shelf committed nonstop rocker before my time is up.
Who Pays released a 2024 demo tape as their effective introduction to the world, and though its pockmarked barrage may be more to many punks’ taste, Hard Times is streets ahead when it comes to arrangements and performance. ‘German Intimacy’ is Oi!-leaning hardcore for all the 78 seconds it takes to open the release, but it’s not long before there are solos, middle eights, key changes, stuff like that, with Kirk Podell attacking the mic with canine abandon and his three bandmates dipping into garage punk and 70s metal in amongst their Career Suicide/Poison Idea type rampage. The title track is in fact a cover, originally by cult soulman Baby Huey, and Who Pays split the difference between retaining its essence and making it different enough to be a worthwhile exercise.
There’s nothing with Crude Image’s self-titled tape saying who’s behind it, which is common enough with this sort of thing, but – as of late July – no clues anywhere else online either. I take such behaviour as a case to crack, not least because the credits which are provided – Lindsay Corstophine (Sauna Youth, Marcel Wave et al) on recording, Josie Edwards (Sniffany & The Nits) on cover art – suggest Crude Image is a London-based entity on nodding terms with others previously promoted herein. Or is that what they want me to think?
Like hardcore punk in general, and particularly desperate-sounding speedy nihilism like this, Crude Image leaves you with an urgent need to hear it being hammered out live, in which case they’d presumably have to choose whether to cash their anonymity chips. It stomps hard and fast but often does so with an offtime rhythmic sense, sheets of noizy reverb and guitar solos that seek to disrupt more than complement. ‘Walk The Earth’ comes correct at the end with a deathrock bassline on fast forward and a suitably unformed guitar solo, but before that, nine other songs of no-brakes nihilism render this project checkable for folks into anyone from Muro to Quarantine to Golpe.
I may never be stood in the same room as Gagu, who are from a small city in Connecticut, but have learned their names with minimal effort and really dig the angry-serpent hardcore writhe of their demo tape, which Richter Scale are handling in the UK. Self-recorded in the drummer’s basement a little less than a year after their spring 2024 formation, the eight songs on this release are decidedly unvarnished, but sound as hench as they needs ta’ for a release of this nature.
They’re also fast as shit off a shovel: the spectre of Gagu satisfying the ‘modern hardcore bands with three- or four-letter names’ trope overly easily does rear its head on this demo, but Louis Baumer, Zach Fontanez and Zach Voytek are throttling it sufficiently that I can yak about groups like Speed Plans, or that Total Nada EP I reviewed in the last column, instead of just doing the “for fans of: Gag, Gel, Spy, Bib, Hoax” copypasta. Member-wise, that only leaves vocalist Lexi Petit to big up, and this shall be done via reference to her cornea-popping tearout style – again, a popular one in modern hardcore, but rarely with this much metallic beastliness – and lyrics that address, both in plural quantities, the topics of substance abuse and controlling mother-daughter relationships.
Hair Clinic, a tape label helmed by the Olympia, WA-based Max Nordile whose broad vibe is something like the Pacific Northwest equivalent of the ‘no-audience underground’, has just released the debut by Blug, Turnip Nation. It’s so titled because it was recorded live for the 21st birthday of one Alex Turnip, who I hope against all probability is the same one Google tells me sings in a tribute band called the Arctic Numpties.
Certainly, what transpires in this seven-and-a-half-minute recording is an unconventional way of trying to make a 21-year-old happy. Nordile, on drums here, is joined in Blug by Marissa Magic (vocals and bass) and Grace Ambrose (guitar): all three have had two or more bands addressed in this column before, none any sort of simple pleasure, and this has more legit bizarritude than I dared expect. Something akin to no wave a la Teenage Jesus but with the weaponised incoherence of a band like Teddy & The Frat Girls (or what I imagine those early Slits live shows may have been like), the percussion sometimes sounds like horses’ hooves with bells on, or without them on, and Ambrose’s tone can sometimes jab your very bones. My kind of freak occurrence!
First occurrences can still find their way into Straight Hedge after 15 years’ hard labour. (Sidenote: not long now before I can review bands whose members are younger than this column.) No, silly, you can’t have a different type of music, but how about a band who bill themselves as a two-piece despite one of them being a dog? This is Eye Ball from Toronto, whose debut album – 12 tracks in 14 minutes, titled Gull Songs and issued on tape by Noise Merchant – has its effervescent synthpunkpowerpop co-credited to Jesse Fellows (elaborate tats) and Sophie (luxurious coat).
We are, by any honest metric, dealing with egg punk here, but Gull Songs is far less zany or throwaway compared to much of what you might encounter when things are thus tagged. Fellows pitches his vocals up to complement the cardboard-set sci-fi keyboards, but still ends up with songs which often rock in a (camply) tough Spits or Queers way; tape opener ‘Gull Song’, with its elastic-band hardcore guitars, is closer to someone like Judy & The Jerks. There’s borderline tweepop on ‘Daisies’, garage rock on ‘The Cheapskate’ and a song called ‘All Dogs Look Like They’re Smiling When They’re Pissed’, which I hope is in the North American rather than British sense.
Metal hour begins… now! Even better, it actually lasts about 55 minutes, giving you ample time to piss like a boss after drinking from the fount of Tokyo speedbastards Verdalack, whose debut album Force From The Grave has been picked up by Hells Headbangers. Five-strong and trading as Void, Vigor, Vandal, Vortex and Villain, Verdalack have some skin in the global crust punk game (notably via related band Military Shadow) and are doing something that could reasonably be called ‘metalpunk’ here, but when the solos blaze like they do on FFTG – when the basslines gallop, the harmonics pinch – be in no doubt you’re dealing with some real rivetheads.
Verdalack’s precise ratio of elements might see off a few less-than-true believers over these eight songs. Villain’s vocals are slathered in noisepunk style reverb and slaver like the proverbial hellhound; can’t claim much knowledge of the dude’s background, but he could do a job in any given chaotic hardcore mob. Then there’s either or both of guitarists Vandal and Vortex, who sound like they’ve internalised the very concept of speed metal as they fire off outrageous futureshock fretboard acrobatics on songs like ‘Final Assault’. So Verdalack run the risk of being too punk for the metallers and too metal for the punx… except the only risk is tricking oneself into giving a shit about any of that.
Not that I was wavering any time recently over the question ‘can death metal be punk?’, but supposing I had been, seeing Thoughtseize the other week would have set me straight. Heck, they’re one of the best live bands I’ve seen this summer at least, bludgeoning through a righteous set of crusty grinning nastiness that’s equal parts Swedeath and stenchcore. A little Bolt Thrower-adjacent, by the same token, but on their own tip despite all this. Oh yeah, and they’re from Falmouth and employ a bunch of Magic: The Gathering references from their name onwards, but if that goes over your head like it does mine it can just serve as fun chat about swords and such.
Thoughtseize’s self-titled tape album is packaged with an MTG card and small plastic weapon that may be useful for dispatching woodlice or getting food from between your teeth. Simon Walker has a fine low register and a guitar sound that flirts with blackened tremolo picking (‘Lord Of Extinction’) but is mostly downtuned like an unusually rusty chainsaw. As the trio’s rhythm section, both Dan Ledley and Hamish Adams sound like they’re honouring crust and crossover as much as anything, and perhaps all of this could make Thoughtseize sound frivolous, or like genre dabblers, but in the moment there are no gimmicks here, just 25 minutes of punked-up death metal frenzy.
Damaged Goods, a Leeds DIY venue, has compiled a 20-band tape to raise funds for its upkeep/basic existence. The tape already seems to be sold out but maybe they will make more, to raise more funds. If not, it’s a really good digital snapshot of the city’s current scene, diverse in style but with a common mentality simmering away, even if you may have to take that on trust when sizing up, say, The Dogs’ KBD drum machine geezerpunk and the deathful grindcore of Obnoxious Concoction.
It begins and ends with textbook Yorkshire gumby blare from Rat Cage (a song called ‘Thatcher’s Back’ so you know that’s good) and Tramadol respectively. There is more hardcore near the start from Total Con and Diall, and near the end from Ruined Virtue and Mother Nature. The Shits do a startlingly monotonous live chunter through their smash hit ‘Waiting’ and there is a psychedelic midsection thanks to Self Immolation Music (Spacemen 3 enthusiasts explore their ambient noodle rather than rifferama side), Cellar Messiah and Eternal Vape. Thank do needling jagged postpunk, as do Thank-related group Solderer. Most of this compilation is unreleased, or live versions of stuff that was released, or on a physical format for the first time, and adds up to the sort of regional compendium that you rarely get these days.
Signing Straight Hedge off for summer with another compilation, this one a 40-song monster collecting everything recorded by Japanese hardcore titans Death Side outside of their two LPs. The Will Never Die, which shares its curious title with one of the singles collected here, had a domestic CD issue in the late 90s, with a vinyl version lying in limbo for several years until La Vida Es Un Mus picked up the slack. It’s nice as hell, a gatefold sleeve containing a booklet of lyrics and flyers as well as almost an hour and a half of unequalled baroque brutality.
Listening to this stuff – recorded between 1987 and 1994 – with a 2020s citizen’s instant access to historical context, you can grant that Death Side were not totally nonpareil. In a country who hardcore scene did extreme noise arguably better than any other, G.I.S.M stand out as a band who folded grandiose heavy metal solos into their batter before these Tokyo lads did. Plenty of their output, especially that collected on various artists comps in the late 80s, is also evidently post-Discharge, or Discharge’s dishevelled offspring like Chaos UK (with whom Death Side later shared a split album). Guitar player and main songwriter Hiroyuki Kishida, better known as Chelsea, is a reasonable shout for greatest ever hardcore punk soloist, peppering these songs with warp-speed classical gas attacks that are like if Quorthon had been tricked into joining Anti-Cimex. Chelsea died in 2007 and this immense release is dedicated to him.
Straight Hedge Mix August 2025 Tracklist
Béton Armé – ‘Combattre’
Who Pays – ‘Hard Times’
Crude Image – ‘Walk The Earth’
Gagu – ‘Shame’
Blug – ‘Dungeon Paradise’
Eye Ball – ‘The Cheapskate’
Verdalack – ‘Final Assault’
Thoughtseize – ‘Omnah’
Obnoxious Concoction – ‘Anonymous Materials (The Demonology Inherent To Microplastics)’
Death Side – ‘Try’
