An adventure in split Ep's! I have no gun but I can split: TOTUUS / HIASTUS "Sankari / S/t" split Ep, 1996

If you are looking for something clean, thought-provoking, challenging hardcore-punk that goes against the rules and regulations, codes and conventions, against "the norm" done by good-looking Instagram-friendly Americans who thrive on being "followed" by others and taking selfies, then this record is not for you. Or maybe it could be if you bother for a change, checking ugly bands playing ugly music to ugly people for a good price as I was able to find a copy of this split Ep for a mere 2€ which is about 15 times cheaper than a Turnstile record (checking this Zoomer band's website I realized that they sell grossly overpriced hats and fucking teddy bears but no physical records... what an odd choice for an ex punk band). Alright, let's stop with the boomer-flavoured rant, as we can hold hands, kiss and definitely enjoy Turntile and Hiastus, even though the latter were fortunately never nominated for any kind of awards, except a local beer drinking contest and a grizzli bear imitation one. 

Let's just get to the actual record in a swift fashion. This is not an excellent record to be perfectly honest. I like it a lot but that doesn't mean it is objectively that good and, in fact, even fans of the genres adopted by the bands could do without the Ep and live a perfectly normal, unhappy life. I am not, have never been and never will be, as you know full well, one deterred by average generic punk music. It is all a matter of love that is as blind as it is, in this case, deaf. This Totuus/Hiastus split Ep reminds me of the original noble goal that led me to create Terminal Sound Nuisance: "a blog promoting good (and not so good) genuine punk music". This record does fall into the "not so good" category but it doesn't mean it cannot be loved and rediscovered. There was something heart-breaking in seeing this battered copy in the 2€ record bin (my acute crust detector told it was only a matter of time before it got relegated to the 1€ one) and, being a soft bastard, I could not help but rescue this little angel from the dumpster, like a gran welcoming her seventh kitten because the little shit was hungry and homeless or something. 

I knew of Totuus before because I already owned the 1999 self-titled Ep released on Fight Records and I closely associate the band with this well-known and still active Finnish label based in Tampere that released or rereleased works from Kaaos, Tampere SS, Unkind, Positive Negative or Riistetyt. With such a list of culprits, one already logically imagines what Totuus - which translates as "truth" - will sound like: classic raw and direct Finnish hardcore. Clever but not completely true. The backbone of the band remains firmly rooted in 80's Finncore (think Terveet Kädet or Kantan Uutiset, even Riistetyt) and the production, or lack thereof, effortlessly reproduces the sound of that decade, but you can still tell Totuus was a 90's band. It would not be mistaken to compare them with bands like Rajoitus or Uutuus because, beside them all ending with the phoneme "-tus", they cook with the same old-school ingredients, but where the aforementioned bands almost exclusively rely on 80's Finnish hardcore (although Rajoitus were Swedes) Totuus also had a European hardcore influence and bands like BGK or Ripcord do come to mind. It would appear far-fetched to state that they were as good as all those canonized acts but their side of the split is still pretty solid and has that wild, furious, biting energy. 9 short songs in less than 7 minutes. The split Ep format fits the songwriting perfectly and makes Totuus and solid example of proper raw old-school hardcore done in the 90's and looking lovingly toward the previous decade. 

Do you remember that kid at school who was desperate to look like the coolest, most stylish, most popular cat and tried so hard to walk like him, dress like him, talk like him? That's pretty much the relationship between Hiastus and Hiatus. The former went as far as calling themselves Hiastus, which means - wait for it, wait for it - "hiatus" in Finnish. On the surface, this sounds adorable. A band trying to sound like their heroes, a band that openly wears its heart on the sleeve, a band that does not give a single shit about even trying to pretend to be original in any way. And really deep down, it is what most teenage bands are all about when they start. They just want to be The Clash or Black Flag or your older cousin's nu-metal band that for some reason seems to attract a lot of girls. 

D-beat, as a genre, works exactly like this, on worshipping and emulating the source material, referring to the signs and symboles. If one were to see it as a subgenre, 90's crust would be one that is defined strictly with a rather short time period - let's say from 1991 to 2005 and the rise of neocrust. D-beat also started as a 90's epiphenomenon but, contrary to the classic eurocrust sound, survived in one piece in spite of a certain drop in popularity in the late 00's, and then got even stronger and spread everywhere with time. Therefore "eurocrust" or more globally "90's crust" was not so much a subgenre as it was a wave, with a distinct sound that was used to build and lead the new generations of crust, as opposed to d-beat which by essence had to stay the same with some tone variations. Siblings of 90's crust, "cavemen crust" or "cavecrust" (as I like to call it) managed to stay alive, afloat and deliver proud examples of the Doom-loving crust traditions from times to times, especially in Japan - Doom-love was an essential trait of European crust in the 90's - and instances of classic ENT/Disrupt dual-vocal crustcore bands still occur but on too small a scale to state to states that there is a such a thing as genre-emulating or genre-referring 90's crust trend. Sob fucking sob.

But in any case, Hiastus were 90's eurocrust to the bone. It was in their blood, they breathed eurocrust, they ate eurocrust, they drank eurocrust, their wildest dreams were made of fantasies of splits between Hiatus and Warcollapse, Silna Wola and Subcaos, Enola Gay and Social Genocide. For all I know the drummer named his first-born Way of Doom. It is actually not the first time that I write about Hiastus as they appeared on the Never Again compilation Ep that I reviewed 10 fucking years ago. That stings. Beside the mighty Hiatus, the Oulu-based band was without a doubt very influenced by the national crust heroes Amen who, with a first deliciously sloppy Ep in 1990, belonged to the first generation of eurocrust. They clearly must have played Feikki and Paranemia quite a bit. With the band relying on the traditional dual vocal crust attack, like Amen, to spread the message - recent discoveries revealed that the first instances of such an aural technique may date back to the neolithic era, when humans could not actually speak and grunted like apes - early Disrupt and Extreme Noise Terror must have been blasted to death as well. The sound is obviously pretty raw (the surface noise only providing extra crust points) but the music is more energetic than I remember with a good pummeling drumming. The vocals are too loud in the mix and a little overwhelming at times, especially because of the very dedicated fellow responsible for the low growling parts. Ironically the spoken parts are too low in the mix, as if the singers, after three songs of shouting like demented sea elephants, were too shy to speak normally all of a sudden. The flaw makes the music sound a bit ridiculous but even more enjoyable as well. This is 90's DIY crustcore, not technical metal. 

Hiastus remind me of the Polish band Money Drug who were equally raw and a bit sloppy with their dual vocal eurocrust recipe, and of their countrymen Rotten Sound who started as very similar Disrupt-ish act with their Ep Sick Bastards in 1995. I like the Hiastus side a lot but, let's get real, this is one is for the crust completists, for the archivists, for the obsessed, for those who consider prehistoric 90's crust as the sweetest serenade and mid-table Hiatus-like bands as adorable underdogs in a decade plagued by shoegaze. 

You already know if you need this split Ep, I know I do.   

  

TOTUUS + HIASTUS = argh          

Still believing in ANOK: Life's a Riot! "S/t" Ep, 2001

Our flat is small. Housing is a very relative concept depending on where you live. A small flat on the outskirts of Paris is not the same as a small flat in Berlin, Dublin or Acapulco (I can only assume, I have never set foot there). When I started Terminal Sound Nuisance in 2012 I lived in a 9m2 room - the word "flat" sounds a bit like a hyperbole in that case - with a shared "bathroom" - a bathless room, in the broad sense of the term - in the corridor. Once, I found actual shit on the bog's wall, not the most pleasant discovery on a Monday morning especially since I was pretty certain it was not mine. I have always suspected it was the girl's next door, she looked very tidy and wore far too much perfume but I could sense she despised me a great deal, probably because there were times when I blasted Atrocious Madness a bit late at night. But like the size of flats, late Atrocious Madness is relative. Then I miraculously got a full-time job which allowed me to move to a palace-size flat of 11m2. I still did not have my own bathroom and there was clearly fart maniacs using the thing too but I never found any shit on the walls. I did uncover a filthy pair of knickers though. And a proper bum sleeping in the shower. The poor bastard was cold and I just did not have the heart to kick him out. To be fair, while he was at it, he could have actually used the shower because his feet stank like a dead hamster. 

A few years later, finally, my partner and I moved to a staggering 22m2 flat with our own bathroom (to this day I still like a bourgeois for just being able to take a dump without having a knobhead waiting and sighing loudly in front of the cubicle while playing Candy Crush on his phone, pure evil that). But I am not here to talk about my dull housing adventures. I am just running out of space for new records. I am well aware that it is basically a first-world problem but still, it means that I have to get rid of records I don't need (but how do you even define this notion?) or just don't listen to (again, does listening to a single-sided once four years ago counts as "not listen to"?). And I have to admit that Life's a Riot!'s Ep usually ends up in the "records-I-will-probably-store-in-our-tiny-and-already-packed-basement-but-still-might-play-once-before-just-to-make-sure" and each time I play it again, I realize how good it is and blame myself for even considering banishing it to that dreadful spider-infested place. I still have to make room and it breaks my heart so that I end up buying new records just to feel better about the loss. First-world problem, I told you. Did I mention I also own an offshore record collection?

The story behind the acquisition is both sad and heroic in that it makes me look like a saviour of unloved punk. Ages ago, a friend of mine was getting rid of some Ep's he no longer wanted (records he had himself been given if I remember correctly) and being a kind-hearted charitable fellow, I agreed to take the records under my wing. I think we can safely say that I am Paris punk's answer to Gandhi, the main difference being that I still have (some) hair. The internet is rather quiet about them but here is what I have been able to gather. Life's a Riot! (a reference to Billy Bragg I presume?) were a Finnish band active in the early 00's and I think it might have been some sort of side project from the people from Diaspora (Joakim, Mari and Jossu also played in that band). In any case it was made up of people involved in many local bands ranging from Alakulttuurin Kusipäät, Pax Americana, Scumbrigade (Joakim was from Sweden) and even Tampere SS and Kuolleet Kukat (for the drummer Juha who sadly passed away in 2004) which accounts for the band clearly knowing what they are doing.

But what exactly were they doing then? Helsinki's Life's a Riot played energetic anarchopunk with male and female vocals blending the classic UK sound of bands like Alternative, Hagar the Womb or The Sears, the more modern approach of Harum-Scarum, Mankind? or Jobbykrust and I can also hear a touch of Californian peacepunk like early Resist and Exist or Media Children. The opening number is a case in point with its Zounds-like introduction followed by overlapping vocals (anarcho spoken words over angrily shouted slogan) and then a fast and pissed phase. I love how the vocal polyphony and variety of flows and textures work within the songs, it never sounds forced (even the accents sound pretty British) and it confers a delicious catchiness that really makes the Ep stand out. It is, objectively, a strong record so that it feels very odd to see the ridiculously low price of the Ep on discogs. I realize the belief that discogs reflects the quality of a record is about as delusional as believing you could become a Tik Tok influencer while you're already 43. If anything, discogs reflects the popularity of a record at a given time which does not equate the substantial quality (although it can) and in this light it is needless to point out that Life's a Riot! can be said to have been almost completely forgotten and that their tuneful, dynamic brand of old-school anarchopunk did not really fit with the punk's trends of the early 00's. Rejoice, you can get the thing for the price of a bag of crisps (and not even the fancy organic middle-class brand, just the regular one you can eat remorselessly at 1am after the gig). 

Had Life's a Riot! been around later they would have probably been a popular band - maybe playing K-Town and being offered records on fashionable labels - as there was a renewed interest in the old-school anarchopunk sound (which must be seen in parallel with the UK82 revival I reckon) from the late 00's on, possibly caused and encouraged by Ian Glasper's work, the Overground anarcho compilations and the works of labels like Demo Tapes. 00's bands like Surrender or OK? and 2010's ones like Vivid Sekt, Dogma or fellow Finns 1981, in their early days, are not dissimilar to what Life's a Riot! were doing (the same could be said about Stracony, which we tackled last time). 

The Ep's cover displays the old picture of a dog wearing a gas mask (it was quite the thing during WWI) but I have always thought it looked like a chameleon or some kind of weird lizards. The record has a foldout cover and the lyrics are about the grey zone, Big Brother and Buenaventura Durrutti. It was released on Witchhunt Records - the band's own label that put out records from Diaspora, Mushroom Attack or Unkind - and Les Nains Aussi, a label from Grenoble, that cryptically translates as "dwarves too", that must be saluted for still being very much active.

Don't be a poser and grab the Ep, yeah?

Life's a Riot!    

Live by the Crust, Die by the Crust: Keretik "Terra Mater" Lp, 2017

The formidable abundance of readily available punk music, online just as much as in physical formats (which we used to call, in the old days, "a record" or "a tape" or even, for the embarrassingly unfashionable ones among us " a cd") can be rather vicious. On the one hand every single new recording - even the shite ones it has to be said - can be streamed, digested, stored in a corner of the brain and digested instantly, on the other, well, it has become impossible to even give a chance to many potentially worthy bands. Just listening to the first song of every new d-beat recording in a month would take you a whole afternoon, and I'm only talking about 90 second long bursts of noise. Imagine what doom metal fans and their eight minute long songs must go through because of the sheer profusion of new music, the endless flux of novelty. Poor bastards. 

Even I struggle to give a go to bands playing subgenres that I hold close to my heart even though I do spend a lot of time clearing my personal soundscape from pretentious egg punk and shoegaze abominations. Tragically, despite my Sauron-like capacity to spot good crust from miles away, some top bands do escape my awesome attention and die trying in the luxurious mountains of Mordor while terrible hobbity postpunk acts manage to crawl through the epicenter of the Crustdom. I almost did not notice Helsinki's Keretik and only gave them a listen because the Lp had been released on Urinal Vinyl, an old-school UK anarchopunk label that I always keep an eye on, and I can't praise the Dark Lord enough since Terra Mater is an unsung jewel of gloomy metallic crust. And you know what? By which I mean you probably don't but are about to because I am going to tell you what you don't know, yet, but will be happy and surprised to and possibly thinking, aloud or not, "fuck me". In fact, you probably know Keretik under another name, Viimeinen Kolonna. 

VK have been around since the early 00's and have released quite a few records on Agipunk, Hardcore Holocaust and of course Fight Records (who also have a hand in Terra Mater) so you have probably at least bumped into their name. I suppose the change of name - and the symbolical burial it implies -  signified the band's intent to try new things musically as Keretik has much more of an old-school crust feel than what VK's were famous for, that is to say thick, fast relentless thrashing Finnish hardcore. To be honest, and I am not trying to boast needlessly here, the first time I heard Keretik I thought that it was the new project of VK's singer as he has always had easily recognizable vocals. In fact, you could describe him as sounding like a crazy drunk on the street chasing you while aggressively yelling insults as loud as possible. But in a good, Finnish hardcore styled way, a genre renowned for its extremely hostile and pissed vocal aesthetics. The three members making up Keretik are not exactly novices in hard-hitting punk music as they previously made some noise in Rythmihäiriö, Agenda or the grossly underappreciated Amen. So they definitely have bad backs. 

Keretik play raw, dark and direct old-school metallic crust with mean dual vocals - gruff and hoarse shouts versus evil and desperate yells - reminiscent of the Finnish hardcore tradition but that also has a lot to do with the language itself and its particular prosodics. Along with the genuinely torturous and aggressively punk dual vocals (one of the record's strongest point, they sound like a massive bollocking of biblical proportions, a "you're being grounded, no Discharge for two weeks" kind of punishment). Finnish does confer an original vibe to the music as few old-school crust bands sang in Finnish, apart from the aforementioned mighty Amen and proto-crust legends Painajainen. Keretik did not try to go for a massive crushing sound and kept it raw and primitive which fits with the record's rather short length for the genre, seven songs in eighteen minutes. The music could be described as primal and there is a certain Amebix influence in the songwriting. There are other elements brought to the table as gloomy pagan crust punk acts like Dazd also comes to mind (especially in some creepy melodies), as well Coitus for the dark and rocking thrashing squat-crust mosh-inducing riffs and the dual vocal post-stenchcore sound of A//Solution could easily be invoked too. The record itself is a little disappointing as there is no insert included and the visual does not really appeal to me. It was released on three labels, Urinal Vinyls, Psychedelica Records and, unsurprisingly the immortal Fight Records. And as a testament of the old-school DIY punk spirit the band decided to add a patch with the record. Thanks for that.  

Keretik have another recording under their bullet belts entitled Tomorrow's Worst Enemy. It was recorded in 2021 and I am not afraid to say it pretty much stands as one of the best crust works of the past few years. Building on their raw and primitive metal punk vibe, thanks to a better sound and more articulate songwriting, Keretik have added a sense of crust epics and atmospherics without giving up on the aggression. Beside the aforementioned culprits I am reminded of Axegrinder and Misery as well. Top drawer old-school crust that I cannot believe went unnoticed. In fact, if I had not done some research about Keretik for this post, I probably would not have even known about the existence of Tomorrow's Worst Enemy while it is right up my stenchcrust alley. There is tape version of it, but the band is looking for a label for a vinyl release. You know what to do: support the band. 

Terra Mater  

Live by the Crust, Die by the Crust (2012-2021): Ydintuho / Axebastard "Atomic Crust" split tape, 2012

We have been talking a lot about band names on Terminal Sound Nuisance and by that I mean that you have been reading, with faithful awe, what yours truly has to say about terminology. More often than not, I find myself caught in a maelstrom of semiological circumvolutions about dis-prefixed monikers and to be honest I really enjoy that. One of life's simple joys. The band that inspired me to write this short piece today is, rather expectedly if you have already bumped into the blog, even accidentally, because, as people say, shit happens and loneliness often induces longer hours spent before a screen, not that that implies you are lonely, but you might be in which case said piece will hopefully entertain you, Axebastard. If you know anything about crust, if you have at least some basic knowledge about this mighty wave, you will be bound to know why Axebastard are called Axebastard, the subjective (un)tastefulness of such a lexical choice not withstanding. The prefix "axe" for Axegrinder and the substantive "bastard" for Hellbastard. One may propound that they could have gone for Hellgrinder but I for one am of the opinion that Axebastard was the wisest, if you can call it that, option of the two since Hellgrinder, to my ears anyway, conjures up images of Metal Punk Death Squad action rather than stenchcore goodness. 

Atomic Crust is the title of this split tape just to remind you and make sure that you are well aware that, upon listening to the tape, you will very likely be exposed to crust music or affiliated. I actually hesitated before including the tape in Live by the Crust, Die by the Crust, not because it does not correspond aesthetically and artistically to the template of the series, quite the contrary, but because it was released physically in late 2012, the time limit of the selection, and both sides were recorded in 2010, which is outside of the limit. But I suppose rules are meant to be broken or as Abrasive Wheels used to sing "No rules is the first rule" so there you go: the 2012 split tape between two Finnish bands Axebastard and Ydintuho.

Before getting to the actual music, I have to admit that the choice to include this work had a lot to do with how the tape, the object looked, to be more accurate, it mostly had to do with how hyperbolically, emphatically and shamelessly CRUST it looked. It does not come with your usual cold jewel plastic case but with a foldout paper case enveloping the tape along with a separate lyric sheet. Like the vinyl or cd formats, it is not uncommon for DIY punk tapes to experiment with different sort of casing techniques, even if it makes the object more fragile and prone to tears, but still  in this case it looks absolutely brilliant. My detector measured significantly high levels of crustness just with the foldout paper and it almost exploded upon opening the thing. The artwork is saturated with crust signifying, naive and deliciously crude crasher-styled skulls with punk haircuts, war banners, empty bottles, more crusty skulls, some sort of orc, a Mad Max cosplayer with a dilapidated guitar, rows of sloppily drawn skulls, weapons from the Bronze Age, grim black and white pictures with slogans about the nuclear war and a crust skull with a circled A on the forehead. It is like a crust bingo or crust fan service and I, for one, actually really enjoy the band's intent to pay a tribute to the classic crust aesthetics while playing and having fun doing it. I mean, the tape is called Atomic Crust for a reason. Fucking lol, right?

So what about the music then? Technically the first side is Ydintuho, a band from Kuusamo that I had, for some reason, never heard of although they did a split Ep with Kilmä Sota in 2012. Oh well. Ydintuho have been running since at least 2008 and are apparently still active which is a testament to resiliency in an age when the average life expectancy of a band is 18 months, 2 albums, 1 tour and 186 instagram posts. The band proudly claims to play "raw punk deathstrike" and sensibly so. The tracks were recorded in 2010 (I think) so that they aptly represent what Ydintuho were about in their early stage. It won't take anyone by surprise to learn that these Finns engage in raw and distorted d-beat punk. I can hear a distinct Japanese noize crust influence, not unlike Contrast Attitude or D-Clone with vocals reminiscent of Atrocious Madness and a healthy passion for Disclose which they cover lovingly. At that point in time, there were certainly not as many bands going for that classic Japanese crasher noize hardcore in Europe (Giftgasattack comes to mind and a bit later Electric Funeral) so while Ydintuho did not invent that particular wheel, they undeniably prefigured the rapid spread of that noize-not-music niche genre worldwide, a modest achievement perhaps but one that is meaningful if you closely consider the evolution of trends, and they remain a rare Finnish example of the style. I had not played the Ydintuho side for a long while and was very pleasantly surprised. Give the rest of their records a try, they are very much worth the attention.   

On the other side are Axebastard, the crustier element of the tape. You won't need much imagination to make a guess at what those dirty punks were up to: apocalyptic and rocking raw stenchcore. You could diachronically locate the band in that post 00's stenchcore revival wave that saw the rise of European bands like Cancer Spreading or Last Legion Alive. Sadly the band did not play for long (between 2008 and 2011 I think) and while the rawness of the four songs on Atomic Crust can be rightly appreciated for their cavemen quality, I nonetheless would have loved to see what Axebastard could have achieved with a better production and a proper vinyl release. If you are looking for dirty stenchcore with mean gruff bearish vocals, rocking cavecrust moments interspersed by heavy filthy thrashy metallic breaks, then Axebastard are tailor-made for you. They are not unlike a primitive, preliterate crust-and-proud version of Hellshock and Stormcrow and I cannot help thinking about early Cancer Spreading too, a good thing since they have stood for the Euro stenchcore sound for all of the 2010's. I like how the band tried to use several type of vocals on the opening track, the rendering is not perfect but the idea is sound, and that sort of mid-paced d-beat drumming fits well here. The second number is a groovy Extinction of Mankind-influenced song with ace double bass drumming and expert headbanging power while the third track is a faster, more traditionally pummeling 90's cavemen crust headbutt and the final one is basically a blend of these elements with a gloriously filthy mid-tempo moshing stenchcore conclusion. Nothing ground-breaking but it does leave the listener waiting for more. I am personally curious about what Axebastard would have been able to achieve with a longer format in terms of cohesion, narration and atmosphere because these four songs work very well together. 

The Axebastard side was also recorded in 2010 and there is a rough 2008 rehearsal tape that you can download on their bandcamp entitled Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Darkness (just in case you were hesitant about the genre) that included a song called "Hellgrinder". Cheeky fuckers. I also found a file from 2009 that is supposedly a cdr demo with different and rawer versions (unmixed maybe?) of three songs on the tape and some visuals for the band and even a picture. This recording is nowhere to be found on soulseek so I included it in the download file, for posterity. Atomic Crust, in the end, can be said to be one for the crustiest crusters that I warmly recommend, if only for the fact that Axebastard is one of the very few Finnish stenchcore bands. That's trivia gold.

So let's axe the fucking bastard, shall we?

Atomic CRUST

              

 

Ace Compilations for Less Than a Fiver on Bloody Discogs (part 3): "1997 - Damn the Contorol" compilation Ep, 1997

Here we go again, this is the third part of Ace Compilations for Less Than a Fiver on Bloody Discogs and yet another lovely compilation Ep that you should be able to grab for the price of a döner kebab, a suspicious pint of lager in Paris or a single ticket in the London subway (for real, I almost lost it the last time I went there and I demanded to see the manager immediately, I mean, £5!!!). I have to admit that I had absolutely never heard of, never mind seen, this Ep until quite recently when fate graced me with the opportunity to own it for a particularly inexpensive sum. Hail old-school distros and their sleeping stock from the 1990's. It felt a little odd that no one ever mentioned 1997 - Damn the Contorol to me and that even the nerdiest corners of the internet appeared to be devoid of references to it. A mate of mine told me that there were rumours on the dark web that the Ep was haunted and that every owner suffered particularly violent death, their bodies dislocated, pure expressions of horror upon their faces, shoegazed to death. It does make one shiver and there's little wonder that, faced by an awful doom, people kept silent about this Ep. 

 

However, I am not one to be afraid of any record and I once again proved that my fearlessness and proverbial placidity before danger were real and not the stuff of old wives' tales (in fact, only ponies, geese and Dire Straits can scare yours truly, the combination of the three, say a couple of geese riding a pony while playing Dire Straits on their phone, would certainly cause sudden death). So I picked the Ep and, after playing the geezer, thought out loud - and I am quoting with utmost exactitude here - "Fuck me, that is an exquisitely lovely piece of punk art that I shall proudly dress with the gleaming escutcheons of Terminal Sound Nuisance". I still keep being astonished in no small degree at the relative obscurity and unpopularity of the compilation especially since it does not appear to have been hard to find at all. Did any of you, my dear readers, know of it? Maybe I just don't hang out with the cool used-to-be-kids anymore. Sob, fucking sob.

 

From what my ready mind can infer, and rather predictably, 1997 - Damn the Contorol (yes, actual spelling and a top example of Japanese-English) has something to do with the year 1997. The Ep was released on Vomiting Label, a short-lived (it was actually the label's sole release) entity based in Finland (EDIT: well-informed elders told me that behind Vomiting was actually Otto from Força Macabra who liked to change label names so that people would be very confused. Good one!), which possibly accounts for the presence of two Suomi bands (there's the quick-wittedness at it again). Did some sociopolitical unrest occur in Finland in 1997? I found no information supporting this claim. Since the blurry and highly contrasted picture on the cover depicts some sort of riot or urban unrest and that the subtext reads "That's the information they don't tell you... That's the information that exists... That's the information we never get...", one may deduce that the title refers to a political event that took place in 1997. I did not find much about this particular year in terms of eruptions of anger and violence promptly cured with state-sponsored truncheons, water cannons, teargas, good old beatings and even, if you're very lucky, non-lethal crowd control weapons. 1997 saw intense rioting in Northern Ireland on the part of Irish nationalists and bloody state repression against the Uhygur populations in China known as the Ghulja incident. Some things sadly never change. There was also the unexpected retirement of Eric Cantona but that's a French-only trauma that I'd rather not get into. It still hurts.

 

 

Another political element to Damn the Contorol lies in its open antinazi stance with a picture of local boneheads with targets on their faces and a "Break Neck Action" caption. I doubt any nazi actually saw this compilation Ep but regardless giving the finger to the scum is always a noble intention. If the purpose and binding theme of the compilation in relation to the context of 1997 is never properly expressed but there is however an inflated dithyramb from the producer/label guy on the eternal glory of hardcore punk, stating at some point that: "The dance floor leaves and breathes, and the dancers are one with each other in a huge machine gun panorama of noise and light and movement. When music is good for today's dancing, it's HARDCOREPUNK". Now that's a moving declaration of love and, even if many of us have a bad back these days, I suggest we all joyously dance together like the man said. 

 

Although Vomiting was a Finnish label (the name would have been rather fitting for a goregrind endeavour but whatever) there are no less than four Japanese bands out of the nine acts making up the thing. The first band is Chaos Channel from Osaka with the song "Don't kill future" which, whoever it was aimed at, was not an unreasonable demand after all. Modern streaming platforms such as youtube (I don't know if you are familiar with it but it's apparently pretty big and millennials really dig it) have made the noizy punk style of bands like Chaos Channel readily accessible and nowhere as obscure and confidential as they still were not so long ago. I am sure it was different in Japan because they have always had this tradition of highly distorted fast and binary Bristol punk-rock initiated by Confuse so that the genre must have been pretty normal to Japanese punks (like käng in Sweden or shite oi music in France). However, outside of the country, only the nerdiest punks were conversant with top secret bands like State Children or Gess so that it is hard to gauze the popularity of heirs like Chaos Channel. Even if the phrase "noisepunk" was only coined in the mid 00's by the Wankys, I feel it is the perfect description for Chaos Channel's music. Absolute pogo-compatible Swankys worship with the same assumed silliness and hyperbolic punkiness musically and aesthetically. The singer sounds like an absolute pisshead raised on early Disorder and Chaotic Dischord, the guitar's piercing distortion is reminiscent of the national classics, the bass is driving on a Confuse team dragster and the drummer has fun being as primitively ciderpunk as possible. If you enjoy the style, Chaos Channel, along with neighbours like Order and Dust Noise, were the real noisepunk deal in the mid 90's. Absolute swankers, "Chaotic punk is forever" as they proudly stated. The song was recorded in 1995, a busy period for the band since they released two Ep's on Overthrow in 1994 and 1995. And did I mention guitar player Yamakawa also played in Gloom?

 

Next up are Leben, a band from Graz, Austria, I know nothing about. Very rough and fast hardcore punk with a cavemen grindcore vibe. They only ever appeared on one other compilation Ep entitled More Noise by Nice Boys released on Insane Society in 1997 alongside Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Mrtva Budoucnost. Besthöven follow and it was Fofao's progeny's first inclusion on a vinyl but certainly not the last. The song "Sacrificio grotesco" was recorded in 1996 and Besthöven was a three-piece at the time. When Damn the Contorol came out, people who had actually heard of Besthöven, outside of Brazil, and even there they were probably quite obscure, must have been very, very rare indeed. In the Latino America's punk scene of the mid-90's, Besthöven were assuredly something of an oddity. Of course, there were legions of hardcore punk in Brazil, but their open 80's Scandinavian hardcore studded worship set them apart (they covered Shitlickers and Fear of War at that time). As they proudly claim on the cover "Our sound is influeced by hardcore punk bands that making punk a threat ever''' Swedish bands and other crustraw punk core band like Japanese and more...". Since they wholeheartedly thanked Força Macabra, I suppose that was how they ended up on this Finnish compilation. The song is exactly as you would expect early Besthöven to sound like, a blend of raw and primitive käng hardcore with Silencio Funebre-era Armagedom. Not for posers.

 

The last band on the first side is Kirous from Finland with a short and sweet antifascist song "Kasvava uhka". The sound is quite raw, a defining uniting feature of the compilation, and there is a mean chaotic vibe running through the song. Somewhere between Kuolema and their contemporary Uutuus and Katastrofialue maybe. If you had no idea, you could think that Kirous song were recorded in 1985. The band went on to release an Ep for No Fashion Hardcore Records and two split Ep's with the very good Sharpeville and Silna Wola. If you are into raw hardcore, you are in for one minute of classic Finnish hardcore delight. If you are not, I strongly suggest you leave the room immediately. 

 

The following band is Guernica y Luno from Słupsk, Poland. GyL are not widely known outside of their home country but they were undeniably one of the more crucial bands of the 90's along with Włochaty, Homomilitia and of course Post-Regiment. Their lyrics, judging from the translations, were highly political and quite deep and beautiful at the same time which accounted for their undying popularity as the 2017 Nigdy Nie Będziesz Szedł tribute Lp can attest. Heartfelt, intense even emotional at times anarchopunk with male and female vocals and a raw, old-school Polish punk vibe that combined perfectly with their distinct 90's anarcho sound. Tuneful with memorable chorus and a genuine inventiveness in the songwriting for what was one of the most relevant anarchopunk bands of the 90's. The song "La programo" is actually in Esperanto which might come as a surprise to some but makes sense in the context of the band and of the 90's, the Esperanto language standing for unity between people and a common linguistic ground for peace and freedom. If you look close enough you can find quite a few European bands who had or have songs in this Language and obviously Voĉo Protesta, being Japanese, took the concept of Esperanto hardcore to its logical conclusion by singing in this language only. The GyL song is an anthemic anarcho crust punk song with a singalong chorus and something of an 80's Finnish hardcore touch like Melakka when they shout "Kontravaj al kurwa sistema". Ace.

 

Next up are Conclude from Japan with their song "No need flesh". If you close your eyes and play the song, you can spot easily that they were a Japanese going in the direction quite similar to Chaos Channel or Order. The song is a sloppy but fun, drunken, punky and bouncy number with snotty vocals that will please lovers of noizy obnoxious punk-rock and the use of the Iconoclast font is not fooling anyone here. More surprising perhaps is that most of Conclude's subsequent recordings were sung in Finnish and sounded much closer to classic 80's Finnish hardcore like Bastards or Destrucktions although the vocals were still reminiscent of swanking. They even had an Ep called Made in Finland and apparently toured Finland in the 90's. By no means was their choice to shift language unique in Japan as Frigöra sang in Swedish (or in Mob 47 depending on how accurate you want to be) and Corrupted in Spanish. A decent song about animal liberation, a topic Conclude tackled heavily.

 

Totuus are the following contestant with their short sharp shock of a song "Kirkot Hyötykäyttöön". Pretty classic Fight Records-era Finnish hardcore, direct, fast and fierce hardcore with an added 90's touch to the old recipe. Very effective and rather well recorded compared to Kirous but I prefer my hardcore simpler and punkier.

 

Disclose are next with the song "Right of liberty and equality", recorded during the same session as the three songs on the split Ep with Homomilitia from 1995 (you can read a full review here). I recommend you read Pawel Scream's comment at the bottom of the review so that you understand why the Disclose song sounds so bad. The DAT (Digital Audio Tape) containing the Disclose recording got fucked at some point and as a result the noise-not-music creative stance of Kawakami became a little too literal. Anyway, you all know Disclose, we have already been talking about Disclose on Terminal Sound Nuisance so there is not much point rehashing. Typical mid-90's, Great Swedish Feast-era Disclose, distortion-drenched shitlicking Discharge mythology. Funnily enough, some of the noiziest d-beat crasher bands went for a distorted guitar sound rather similar to the one Kawakami had on this song although it resulted from a technical mistake he had nothing to do with. Such is the magic of the Dis.

 

Finally, you've got Blaze, a traditional "burning spirit" kind of hardcore punk band from Machida, Japan. As I have often pointed out, I am not a fanatic of the late 80's/early-mid 90's Japanese hardcore wave. I love the crust of that period but the whole Death Side/Bastard sound, if thoroughly enjoyable and regularly enjoyed at the Terminal Sound Nuisance castle, does not totally speak to the old heart. I was not familiar with Blaze until someone recently pointed out that a much-expected Blaze reissue was going to be released on the hard-working noize-loving General Speech. The book Flex - 1987-1992 tells me that Blaze were "totally in line with the Burning Spirits scene and a classic of that era. Demand for this EP (the 1992 But Nothing Ever Changes Ep) has shot up during the past years" so needless to tell you we are dealing with the cream of the crop here, such bands that generally cause the nerd elite to ruthlessly compete with one another for the throne, a bit like at a Royal Rumble but with much less atheleticism. The song "Heavy conufsion" has super epic riffs and a triumphant thrashing hardcore vibe combined with gruff vocals and beefy singalong hardcore chorus. Pretty flawless for the genre and easily the tightest band on Damn the Contorol. Makes one want to ride a massive wave while wearing shades.

 

The foldout cover turns into a poster when you flip it which displays an anti-technology bordered with a message that is a little hard to read. "A dream of a technophile... The beginning of the end of the world...". Not such an insightful statement considering that 25 years late people can actually pay with their watch. Well only twats do, but still. Each band included a small visual with the lyrics giving Damn the Contorol a real sense of punk collaboration and togetherness which has always been the very point of such endeavours.  

 

That's the real question

Damn the Contorol!