In/Humanity – The History Behind The Mystery/Music To Kill Yourself By LP+7″/CD
Funny like a rash, scary like a sad clown. Opening with keening string drone, it quickly launches into liquefied death metal, falling somewhere between the studied ridiculousness of Cradle of Filth and the self-effacing mordancy of Born Against. The CD version has the 7″ (all reversed guitar grind and creepy stalker dialogue) dropped right into the center, neatly halving the album into side one (a concept record about ritual murder) and side two (best exemplified by the song title “We’re Sick of Music And We Hate Each Other.”) Broke up soon after.
Infest – 7″
It doesn’t even matter which one, really. Infest are Gym Teacher Hardcore. You know what I’m talking about. Drums marshaled for that double-time drill stomp. Vocalist barking out gibberish orders like he should be wearing Tom Landry’s hat. Guitar and bass almost a perfunctory buzz. They’re degree zero for so much 90s punk, without even knowing it: add a couple mosh-metal breakdowns and you’ve got yourself Revelation-style straight edge; speed it up you’ve got grindcore; slow it down you’ve got doom sludge whatever. There you have it: the “range” of modern hardcore in three easy steps.
The Nation of Ulysses – Plays Pretty For Baby LP
The best record to come out of 90s D.C., NOU were far more arty, oblique, and wan than their peers, despite being a sort of amphetamine-driven free jazz garage rock. Lacking D.C.’s penchant for neo-prog, however, they’re certainly the most hardcore band on the 90s Dischord roster. They draw connections between teenage rabble, doo-wop, and John Coltrane with a fat black marker, and then scribble a moustache on the finished product. Their iconographic play is blunt, however; no one is going to be confusing Ian Svenonius with Jacques Attali, let alone Guy Debord. Best liner notes of the 90s though!
Antioch Arrow – The Lady Is A Cat 12″ EP
Phasers on stun, lads. Antioch Arrow sped up the Birthday Party until it blurred into a rasping mush. Occasionally some yelping or squelches of keyboard can be heard. A live video I saw featured the vocalist with his head inside the bass drum for most of the performance. Lots of falling all over each other. Later mutated into an ill-advised goth band, then to further San Diego’s decline into glam rock tedium.
Cap’n Jazz – Shmap’n Shmazz LP
All the blame being laid at Weezers feet for the proliferation of melodic, hook-y whiner rock should really fall here. Not only because they begat The Promise Ring (surely the Bay City Rollers of indie, except without the redemptive qualities of disco) and Joan of Arc (who someone told it was a good idea to crossbreed Gastr Del Sol with Pavement.) But also because here post-hardcore merged with indie pop for the first – but not last – time. The stick-four-words-together-and-maybe-meaning-will-follow song titles. The prickly jangle guitars upended by tricksy time signatures. And, more than anything, Tim Kinsella’s halfway endearing, halfway annoying art bark. If there’s one record out of this list that I feel remotely “guilty” for still digging in the slightest, this is the one. Whether that sez more about me the listener or them the band or them the bands they begot, I do not know, nor care to ask.
Man Is The Bastard – Thoughtless CD
Occasionally queasy mixture of Cookie Monster grind and masturbatory blurts of Japanoise. Starting off as the first “power violence” band (actually that was Neanderthal, who begat MITB) and specializing in 15 second farts of extreme(ly tedious) noise terror, the power of weed slooooowed them down to an oft-interminable double basso crawl. You know how sometimes things are interesting precisely because they’re so interminable? Cf. the 9 minute plod through the second section of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (no, I’m not making this up) that closes this record. MITB were actually quite technically accomplished musicians but they disguised it all by making music that sounds like a tank tread rolling over your skull. Bonus points for hilarious, vaguely disturbing, highly strident/didactic apocalyptic packaging.
Worst Case Scenario – Worst Case Scenario LP
This is a couple of guys from Unwound moonlighting in a “This Is Boston, Not LA” cover band. Inexplicably opens with sub-Ornette free jazz, wherein they don’t totally embarrass themselves. I would have to guess this low level art prank landed them in the round files of many a doctrinaire zine back in the day. The CD contains everything they recorded and goes on a bit too long.
Los Crudos – the 7″ with “Asesinos” on it
Everything that makes ultra-linear old school 80s hardcore any good in two sides of 7″ vinyl that vibrate with such barely restrained force they threaten to break apart into their component particles. Although Los Crudos had many good (read: common sense humanist) things to say – such as tackling homophobia in a genre where the thinly disguised homoerotic male bonding did nothing to discourage hate for the queers – they’re delivered with the howling subtlety of a ball peen to the groin. So perhaps not reading along is a good idea.
Melt Banana – Eleventh 7″
Things that come to mind while listening to the throw-you-ten-feet-against-the-far-wall guitar playing of Melt Banana: Derek Bailey playing DRI; a fleet of out of control ambulances; “Surfin’ Bird” performed on a STHL chainsaw; speed dialing across 1970s AM radio.
Lync – These Are Not Fall Colors LP
Like Cap’n Jazz, Lync are also fey and slightly cloying, but they drown their tugging-on-your-cozy-sweater sweetness in distortion and major chords, so no worries. They’re not precisely “hardcore” but then, so little on this list is turning out to be. But the playful aggression is certainly from within the tradition. And the impact they had on bands to follow was sizeable in the sense that suddenly a lot of sensitive boys felt safe getting all wistful on us. It’s also one of those classic indie records that seems to soak up experience like a sponge, rendering it unplayable 5 or 6 years down the road without being reminded of autumn drives in your beat up ’87 Hyundai, lying in bed and watching the rain drip from telephone wires strung between old collegiate apartments, the smell of hot dog carts in the middle of winter. Not that, uh, I know anything about that.
Lightning Bolt – Lightning Bolt LP
If I compared this record to the Dead could you take me seriously? If not, I don’t wanna play in your sandbox, thank you. Lightning Bolt are hardcore so addled it’s not really hardcore anymore, but I don’t know what the hell else to call it, so here it is. Someone once called them “progressive hardcore”, but please don’t get the wrong idea. What we have here is two sides of humbucking rock jam, bass and drums and indescipherable vocals delivered from somewhere inside the throat, uninterrupted save for a bit of fucking about here and there. (Okay, in a sense it’s all fucking about.) Dig, for instance, the sampled voice that lets us know that “the alternative charts” are “just like the other side, except…a bit stranger.”
Lightning Bolt are a good way to end because a. the record was released in 1999 and b. it pretty clearly represents the transubstantiation of (musical) values which had become a fait acompli by the decades end. Everything was now up for grabs (that most 90s of conceits, whether the scene wanted to admit it or not). There’s very little connecting Lightning Bolt to Minor Threat or Bad Brains or even Black Flag. Less to connect them to Rites of Spring or Moss Icon or Hoover or The Get Up Kids. But they’re still undeniably hardcore, stitched together – Nightmare Before Christmas style – out of the old sackcloth. They’ve managed to do something that two or three years ago I would have thought impossible: they’ve made me interested in this music again. Their recent (relative) success is well deserved.
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Well, that certainly went on, didn’t it? Us elderly types do have the tendency to ramble when it comes to our salad days. But don’t go anywhere just yet…we still have to talk about Universal Order of Armageddon, Assuck, Avail, Indian Summer, Karp, Crossed Out, Mohinder, End of the Century Party, Seein’ Red, Downcast, Larm, Capitalist Casualties, Three Studies For A Crucifixion, Merel, 1.6 Band, Rye Coalition, Rorschach, Citizens Arrest…