Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Riot Grrrl had jack-shit UK impact outside London and Glasgow, and Bis went from being a bad joke to just boringly being, and so here’s the best, crassest, funniest splenetic shriek-pop of the decade, and also the best single Digital Hardcore Recordings have put out. Every album I’ve heard by EC8OR has had the same apparently mandatory crap-recording and dull doomstompf quota as all other DHR long-players, but taken a hit at a time they blow things up nicely.
Fast distorto-breakbeats and shouting about fascists are the DHR partyline, and if you think that grows old quick you wouldn’t be wrong. EC8OR get really excited, though , when they start having a go at Spex, apparently a kind of Teutonic ‘Q’ magazine which seeks to mislead and pervert the German youth through a variety of garbled means (at a guess: featuring boring music, featuring boring ravers, featuring boring rock bands, not featuring EC8OR much). The music rattles along at boneshaker speed, pugnaciously defying any attempt to dance to or even keep track of it, then stops for EC8OR to yell “Spex is a faaaaaat….BITCH!” and then does exactly the same except louder and more distorted, and then does it even louder, and so on. The really amazing thing about DHR’s good records is that they’re so fun and vital even when you should by rights be bored sick of the schtick. EC8OR, for these four minutes, have nothing to do with post-industrial posturing or even politics, and everything to do with having a skull-scouring bloodyminded yell, and anyone who’d deny that as a part of good pop probably deserves to work for Spex.