Featured Release Roundup: September 6, 2018

Scythe: S/T 7” (Discos Huayno Amargo) After a standout demo, here’s the debut vinyl from this California band and it does not disappoint. If you’re a fan of creepy-sounding, metallic Japanese hardcore like G.I.S.M., Mobs, our Zouo (or newer bands in that vein like Blazing Eye) the sound will be familiar, particularly the growled vocals and the wobbly chorus effect on the guitar. However, Scythe don’t sound like a modern interpretation of that style so much as a lost relic from that era. The record sounds warm, organic, and analog (or at least analog-ish… I’m not sure how they recorded it), and the lack of clarity only serves to heighten my interest. This feeling carries over to the cryptic and minimal visual aesthetic, which has me examining every square inch of the packaging to figure out what’s going on. Spending time with this record reminds me of discovering records by the Misfits and Black Flag when I was a teenager, long before you could Google a band’s name and instantly find their biography, discography, and other information. This music comes from another place, but I don’t know where that place is or how I can get there. All I can do is listen closer and let myself get sucked into the band’s world. This record feels real and immersive in a way that pulling up a bandcamp site and listening while you wash dishes or run on the treadmill just can’t replicate. So kill the overheads, light some candles, cue this up and let it take you where it wants you to go.

Nueva Fuerza:  Hitos Y Derrotas 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) After an earlier 7” (which we still have in stock BTW) on the Spanish label Discos Enfermos, here’s the debut 12” from this Barcelona hardcore band, this time on La Vida Es Un Mus. While their earlier EP packed 10 songs onto a 7”, here they give us five songs on a 12”. Don’t worry, though; even though the songs are longer, they still have the clipped, jagged quality of the 7”. On Hitos Y Derrotas, however, they balance that Wire-esque sense of abruptness with longer passages that channel the same tense pulse as Destino Final. One minute the band is grinding into a deep groove, cymbal wash and guitar distortion blending into cascading waves of sound, the next they’re laying into Greg Ginn-inspired jagged and mind-bending guitar leads. Those leads are my favorite moments on the record, and while I wish there were more of them they’re more climactic for only popping up every so often. If you’re a fan of the artsier hardcore bands that LVEUM puts out—the aforementioned Destino Final, Una Bestia Incontrolable, and Permission, for instance—this will tweak your expectations in much the same way.

Ambush: S/T 12” (Diabolous) Debut one-sided 12” from this band out of New Hampshire (you don’t hear that every day!) featuring members of Aspects of War. While Ambush's music is rooted in d-beat and crasher crust, this 12” pushes past those sounds’ basic elements and arrives at something that’s even more interesting. Like Lebenden Toten or D-Clone, Ambush seem less interested in riffs and more interested in building compositions out of shifts in texture and timbre. In that respect they often sound more like industrial music than hardcore. Even the opening track, “Brain Dead,” which has some abrupt rhythmic changes, bleeds together into a vast lake of noise and feedback. Listening to this record reminds me of looking at one of Seurat’s pointillist paintings. Those paintings offer you a choice: you can step back from them and consider what’s being portrayed or represented, or you can get up close and lose yourself in the rhythmic pulses of abstract color. Similarly, any given second of this 12” sounds like inchoate noise, but take a step back and these are definitely songs with a sense of logic and movement to them. For me the magic of this 12” lies in the space between those two ways of listening, how you can’t quite lock onto both at the same time. It’s a tough feeling to describe, but if you’re a fan of super noisy bands like Confuse hopefully you get the gist of what I’m talking about and you understand that this is one of those rare records that can take you to that place.

Hand Grenades: Demos to London 12” (Almost Ready) Almost Ready re-releases this 1979 obscurity from New York, expanding the original single’s two tracks to a healthier four. The record’s packaging gives essentially no information about how these recordings came to be and the label’s description doesn’t help to clarify things much either. What I know is that these recordings come from New York in 1979, but they sound much more like what you would expect to hear coming from a teen center rehearsal space in suburban London around the same time. In other words, this sounds like the major touchstones of UKDIY like Desperate Bicycles, Television Personalities, or Teenage Filmstars. Like those bands, Hand Grenades sound like they’re experimenting with home recording technology and becoming fascinated by the sonic possibilities, but they’re not weird or visionary enough to discard pop song structure and launch into Nurse With Wound-style abstract noise. Sometimes, it’s the song itself that’s interesting. That’s the case with one of the bonus tracks, “Murder,” which reminds me of the TVP’s / Filmstars’ wry, slightly twee take on punk rock. More often, though, it’s the sound itself that’s most interesting, how tape hiss might mesh with guitar distortion and ambient room noise to create lush swirls of sound that couldn’t have been created any other way. Long story short, if you go deep with the UKDIY sound you will enjoy this, though it begs the question of why weren’t there more American groups that sound like this?