Featured Releases: January 12, 2023

Vidro: Glöd 12” (Beach Impediment Records) Stockholm, Sweden’s Vidro has been kicking around for a few years, releasing their debut full-length in 2018, a split LP with Brazil’s Cankro in 2019, and now Glöd, their second full-length. I first heard Vidro about a year ago and wondered how a hardcore band this good could fly under my radar. Their sound is massive, with a straightforward hardcore foundation that leans toward noise rock’s more sophisticated pummeling strategies. The band can play their asses off, their wrecking ball rhythm section anchored by drummer Staffan (who played in a later lineup of Headcleaners!). Rather than relying on flashy fills, Staffan creates skewed takes on classic punk beats that he delivers with the uniform intensity of heavy industrial equipment. Guitarist Lucas favors dense and dissonant chords, giving the music a richness of texture that reminds me of Die Kreuzen and Nog Watt. Vocalist Vendela fronts this white-hot band, matching the instruments’ magical blend of subtlety and intensity… as with the music, once you stop recoiling from the initial attack, you hear all this subtle musicality in the vocals that keeps you coming by for repeated listens. I’m hard-pressed to find any close comparisons for Vidro’s style, though the battering-ram intensity of their mid-paced tracks will appeal to fans of Golpe. If you can’t tell, I’m smitten with Vidro and Glöd, and I’m stoked the record has an appropriate American home on Beach Impediment Records, the top label in the game.

Prisão: S/T 7” (Adult Crash Records) Denmark’s Adult Crash Records brings us this debut from Stockholm, Sweden’s Prisão. If you’re thinking that Prisão doesn’t look like a Swedish word, you’re right… Prisão’s vocalist is Lucas—also the guitarist in Vidro—who is from Brazil and sings in Portuguese for Prisão. Prisão fits right in on Adult Crash’s roster full of exciting Scandinavian bands whose music is rooted in gritty 80s hardcore. While Lucas’s other band Vidro fuses subtlety and power, Prisão has no time for the former, with a stomping, bruising caveman attack. Not that it’s dumb… the riffs and beats are smart but straightforward, the band dragging their knuckles as they march toward their muse. It’s burly and mean, but not tough-guy shit… music made for purging the grinding monotony of the straight world. Totally killer.

Various: Öresund HC Omnibus 12” (Adult Crash Records) Like the classic Japanese hardcore compilation Thrash Til Death, Öresund HC Omnibus presents an EPs worth of material from four different bands, including individual front, rear, and insert artwork for each. I love this style of compilation since it feels like playing four killer 7” EPs right in a row, but costs about half as much as four 7”s. It’s great value for money, especially when the bands are well-matched, as they are here. Denmark’s Adult Crash Records has been one of my favorite labels for many years (in fact, several of Sorry State’s own releases have European pressings on Adult Crash), and if you have followed them, you have a good idea of what these bands sound like. While some of Adult Crash’s bands here and there lean toward particular styles like d-beat, oi!, or UK82, everything on the label is fast hardcore punk, and Öresund HC Omnibus follows the pattern. All four bands—Zyfilis, Nonplus, Junta, and Hag—have earlier releases (though Nonplus only had a demo tape)—so you might come to this record looking for new material by a band you already like, or you might like the sampler aspect of it… either way you’ll be satisfied. All four bands play sprightly and catchy hardcore punk, but each group brings in its own wrinkles. Zyfilis has their explosive guitar leads, Nonplus a gnarlier sound that borrows from the rawer end of the Totalitär school, Junta’s manic hardcore exudes desperation, and Hag’s fist-pumping hardcore punk will appeal to fans of their fellow Swedes Axe Rash. All four bands are killer—like everything on Adult Crash—and you can’t go wrong with this if you want to get hip to four great contemporary hardcore bands from this part of the world.

The Dishrags: Three (1978-1979) 12” (Supreme Echo Records) Archival label Supreme Echo Records brings us an updated version of Three, their retrospective release from the Dishrags, a Vancouver group who lay claim to the title of being the first all-woman punk band in North America. Supreme Echo released Three back in 2014, but this new pressing makes some additions to the booklet full of archival material that accompanies the record. The Dishrags were not just the first all-woman punk band in North America, they were one of the continent’s earliest punk bands period, and like a lot of other early Canadian punk bands, they seem more connected to the UK 77 set than many American bands of the same era (Three even includes covers of the Clash and the Adverts). The Dishrags’ three-song single (reproduced in full here) sounds like one of the legions of bands who formed in the UK in the Sex Pistols’ wake, when an entire generation of young people (the Dishrags were only 15 when they started!) realized the expressive potential of raw and immediate rock and roll. While those three tracks are still raw, the background vocals and more measured performances make the Dishrags’ best songs shine. Besides the single’s three tracks, Three also collects a treasure trove of live and demo material. The sound on all this stuff is great, and while I think the Dishrags’ songs benefited from the slightly more produced sound of their studio EP, these other recordings show a group who could bash out straightforward and aggressive punk with the best of ‘em. In an ideal world, the Dishrags would have recorded a killer album with this lineup, but this collection is the closest thing we’re going to get to that. It’s still a satisfying listen and an important piece of punk history.

Split System: Vol. 1 12” (Drunken Sailor Records) Debut full-length from this Australian band that features the guitarist from Stiff Richards and Jackson Reid Briggs on vocals, from Jackson Reid Briggs and the Heaters, whose most recent LP Drunken Sailor Records released in 2021. If you come to Australian punk looking for bands who are steeped in the tradition of 70s Aussie groups like the Saints and Radio Birdman, Split System is going to be right up your alley, as they combine hard rock riffing, punk energy, and pop songwriting chops in similar proportions to those classic bands. Split System even includes a nod to a classic Radio Birdman track here, nicking a bit of the riff from “Aloha Steve and Danno” (which was itself nicked from the theme song to the TV show Hawaii Five-O) for their track “Ringing in My Head.” Vol. 1 is an amped-up affair that seems like the perfect soundtrack for a sweaty, beer-soaked romp in the back room of a dingy Aussie pub, but the hooks are strong enough that you’ll still be humming them the next morning. While Split System is primarily interested in punk bashing, the standout track “Ultimatum” leans toward the Flamin’ Groovies’ power-pop… hell, you might even play that one for your friend who loves Tom Petty. I’m all for hooks, but you have to send them down the gullet with a big spoonful of punk grit, and Split System has grit to spare.

Green/Blue: Worry 7” (Feel It Records) Minneapolis duo Green/Blue are back with Worry, a two-song single that follows up their recent album Paper Thin, their first for Feel It and their third overall. If you’d told me the two songs on Worry were a hot new band from Melbourne, I wouldn’t have batted an eye, as (despite Green/Blue’s blustery locale) these two tracks have a sun-bleached sense of melody that reminds me of a lot of contemporary Australian underground music. The Mo Tucker-ish drumming and furious rhythm guitar strumming is very Velvet Underground (perhaps through the Modern Lovers, the Clean, or one of the other zillion bands whom the Velvets influenced), but these songs’ meat is in their strong, forward-facing vocal melodies. They’re both total toe-tappers, and work well on the single format where each side gets your undivided attention.