Featured Releases: November 3, 2022

Dominant Patri: Heroes Glory 12” (Demo Tapes Records) Demo Tapes Records brings us a reissue of this obscure but worthwhile document, Dominant Patri’s 3-song 1982 demo Heroes Glory. Dominant Patri was only around for a short time, playing a handful of gigs with other punk/anarcho bands of the day and recording these three tracks. While it’s a slim legacy in terms of volume, Demo Tapes makes the most of it with incredible sound and a booklet collecting what must be every scrap of extant information about the short-lived band. As for the three songs themselves, they are gems. Stylistically, these are straight-down-the-middle anarcho-style punk, not as hardcore as the crustier bands and not as melodic as bands like Zounds, but bringing together both ends of the genre’s spectrum. It helps that these songs have a powerful recording, crystal clear and present in a way that you wouldn’t expect from a band so obscure. As the only audio document of Dominant Patri’s existence, I find myself listening to these tracks with a lot more focus and attention to detail than I otherwise would… it feels like this record is a keyhole to a wider world. That actually goes for the reissue as a whole. Some reissues can feel like a feast overwhelming you with music and visual ephemera, but Heroes Glory is like a miniature painting that you pore over and appreciate every detail. Dominant Patri might have been a blip on the radar, but they were a beautiful blip, and anyone with a taste for vintage UK anarcho will love these three tracks, even if every time we listen, we wish we could have more.

122 Hours of Fear zine This giant, ambitious, full-color, square-bound zine comes to us from Layla Gibbon, former Maximumrocknroll coordinator, member of Girlsperm, and all-around punk historian and aesthete. I was super stoked to devour this mag, and even with my high expectations, it blew them out of the water. Do you ever read Maggot Brain and wish there was something of similarly high quality that focused on hardcore punk? If so, 122 Hours of Fear is the fulfillment of all your wishes. Focusing (rather loosely, I’d say) on the live gig-going experience (Gibbon started work on the project during the pandemic, when there were no gigs), 122 Hours of Fear cuts a wide swath in pretty much every respect, from the contributors (young punks, old punks, and everyone in between), to the bands and music covered (everything from classic punk to the most obscure Japanese noise to mainstream rock), to the styles of writing (show reviews, text messages, journal entries, stream-of-consciousness essays, etc.), to the emotional register (hilarious, angry, wistful, irreverent, surreal, thoughtful), to the modes of presentation (standard written entries, visual art pieces, scans of vintage ephemera, photographs, and more than a few mixes of several of these). While there are highlights (Sam Ryser’s surreal account of a Dawn of Humans gig in Slovenia, Ambrose Nzams’ story of a wild night at Philly art school parties, Tobi Vail’s deep contextualization of the Wipers’ standing in the wider punk scene, and the numerous incredible photographs littered throughout the book), the entire publication is just riveting. There’s also probably a cool story about your favorite band (my favorite band is the Fall, and there’s a bonkers account of one of their most infamous New York gigs). I know this is expensive, but it’s beautiful and the amount of work that has gone into it is staggering. If you love punk and underground culture, it’s hard to imagine you won’t love this.

Class: Epoca de Los Vaqueros 12” (Feel It Records) In case you missed the memo when their excellent self-titled cassette came out (note: that cassette is now back in stock), Tucson, Arizona’s Class features Rik from Rik & the Pigs on vocals, but with a sound that’s more fleshed-out and ambitious than the Pigs’ grimy, Stones-descended punk. Class’s first cassette caught my ear right away, and while I’m surprised to hear the full-length follow so quickly (especially in today’s age of interminable vinyl production waits), I’m pleased to hear that it picks up right where those tracks left off. Class is one of the few American underground bands that sounds of a piece with the most interesting music coming out of Australia right now. Like Civic, Vintage Crop, the Shifters, or Delivery, Class makes pop music informed by the punk and post-punk traditions, and they take songcraft and production seriously in a way bands typically don’t in the American underground, where a tossed-off, slacker approach seems essential to make it clear you’re not with the capitalists. Not that Class has anything to do with capitalism (I bet no one has ever written that before!), but they are interested in making good music that people might want to listen to, and listen to in order to get a feeling of simple pleasure rather than some sort of complex emotional and political gestalt. Stylistically, they remind me of the fuzzy 70s space where the punk underground met the rock overground, with the Flamin’ Groovies trademark chime informing tracks like “Light Switch Tripper,” and others like “Left in the Sink” reminding me of 70s UK bands like the Skids or Elvis Costello & the Attractions who weren’t punks but whose music from that era soaked up the ambient energy. Pop tunes, punk energy, musical chops, rich and subtle production… Class’s debut album has it all.

Penetrode: S/T 12” (Alonas Dream Records) The last time we heard from Philadelphia’s Penetrode was back in 2017, when they released a split 7” with Chicago’s C.H.E.W. That was a great pairing, bringing together two intense and inventive bands with top-notch musicianship, and while C.H.E.W. is sadly no more, the intervening five years have apparently done little to soften Penetrode’s rough edges. The overall tone of this record is dark, murky, and uncomfortable, but the thing I focus on most is the playing. Penetrode is so locked in that they can execute the lunging rhythmic acrobatics I associate with Bl’ast! or Damaged-era Black Flag. You hear this on tracks like “Delusion” and “Past.Future.Present,” which sound a lot like Bl’ast!, but that locked-in way of playing also shapes songs like the dirge-y, mid-paced “Psychic Death” and the manic instrumental “Penetrode.” The riffing is great throughout the record, catchy, powerful, and inventive, often squeezing complex, dissonant chords into nimble runs. The grimy production and the muffled, low-in-the-mix vocals are straight out of the Bl’ast! playbook too, and as with that band it can make it a little tougher to wrap your ear around this record on the first listen. However, once you lock in, the murk perfectly encapsulates the music’s dark and desperate vibes. Highly recommended for those of you who like your hardcore dark, moody, and complex.

Flower City: Maggots Consume 7” (Esos Malditos Punks) Maggots Consume is the debut EP by this hardcore band from Austin, Texas. I’m not sure who is in Flower City, but based on Maggots Consume, it’s hard to imagine their sound isn’t informed by titans of Austin hardcore like Impalers and Criaturas. Flower City has a similar approach, building their songs around interesting and inventive riffing and playing with a head-down intensity that never lets up. As with those bands, it sounds like a relentless barrage on first listen, but a closer inspection reveals a subtlety in the arrangements that keeps the songs interesting all the way through… a noisy lead guitar passage here, an ever-so-subtle let-up in tempo there (only to come crashing back to full intensity, of course). The vocals are drenched in echo and buried way down in the mix, keeping the focus on those riffs, which just keep coming at you for the duration of these six tracks. While the lack of obvious dynamics and theatrics might make Flower City inscrutable to a dabbler in hardcore, those of us with an appreciation for this workmanlike approach to the genre will appreciate their power and precision.

Mosquito: The Originol Soundtrack cassette (Rotten Apple) Several times over the past few years, I’ve wondered, “what happened to Mark Winter?” It seemed like he was everywhere for a few years. His project Coneheads was a certified underground phenomenon, but there was also Big Zit, C.C.T.V., D.L.I.M.C., and plenty more, and they were all very good to fucking great. Then the releases just stopped with no fanfare. Maybe he was still putting out tapes you could only order via carrier pigeon to keep them safe from poseurs like me, but if that’s the case I didn’t so much as hear about them. So, Mosquito: The Originol Soundtrack marks, for me, the return of Mark Winter, and it is fucking awesome and a complete left turn. The fifteen-minute album is all instrumental (there are a few passages with spoken vocals) and the music, according to the description, follows the life cycle of a mosquito. Not being an entomologist, I can’t speak to the accuracy with which Winter has evoked the mosquito’s biology, but I can say the music is wide-screen cinematic, evoking a range of different moods that all seem mosquito-like, but from different directions. The way Mosquito slides between different moods and textures reminds me of the 70s German band Faust, as do the often bass-driven arrangements and the loose, quasi-jammy structure of the different movements. The bass-driven, funky feel also makes me think of cult 70s film soundtracks, particularly Alain Goraguer’s brilliant soundtrack to the 1973 animated film La Planète Sauvage. While the genre differs from anything I’ve heard Winter do before, you can still tell it’s him… the tones and textures of the instruments sound a lot like Coneheads and D.L.I.M.C., and a few of the movements (especially the first and last ones) feature some of his trademark mutant Chuck Berry lead guitar playing. While the potential audience of people who love both Coneheads and the kinds of weird soundtracks and library records unearthed on labels like Finders Keepers might be small, I am 100% in that demographic, and I fucking love this. Now, pardon me while I research how to train carrier pigeons so I don’t miss another note of music this person makes.