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What’s up Sorry Staters?
How was everyone’s Halloween? I had a pretty good time. Coated my face with makeup to look even more like a corpse than I usually do. Just had myself a cool ghoul’s night out. Saw a Dead Boys cover band, got covered in fake blood (at least I hope it was fake), and partied with my Richmond friends. Speaking of Richmond, I’ll be driving up there yet again this weekend as Public Acid makes our way to Philly. We’ll be playing with Beton Arme and KOS, as well as Dark Thoughts for their record release show on November 9th. It’ll be Public Acid’s first gig since we returned from Europe earlier this summer, which is wild to think about. Hope to see some of you readers there!
For my staff pick, there is no better option than the Stunted Youth / Save Our Children split LP that just came out on Unlawful Assembly. Beyond all my Halloween nerdiness I’ve focused on for the last month, I’ve listened to this LP like a dozen times. A record that makes me reiterate to myself: “Goddamn, I love hardcore.” The 2 bands were/are based out of Austin, Texas, and they share members. Seems like they were always kind of a package deal. I remember seeing both bands touring together back in 2022. They actually played in NC and it was Meat House’s first show ever. Pretty funny. In my mind, I had assumed that both bands were now defunct. Maybe for a while they were? Not too long after that tour in 2022, Chester who sang in Save Our Children and plays guitar in Stunted Youth had actually moved to Richmond for a while. He was playing in the band No Victim, whose tape I was raving about many months back. So, all this to say, this LP coming out was quite a surprise.
In a way, it’s kinda beautiful that these 2 bands were always intertwined. On that tour back in 2022, Stunted Youth and Save Our Children had a split cassette as well. Many of the songs, if not all of them, appear again on this LP. To my ears, it sounds like both bands re-recorded these songs? Just based on the fidelity of the recording, they sound like sonically updated versions of the songs from the cassette. The collection of songs on this split LP seems like a single session from each band. Like one day, they just went into a studio to record literally every single song they had, which is a pretty rad thing to do. Not overwrought with concern about production or cleanliness, just down and dirty live capturing of each band ripping it up. Or at least that’s what it sounds like to me. It’s raw and gritty, but still clear and punchy, more like a proper recording for a record than a demo. There’s literally like 40 songs on this LP, around 15-20 from each band. And what’s great is that it still doesn’t feel like an overly long hardcore record. I mean, maybe you’ll feel like you’ve been bludgeoned repeatedly for 30 minutes, but for my money, that’s a good thing.
What I love about both these bands is that they embody the spirit of everything I love about 80s US hardcore punk. Like these dudes heard Void and Gang Green, then just stopped and called it right there: “YEP, that’s what perfect hardcore is supposed to sound like.” Youthful, explosive, fast, chaotic, even a little sloppy sometimes. And you might assume that you’d feel barraged by digesting so much material from each band since it’s pretty much all-out raging hardcore for the entire listen. While surely these songs were formed with urgency, I personally don’t think the songwriting was shot from the hip so carelessly. The songs are powerful with meaty, badass riffs to sink your teeth into, tons of smoothly executed transitions and tempo changes, and most of all—all out RAGE. I’ll go on record and say that I’m not even the biggest fan of when hardcore drumming gets into “blast beat” territory. But with Save Our Children in particular, when they erupt into these tempos, it doesn’t make me think of “power violence.” The band’s stylistic take on this style of playing reminds me more of the way certain 80s bands that I like would approach this tempo, like Negative FX or Deep Wound. It just rips.
Now if I had to compare the two bands, I would say that Save Our Children is more snotty with big, bright riffs and maybe slightly tighter, more composed song structures and tempo changes, while Stunted Youth is gruffer, meaner, more noisy and chaotic sounding. I think I might prefer S.O.C. just by a hair, but both bands are great. Match made in Hell. Makes me wonder if people will compare this to Faith and Void one day. Honk once or honk twice. Everything about both these bands to me resembles a lack of pretension—no tough guy posturing, no obvious or corny aping of genre or style like a tribute band… just an exemplary display of true, genuine love for tried-and-true blazing hardcore punk. If you sleep on this, you’re missing out.
That’s all I’ve got. As always, thanks for reading.
‘Til next week,
-Jeff