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Mercenarias: Cadê As Armas? LP (original 1986, Baratos Afins; reissue 2021, Beat Generation)

We just got in copies of this reissue of Cadê As Armas?, the first album from Brazil’s Mercenárias, and I’ve been spinning it a bunch. I’ve heard these tracks on several previous Mercenarias compilations like 2005’s The Beginning of the End of the World on Soul Jazz Records and the 2018 collection on Nada Nada Discos, but Beat Generation’s reissue marks the first time Cadê As Armas? has been reissued in its original format.

Mercenárias began in 1982 when the punk scene in São Paulo was at a creative peak, with bands like Inocentes, Cólera, Olho Seco, and Ratos de Porão hitting their stride. While Inocentes and Cólera had a lot of UK punk in their sound, the latter bands’ gnarly hardcore is what I think of when I imagine early 80s Brazil… grimy, angry, and above all intense. When you factor in that Brazil’s proto death metal scene with bands like Sepultura and Sarcófago was just a few years away, it seems like brutality must have been the order of the day, but Mercenarias’ music is something else.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to scrounge up much historical information about the band. Nearly every bio notes the members were students when Mercenarias started, which makes perfect sense… Mercenarias’ music comes off as urbane, particularly when contrasted with the hardcore bands I mentioned above. However, I can’t seem to find much on why the group started or what the members wanted to accomplish. Even the two essays printed in this reissue’s insert (one of them by Joao Gordo, Ratos de Porão’s singer) seem to be from an outside perspective. The sounds of the early Rough Trade Records catalog must have influenced Mercenarias, since their music exudes a sense of art school cool that resembles many of those bands.

While I don’t have much info to fill out Mercenarias’ story, I have some good news: there’s a surprising amount of vintage video footage of the band. Check out this video of “Pânico” live on Brazilian TV, this one of a track from their second album, Trashland, on another Brazilian TV show, this scorching early live version of “Policia,” and their very awesome, very 80s official video for “Pânico.”

Aunt Sally: S/T 12” (original 1977, Vanity Records; reissue 2022, Mesh Key Records)

I pre-ordered this reissue from Mesh Key Records so long ago I had forgotten about it when it arrived on my doorstep last week. The vinyl supply chain issues suck in pretty much every respect, but at least it resulted in a nice little surprise for me.

I hadn’t heard of Aunt Sally when Mesh Key announced their reissue of this 1979 LP. While I think I’m pretty knowledgeable about Japanese hardcore, I know comparatively little about the country’s post-punk scene. When I first listened to Aunt Sally on Bandcamp those many months ago, it sparked a research spree where I learned about a lot of cool stuff, including the Akina Nakamori LP I chose as my staff pick a while back. There are still several records from that research session hanging around on my want list, so if the vinyl gods are with me, this won’t be the last Japanese post-punk LP I write about for one of my staff picks.

Back to Aunt Sally, though. In Bandcamp’s short piece on the group, they wrote about how they were inspired by the Sex Pistols. Aunt Sally’s singer—who later made experimental music under the stage name Phew—flew to London from Japan in 1977 and saw the Sex Pistols live. She was so inspired by the Pistols that, upon returning to Japan, she set about recruiting her own band. It’s crazy how, although Aunt Sally was based thousands of miles from London in Osaka, Japan, their origin story so closely resembles that of so many English post-punk bands.

Like a lot of those English post-punk bands, Aunt Sally sounds nothing like the Pistols. While plenty of second-wave punk bands took a lot of inspiration from the Pistols, it’s fascinating that so many people saw the Pistols as this watershed moment of inspiration, but it never occurred to them to copy what the Pistols were doing. It’s like the Sex Pistols were this bomb that blew open a door, allowing an entire generation of musicians to step through into a kind of Narnia where their innate creativity was unleashed.

And maybe because the Sex Pistols’ roar was so mighty, ratcheting up rock’s loudness, pomposity, and masculinity to absurd levels, it created space for the music Aunt Sally made. It’s similar to the music that Rough Trade put out in its early years, and if you’re a fan of bands like the Raincoats, Kleenex, Essential Logic, and Delta 5, you’ll no doubt love this Aunt Sally album. Like those records (as well as bands like Gang of Four, Wire, and Joy Division), Aunt Sally, in my ways, hearkens back to the pre-punk art rock of bands like Roxy Music, David Bowie, and early Genesis, albeit without the aforementioned pomposity and masculinity that the Pistols made to seem so ridiculous. Aunt Sally’s music strikes me as forward-thinking, cerebral, and unafraid of delicacy, yet still somehow punk in spirit.

It looks like, as of right now, there are still a few copies of the record for sale on Mesh Key’s Bandcamp site. The first pressing comes with a bonus live 7” that won’t come with subsequent pressings, and the songs on that are interesting and worth having. The first pressing was only available through Mesh Key’s Bandcamp site, but I’m hoping that when this gets repressed we can bring in some copies for Sorry State.

Kalefa Sanneh: Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres book (2021, Penguin)

My house doesn’t have central heat, and it’s been quite cold here in North Carolina (well, cold for us at least), so I’ve been reading a lot. Last week I plowed through this book by former New York Times pop music columnist Kalefa Sanneh, and I thought y’all might want to know about it.

Sanneh’s conceit is right in the book’s subtitle. He gives us capsule histories of seven different genres that were and are popular in the 20th and 21st centuries, which add up, more or less, to a history of popular music during that time period. It’s such a straightforward idea that it’s surprising no one has done it before, but part of the issue is that artists and music writers are often reluctant to talk about genre. Artists don’t like their work to be limited or pigeonholed by genre, and critics tend to view the best music as somehow transcending genre… that if something is “just” a country record or a dance record that it can’t be great. Sanneh’s book takes these biases head-on.

What is genre, though? Ostensibly, genre refers to categories of artistic works based on form, subject, or style. In literature, epic poetry and sonnets are different genres… one is very long and deals with heroism; the other is exactly 14 lines and deals with romantic love. In popular culture, though, genre means so much more than that. Just look at the term “genre fiction” in the literary world. Today, “genre fiction” refers to literary works that fit into established genre categories like science fiction, romance, crime, etc. However, “genre fiction” is typically distinguished from “literary fiction,” which somehow transcends genre, the implication being that genre fiction is formulaic or less interesting.

Much like genre fiction, musical genre is not strictly about formal categorization, but just as much about who listens to particular artists or styles of music. This is rooted in the ways stores categorize records, as well as radio programming, where stations target a certain demographic profile and serve them with a particular style of music. Thus, R&B became music that black people listened to. Country music became music for rural white people. The interesting thing, though—and this is where much of the tension in Sanneh’s narrative comes from—is that both things, the musical styles and the communities they serve, are changing constantly. Obviously, you can listen to country music from the 1950s and country music from the 2020s and they sound very different (albeit with some through lines). The demographics also change. Rock and roll started out as black music, but was basically whitewashed over the course of the 60s. Country music’s changes were less dramatic, but changing from targeting rural white people to suburban white people had a big effect on the genre’s style and politics. These changes were always gradual, anything but synchronous, and generated a lot of controversy as they were happening. Sanneh looks at the careers of stars like Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and many others, illustrating how they navigated the changing landscape, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much.

One of the seven genres Sanneh examines is punk, and obviously I was particularly interested in this chapter. The book’s tone shifts with this chapter, the narrative becoming much more personal because Sanneh grew up in the punk scene in the early and mid-90s in the northeastern US. He covers the standard histories of how punk developed in the US and UK and how it transformed through the 80s, 90s, and beyond, but really the chapter is about how Sanneh himself engaged with punk and what he took from it as his listening habits widened after his teen years. As I was reading, I couldn’t figure out how I felt about the book shifting to more of a first-person perspective… I worried it overemphasized parts of the punk scene Sanneh experienced himself. For instance, Sanneh writes about one revelatory Fugazi gig he saw in the early 90s, which gets more ink than the Sex Pistols’ entire career. In another of the book’s most memorable passages, Sanneh writes about training at the Harvard radio station, which was a crash course / boot camp in punk history. Each week, the station’s elders assigned ten albums, and the trainees would have to listen to those albums, write up their thoughts, and then the group would have heated discussions about their impressions. (This sounds like heaven to me BTW.) It’s interesting that while record company executives, radio programmers, and (to a lesser extent) journalists policed other genres’ formal boundaries, in punk this happens at a grassroots, word-of-mouth level. Further, Sanneh’s punk education seems to foreground skepticism about the very idea of genre, since they encouraged debate at these meetings. It seems like the station’s elders weren’t so much policing punk’s boundaries as pressing their initiates to think through what punk meant to them, and to articulate and defend their reasoning.

Anyway, the book is really good. I was riveted and would have read the whole thing in one sitting if that were possible. I should also note that I haven’t spoiled anything for you… there’s plenty more insight in there, particularly if your interests extend beyond punk.

I think part of what Sanneh tries to do in the book is rehabilitate the idea of genre within music discourse / criticism, or at least to establish it as a useful lens through which you can look at music. I used to hate thinking about genre. I remember when Sorry State opened, we didn’t have genre-based sections, just new records, used records, and bargain bin. When we introduced genre sections, we saw a spike in sales, because most people weren’t interested in digging through a bunch of records they didn’t care about in order to find the rock, hip-hop, or metal they were interested in. The store’s staff still gets into debates over this… a long-running one is whether we should have a goth section at the store, and if so, what records would be in it? What music is and isn’t goth?

I also grapple with genre in my writing for the Sorry State newsletter. A lot of the music we carry and that I write about explicitly engages with the idea of genre. Sanneh points out in his book again and again how people use genre as a kind of social lever to raise up or push down certain artists or trends, or to include or exclude certain people from an in-group. (For instance, it’s hard for white artists to get played on R&B radio, and even harder for black artists to get on country radio. Does that mean Justin Timberlake’s solo music isn’t R&B? Or Lil Nas X isn’t country?) I remember when Disclose was putting out records, reviewers often dismissed them as Discharge copycats; this was doubly the case for bands like No Fucker who picked up Disclose’s mantle. Eventually, this style of music became so popular that you couldn’t simply dismiss… you had to come up with some way to understand or justify its popularity lest you look like an old man yelling at a cloud. This happens with a lot of genres; a new trend emerges and the powers that be dismiss it until it gets so popular that they have to contend with it (especially if they want the money it generates). I’m personally very uninterested in policing genre boundaries. I don’t want to be the one who decides whether something is hardcore or not. My policy, insofar as I have one, is to let the work frame how I contextualize it. If an artist seems to engage with the idea of genre, then I’ll write about it; if they aren’t, then I won’t. I certainly wouldn’t want to use genre as a cudgel to beat artists who are too close (or not close enough) to some imagined ideal.

One more aside: I’ve noticed that in some circles it’s become something of a meme to say “d-beat is a drumbeat, not a genre.” This annoys the shit out of me. D-beat has established stylistic parameters (going well beyond just the drumbeat), a community that coalesces around the sound, a canon of classic releases, and even its own fashion sense. If that doesn’t qualify something as a genre, I don’t know what does. There is no Moses that comes down from the mountain to certify the existence of a new genre. To say that d-beat is any less of a genre than grindcore or alt-country or Soundcloud Rap is just absurd.

A few weeks ago I grabbed this copy of the Stupids’ Violent Nun EP out of a small buy that came through the store, thinking I would listen to it once and then bring it back to sell to someone else. However, I’ve played it over and over. I actually have a lot of thoughts about the Stupids, so I figured this record would make for a good staff pick.

If you had asked me my opinion on the Stupids before I picked up this copy of Violent Nun, I would have told you they got better with time, starting off as a fairly mediocre hardcore band and maturing into a pretty good skate rock band. I spent some time revisiting their albums over the past day or so and I largely stand by that assessment (with some revisions I will explain below), but I felt like it was important to return to the records because it’s been a very long time since I listened to them and my tastes have changed a lot since then.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned many times, I spent my early 20s obsessed with the band Leatherface, not only collecting their records but also looking for and listening to other bands that sounded like them. Leatherface was so influential that there are plenty of threads you can pull relating to bands whom they influenced or who influenced them, but one of the most interesting veins of music I hit was a group of melodic hardcore bands from the UK in the late 80s. The most obviously connected band is HDQ (short for “Hung, Drawn, and Quartered”), which was the teenage band of Leatherface guitarist Dickie Hammond. HDQ started as a UK82-influenced punk band, perhaps on the more melodic end of that spectrum, but by the end of their run as a band, on records like Sinking and Soul Finder, they had evolved into a very melodic band that makes perfect sense as an antecedent for Leatherface.

There were several bands who made a similar transition from hardcore to a more earnest melodic punk style. Another favorite was Exit Condition, who released a ripping 7” on Pusmort Records before going full Hüsker Dü on their Days of Wild Skies album. I’d gotten into hardcore as a teen and still loved it even as I was exploring all of this more melodic music, so finding bands who straddled those styles felt like a special discovery that I was uniquely positioned to appreciate, and I gobbled up anything I could find from the late 80s UK. It helped that the music seemed out of fashion, so the records were generally very cheap. I think a lot of them still are. For whatever reason, though, at some point I got my fill of this melodic style and I rarely listen to it nowadays. Even my Leatherface records rarely see any time on my turntable. Maybe I’ve changed, or maybe the world has changed, my tastes tending toward the brutal and/or confounding as society has drifted in those directions.

When I first came to the Stupids, I was viewing them through that lens that helped me to appreciate HDQ and Exit Condition. While I prided myself on liking most of these bands before and after their transitions away from hardcore, the Stupids’ hardcore material always sounded sloppy to me, with too many jokey tracks that took me out of the hardcore groove. Part of the problem might have been that I was listening to these releases on Boss Tuneage’s CD reissues that came out in the late 2000s. Those CDs were packed to the gills with bonus material, and while it’s great to have all of that stuff, listening to any of the discs in their entirety was a bit of a slog. This was particularly true of the earlier material, which wasn’t so much about hooks as short, manic bursts of speed.

Revisiting the Stupids’ discography over the past couple of days, I’m still impressed with their melodic material. While there are hints of melody from the beginning, something seems to click with the song “The Memory Burns,” the Hüsker Dü-ish track that opens their second album.* While I still wasn’t really feeling Peruvian Vacation this time around, “The Memory Burns” is still a standout track. The third album, Van Stupid, is good but suffers a little from the sloppiness and overabundance of jokey tracks that keeps me from embracing Peruvian Vacation, but on the final album of their original run, Jesus Meets the Stupids, everything comes together for a standout skate rock record. There’s even a good amount of straight up ripping hardcore on it. The Stupids’ 2008 comeback single, Feel the Suck, is also excellent, the a-side up there with “The Memory Burns.” I’ve never gotten around to checking out the subsequent reunion album.

One more quick digression: I have a few interesting “small world” type connections with the Stupids that might make me hold them a little closer to my heart. After the Stupids broke up, guitarist Ed Shred continued down the melodic punk path with a string of excellent bands like Sink, Bad Dress Sense, and K-Line, some of whom I’d investigated and blogged about, which led to a correspondence with Ed. When I briefly lived in London in 2008, I went to see Pissed Jeans at the Grosvenor and it was sold out, and somehow I ran into Ed at the pub downstairs and spent the entire evening talking punk with him and his mates. I ran into Ed a few years ago when he was in Raleigh for a memorial show for a friend of his who had moved to Raleigh in the 80s and become an important part of the music scene here. Oh, and on the Stupids’ US tour in the 80s, they played a show at the Fallout Shelter in Raleigh, which is just a block away from Sorry State. Like I said, small world.

Back to Violent Nun. It rips! When I read about the Stupids, a comment I see again and again is that they sounded more like a US hardcore band than an English or European one. I imagine Violent Nun is the record people are referring to when they say that. While bands like Ripcord and Heresy worshipped American hardcore but never sounded exactly like it, Violent Nun has that perfect early 80s-style hardcore production that I can’t get enough of. I’ve always found Peruvian Vacation (the record that came after Violent Nun) rhythmically shaky, but Violent Nun is a locked in ripper, not mechanically tight but powerful. There’s a little of the jokey element, but the proportions are just right, with the focus on tearing it up.

So yeah, new opinion on the Stupids: all eras.

* I avoided writing the name of the Stupids’ second album because its title might offend some people. Which reminds me of another anecdote. People my age who don’t have kids may not know this, but the word “stupid” has become taboo in elementary school settings, with good reason I suppose. I remember an episode of Turned Out a Punk when Damian told a story about one of his kids reacting with shock and horror when he found out a band had named themselves the Stupids. Which is funny because the kid’s father sings for a band called Fucked Up. It’s funny how people’s definition of profanity changes with time and shifting cultural interests and preoccupations.

Another year is in the books and it’s time to engage in that long-standing music nerd tradition of the “best of” list. While the list format seems to imply there is some sort of science or coherent method, I shot from the hip. I flipped through the records I bought this year and if it felt right, I added the title to my (eventually very long) short list. Then I took that short list and narrowed it down to 10 titles that felt the most important to me. The 10 records below are the ones I spent the most time listening to, but it feels like there’s something else to it. This collection of records seems to speak to this historical moment. I’m struck by the fact that, while I like to think I have a pretty broad palette for music, noisy punk and hardcore dominates this list. Obviously, that’s a style I gravitate toward, but that music also feels important right now because we’re living in such fucked up times. The Tower 7, Horrendous 3D, and Fairytale records are the sound of the giant machine we all live within grinding its gears, teetering on the edge of breakdown. I can’t bear to listen to anything that sounds slick to me in these times because it feels like a farce… how can you live on that surface level when we are surrounded by so much death, sickness, and pain? Not that there isn’t beauty too, but the records that felt the most beautiful were fashioned from rougher, bleaker material.

Top Records

Tower 7: Peace on Earth 12” (Roach Leg)

If I had to pick one record from 2021 as my favorite, it would either be the Tower 7 or the Morbo LP. Tower 7’s gritty, gnarly hardcore was the perfect music for this year. Yes, the record is currently hard to get, but that isn’t because they’re some kind of record collector hype band… it’s just because this is the music that everyone wants and needs to hear right now.

Morbo: ¿A Quién Le Echamos La Culpa? 12” (Cintas Pepe)

When you listen to Tower 7, you wander into the shit. When you listen to Morbo, you crack open a beer while sitting atop the rubble. While it’s gritty as fuck, it’s the one record on this list that gives me something like pure joy.

Horrendous 3D: The Gov. And Corps. Are Using Psycho​-​Electronic Weaponry To Manipulate You And Me​... 7” (Whisper in Darkness)

Fast and fucked will always be cool, but slightly less fast and extremely fucked sounded great to me this year. No one did it better than Horrendous 3D.

Yleiset Syyt: Umpikujamekanismi 7” (Open Up and Bleed Recordings)

Like Morbo, Finland’s Yleiset Syyt has a classic sound that makes me feel like I’m young again, taking my first plunges into the depths of 80s hardcore.

Quarantine: Agony 12” (Damage United)

A record that hits you like a 300-pound linebacker.

Electric Chair: Social Capital 7” (Iron Lung Records)

Electric Chair rules so fucking much. Very stoked I got to see them live a couple of times too, because as good as their records are, you gotta see them in person to get the full experience.

Illiterates: S/T 12” (Kill Enemy Records)

This young band from Pittsburgh came out of nowhere and dropped this catchy, punky take on 80s hardcore.

Amyl & the Sniffers: Comfort to Me 12” (ATO Records)

This record is the outlier on my list, but I listened to it so much I had to include it. I’ve loved Amyl & the Sniffers since I first heard them, and I remain befuddled by how many people hate on them. Perhaps Comfort to Me clicked with me because the Sniffers have essentially turned into a hardcore band without losing any of the swagger or catchiness of their earlier records.

Fairytale: S/T 7” (Desolate Records)

Like a lot of the bands on this list, Fairytale plays noisy hardcore, but their music has this ethereal mystery about it I can’t get enough of.

Nervous SS / Ratcage: Skopje Vs Sheffield 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus)

This is an ideal situations where a split is greater than the sum of its two sides. I always start with Nervous SS’s assault of intricate, explosive riffs, for which Ratcage’s equally ferocious but more anthemic songs provide the perfect chaser.

Notable Reissues

As always, I bought a lot of reissues this year. Here are the ones I enjoyed the most. Many of them are as notable for their packaging as for the music (Neos, Neon Christ, the Worst, Partisans), some of them are pretty straightforward repros that arrived at the perfect time to take over my turntable (English Dogs, the Clean, Burning Image), while others introduced me to bands I never would have known about otherwise (Karma Sutra, Burning Image, Glitter Symphony).

• Spike in Vain: Death Drives a Cadillac 12” (Scat)
• Neos: Three Teens Hellbent on Speed 12” (Supreme Echo)
• Karma Sutra: Be Cruel With Your Past And All Who Seek To Keep You There 12” (Sealed Records)
• Hated: 4 Song EP / Pressure 7”s (Meathouse Productions)
• Nog Watt: Fear 7” (Final Doomsday Records)
• English Dogs: To the Ends of the Earth 12” (Bomb All Records)
• Neon Christ: 1984 12” (Southern Lord)
• Assault & Battery: The Complete Session, May 1981 12” (Alonas Dream)
• Burning Image: The Final Conflict 7” (Going Underground)
• The Clean: Tally Ho 7” / Boodle Boodle Boodle 12” (Merge)
• The Worst: The Worst of the Worst 12” (Radio Raheem)
• Glitter Symphony / Sizon: In Green Furs 12” (Meat House Productions)
• Artistic Decline: 4 Song EP 7” (Meat House Productions)
• The Partisans: Anarchy in Alkatraz / No Future Demos 80 82 12” (Sealed Records)
• Pyhäkoulu: In Retrospect 12” (Svart Records)

Favorite Zines

Make a zine! This list should be longer.

General Speech

Maggot Brain

Razorblades & Aspirin

My War

The “Short List”

Here is my “short list” of artists whose work I enjoyed this year. I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting and this list is already way too long, but here it is anyway:

Straw Man Army, Urin, Vivisected Numbskulls, Hologram, Algara, Suffocating Madness, Chain Whip, Mujeres Podridas, Sial, Psico Galera, Knowso, Slant, Smirk, Imploders, Gauze, Erik Nervous, 80HD, Canal Irreal, Headcheese, Reek Minds, Children with Dog Feet, SQK Fromme, Prision Postumo, Spread Joy, New Vogue, Collate, CDG, Reckoning Force, Personal Damage, GG King

Final Flex

I usually think of buying expensive old records as a source of shame rather than pride, but since everyone else is doing it, here are some items I acquired in 2021 that I think were pretty cool:

Elvis side:

Jesus side: