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It’s been a super busy week for me and I’ve had virtually no time for recreational music listening. It feels like October is this insanely busy time where we try to squeeze in a ton of activity in between the slower-moving months of the summer and the holidays (the invigorating fall weather helps with this), and consequently there seems to be something going on nearly every night after work. Alongside gigs and other social engagements, I was at the Sorry State warehouse until the wee hours of several mornings packing orders (thanks to everyone who picked up the new Zorn record!), and I’ve been cramming in a ton of practice for the two cover sets I’m playing on Halloween. Scarecrow is doing a full set of Misfits songs, and another group of friends is doing 45 Grave. My wife Jet is singing in the latter group and it’s her first time playing in a band like this. We’ve made a couple of practice recordings and I hear her listening to them all the time. It reminds me of when I first started playing in bands. I would tape every single rehearsal and most every gig—I probably recorded just about every note Cross Laws ever played—and I would listen to these recordings all the time, ostensibly to analyze them and think about ways to improve, but mostly just because I was so excited to be part of making this noise. Playing music with friends is still one of my favorite things to do.

I’ve done a bunch of cover sets over the years, and it’s always both socially and musically rewarding. For some of these, an existing band has learned an entire set of covers, but typically it’s an ad hoc group of people who come together just for one gig. It’s nice to play with different people every once in a while, and I’ve particularly relished the opportunity to play with incredible drummers like Eric Chubb (who played in our Adolescents cover band) and Connor Donnegan (who played in our Descendents cover band). Mostly, though, it’s the songs themselves that teach me the most. I’ve never been one to play along with records, really, and I don’t feel like I have much innate musical talent. What I learned about playing music I learned for the express purpose of being in a band, and I rarely learned more than I had to in order to reach that bar. When I started writing music—which was concurrent with starting to play music—the process was totally intuitive. While I might have had a certain sound in mind, I made songs by pushing notes and chords around until they made a kind of sense, sort of like how a sculptor takes a lump of clay and massages it into a legible shape. A lot of other people I’ve played with come to music from an analytical perspective, hearing things they like, pulling them apart to find out how they work, then tinkering with those plans to reshape them into their own vision. That’s never been me, though… I write music the same way I learned to paint, slopping it onto a canvas until it looked like something.

Playing cover songs, though, makes you realize how many ways there are to write a song. Learning a whole cover set even more so, because you really get an insight into particular songwriters’ processes, quirks, and preferences. Every band I’ve ever been in has composed the instrumental part of songs first and then added vocals and lyrics at the very end, but when you learn songs by bands like Discharge or the Misfits, you realize the vocals are in the drivers seat for much of the time. I remember reading that “Bullet” was a poem Danzig wrote as a teenager, the Misfits setting the words to music years later. Certainly, there’s no other way they would have ended up with the song’s ridiculously long bridge, where the band plays the same simple riff 17 (?!?!?!) times in a row. Playing “Hybrid Moments,” Jeff pointed out that the song is basically all chorus… three of them in a row with a brief connecting part to join them together. There’s so little to the song, but I think most people agree it’s one of the Misfits’ very best. “Halloween” is another one that blows my mind, the way the verses and choruses blend into one another, linked by this A chord so there are parts of the song where I can’t say definitively whether I’m playing the chorus, the verse, both, or neither.

Along with picking up songwriting tricks, playing in cover bands also helps develop your playing chops, and 45 Grave has been the most challenging cover set I’ve ever done from that perspective. That band could play! I remember when we did the Adolescents, I was nervous about all that downpicking, and when we did the Descendents, their melodic bass parts were a stretch for me, as I’ve always been more of a rhythmically focused player. But in both cases, with some homework, help from my more musical peers, and a lot of practice, I could eventually play, more or less note for note, what’s on the records. A lot of 45 Grave’s bass parts, though, are just over my head and beyond my playing ability. I’ve had to dumb them down to make them work for me, but I think (I hope!) I’ve done this in a way that doesn’t take away from the songs. Either way, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from getting deep inside these songs.

I always say I’m going to spend more time learning how to play other people’s songs and learning from them in this way, but I never end up making time for it unless I have the pressure of a show and its deadlines. On a long road trip this summer, I remember listening to the entire Big Boys discography in one go and thinking I should take the time to learn a bunch of their songs, as they’re a group whose bass lines I could learn a lot from. In fact, “learn a bunch of Big Boys songs” is still on my to-do list, un-crossed-off and taunting me. And then, of course, there are bands like Wire or the Fall whose bass parts I love, but whose style of playing and composition are totally different to mine, to where it seems daunting to even begin figuring it out. Taking the time to learn that music thoroughly would surely up my game as a player, but I guess there are too many orders to pack, too many books to read, and too many records to listen to at this point in my life. Maybe one day.

David Stubbs: Future Days (Faber & Faber, 2018)

I’ve had Germany on the brain lately and I’m not sure why. Given the current geopolitical situation, it’s an inconvenient time to be thinking about Germany’s cultural heritage, but my musical curiosity has been leading me in that direction. A few weeks ago I wrote about the band A+P, complaining that Germany’s language and culture remain frustratingly opaque to me, and then, mere days later, I started reading a book about Krautrock that was on my reading list.

I must have added David Stubbs’ Future Days to my reading list nearly a decade ago, when the hardcore edition first came out, but I only just now got a copy in my hands and read it. In retrospect, I’m glad I took a long time to get around to picking up the book, because when I added it to my “to read” list, I was in a stage of rabidly researching Krautrock records and trying to hear everything with that tag I could. Stubbs’ book isn’t geared toward that sort of Krautrock fanatic (a book called The Crack in the Cosmic Egg is much better for that… if you can find a copy). Stubbs isn’t a crate digger. Instead, he argues that the cultural impact and legacy of Krautrock comes down to a handful of seminal bands, the rest of the groups falling under that umbrella being also-rans with limited impact or not fitting the categorical definition precisely enough. The one bone he throws this brand of fanatics is when Stubbs asks Krautrock historian Stefan Morawietz for a deep-cut recommendation. Morawietz responds, “A band called Limbus on Ohr (…) Very, very obscure. Compared to them, even Faust sounds commercial.” Stubbs gives us a couple of pages on Limbus, but other than that, he devotes Future Days to Krautrock’s ten or so biggest names.

(Side note: Stubbs book contains, as you might expect this day and age, a lengthy discussion of the origin and continued use of the term “Krautrock.” The term is, of course, rooted in a slur. After much consideration, he finds that term the best option for labeling this historical phenomenon, and I’ll follow his lead in using it, even if it makes me cringe a bit every time I type it.)

While you might not discover many new bands to check out based on Stubbs’ book, he provides a lot of context for the bands he writes about. Aside from the one large book I read about Can (All Gates Open by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt), I know little about the personalities behind these bands, and listening to Krautrock is largely a context-free experience for me. This isn’t a problem, really… the music is so rich that there’s plenty to feed my brain with just the sounds. Stubbs provides some insight on why the music is resistant to the usual architecture of criticism that springs up around important rock musicians, the Krautrockers’ anti-rockist ethos and lack of charismatic vocalists shielding these groups from the normal rock critics’ methodologies. Some context can be a good thing, though. For instance, I have a couple of Guru Guru albums (Hinten and Känguru), but having no sense of who the group was or how their discography fits together, I didn’t realize their first album, 1970’s UFO, is a decidedly more abrasive and out-there affair than the other two. On the “to listen” list that one goes…

Beyond discussing the bands, their members, and their music, Stubbs’ book shines as a piece of cultural history. Much of the book is about the overlapping generational and regional tensions the music grew out of. While a couple of Krautrock’s seminal groups had initial stirrings in Berlin, Stubbs’ argument is that Krautrock, as a musical and cultural phenomenon, is a product of the West German state… a state that existed only for a relatively brief and clearly defined historical moment. The anti-rockist ethos I mentioned above was largely a reaction against America and Americanization; even half a generation before, German groups mostly aped the beat and soul music that catered to the taste of American GIs. While the Krautrockers’ parents’ generation were deferential to Americans, grateful as they were for Americans’ huge role in shepherding West Germany from post-war ruin to economic prosperity, the Krautrockers born toward the end of the war and in the immediate post-war period (i.e. those in their twenties in the 1970s) were the first to ask why they couldn’t have an indigenous tradition of rock music of their very own.

Alongside contextualizing the 1970s Germany counter-culture, another area of interest for Stubbs is examining how Krautrock’s influence spread across the world. Here, that Stubbs is an English author writing in English is a strength, because (as both he and the musicians themselves note many times in Future Days), limited though Krautrock’s influence was, its influence in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds dwarfed its impact in Germany. Particularly interesting is how Stubbs charts the changing attitudes toward Krautrock (and Germany in general) in British culture. Much as the Krautrockers’ parents remained stagnant in their embrace of America post-WWII, a robust Germanophobia reigned in Britain in the 70s. Stubbs notes at one point that, in 70s Britain, the mere mention of anything German was liable to prompt mock goose-stepping and sieg heils, and UK media coverage of the Krautrock groups (and there was plenty! Can even appeared on Top of the Pops!) willfully partook. I can’t find the passage, but there’s one headline that calls Can’s music the “final solution” to rock’s stagnation, and there are countless examples to go along with that one. According to Stubbs, though, this all changed with Bowie. For Stubbs, the thread that runs through Bowie and into the post-punk era is “a new pop ice age” when the hippies’ dusty garb and musty odor were shaken off in favor of a new aesthetic that was cold, sleek, intellectual, and mechanical. Berlin was the geographic vortex of this shift, symbolizing as it did for Bowie a move from the Americanized excesses of the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke periods to the artier, more distant, altogether more European flavor of his Berlin period.

At one point, Stubbs says outright that Krautrock is the missing link between the hippies and the punks, and his argument is compelling. In the music of Can, Kraftwerk, Faust, and Ash Ral Tempel, you can hear the dismantling of the hippie dream and the crafting of new building blocks from which, for better or worse, the 80s would be built.

A few weeks ago I was on the 185 Miles South podcast talking about Italian hardcore. The idea behind the segment was that it would be a “starter pack,” a concise introduction to the scene pitched at people who know little or nothing about it, which of course means there were plenty of killer bands and records I didn’t get to talk about. Case in point, Peggio Punx. I know little about the band’s history, other than that they were from Alessandro in the northwest part of Italy (the region where most of the best-known Italian bands were from), that they existed for at least a few years before they released their first record, and that they put out three EPs in the 80s.

Their first, 1983’s Disastro Sonoro, is a gem of 80s Italian hardcore. The most striking aspect of Disastro Sonoro is the near-total absence of distortion on the guitar, which immediately sets Peggio Punx apart from their peers in the Italian hardcore scene. Peggio Punx didn’t avoid distortion because they didn’t want to be as aggressive or as intense as the other hardcore bands; rather, the guitarist achieves that intensity by simply playing harder and faster, their right hand sounding like it’s in danger of buzzsawing right through the instrument. Rather than the strumming bleeding into a unified roar, each blistering note feels like a cut from a razor-sharp switchblade. Along with the unique guitar sound, the songwriting is memorably punky, the songs brimming with vocal hooks like the “ahh-ahh” parts in “Pubblicita” and the chanted chorus of “Scemo,” and the drummer has some tricks up is his sleeve too, with lightning-fast tom work that sticks in your head as firmly as any guitar or vocal hook. If you dig what you heard in the Italian hardcore starter pack, Disastro Sonoro is essential listening in my book.

1984’s La Città È Quieta... ...Ombre Parlano replicates Disastro Sonoro’s formula with six raging hardcore tunes, but for me it’s not quite as strong, mostly owing to a murkier mix. The drums and vocals are super loud—usually a good thing on a fast hardcore record—but the guitar is nearly inaudible in places, which is frustrating because you can hear just as many cool licks as Disastro Sonoro. The bass sound is robust, though, and reveals the bass player was just as furious as the guitarist. A standout on this EP, though, is the b-side opener “Solitudine,” which features more of the crazy tom work we heard on Disastro Sonoro, but even more over the top. Don’t get me wrong… La Città È Quieta... is still a rager, but it’s just a little less distinctive and striking when compared to its predecessor.

Peggio Punx’ last record of the 80s was the 12” EP Ci Stanno Uccidendo Al Suono Della Nostra Musica!! E.P.. Like most of their peers, Peggio Punx reworked their sound when they made the jump to big vinyl, attempting to do something more varied and musical than the flat-out assault of their earlier EPs. Ci Stanno Uccidendo features more variation in tempo, rhythm (including some funky and reggae-influenced grooves), and texture, though there are still glimmers of the manic quality that made Disastro Sonoro so great. As with La Città È Quieta…, it’s hampered by an odd mix that puts the booming drums front and center, and the more conventional distorted guitar sound isn’t as good a match for the guitarist’s riffing style. Ci Stanno Uccidendo is an OK record, and it’s still hardcore punk, but to me, Peggio Punx’s transition into their second era isn’t as successful as some of the other 80s Italian hardcore bands’. Whereas Indigesti, for instance, was able to leave their old sound behind on their debut LP, Osservati Dall’Inganno, and create something that sounded totally fresh and nearly as exciting, Ci Stanno Uccidendo just kind of waters down what made their previous records so great.

So yeah, one fucking great record, one excellent one, and one pretty good one… while perhaps not enough to get Peggio Punx into the God tier, it’s a respectable showing even in a country where the bar for hardcore was extremely high. Incidentally, until I just looked at Discogs, I did not know Peggio Punx released two full-lengths: 1990’s Cattivi Maestri and 1992’s Alterazione Della Struttura. If anyone knows about those two, please hit me up… I’d love to hear this band broke the pattern of diminishing returns and delivered a late-career ripper.

Hugh Mundell: Africa Must Be Free By 1983 LP (1978, Message Records)

I’m not well-versed in reggae’s history, but I’ve been listening to a lot of it lately, a trend sparked by discovering this Hugh Mundell LP this summer.

I may have told this story before, but reggae first hit me when I was still in high school. Aside from the Bob Marley tunes you soak up just from being an American, the first experience with reggae I can remember is buying a compilation CD called Dub Chill Out from a big store called Planet Music in Virginia Beach, the same place where I bought my first Minor Threat and Black Flag CDs. I can’t remember how I figured out that dub reggae was something I should be interested in, nor can I remember why I bought that CD. My guess is that it was cheap… as a broke teenager, I was always trying to make my music dollar stretch a little further. While I had little money to spend on music, I had a pretty bumping sound system in my car. My first car was a tiny Dodge Ram pickup, and for my birthday one year, my dad outfitted it with a powerful amp and two huge speakers that sat behind the driver’s seat. It was super loud, especially in the truck’s tiny cabin, and my parents said they could always hear my stereo from half a mile away when I was driving home. Dub Chill Out, while having nothing on the surface to distinguish it, had a phenomenal track listing, and the mastering was huge and bass-y. From the moment I popped in the CD and cranked it in my car, I was in love. I still love bathing in loud bass frequencies (something I also appreciate about Sabbath and the handful of doom metal records I really love). I got a really great dose of that a few weeks ago when legendary dub producer Scientist played in Raleigh, the colossal PA at the Lincoln Theater submerging me in pulsating low end.

After Dub Chill Out, every couple of years I’d find another reggae record to fall in love with. There was Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Return of the Super Ape, King Tubby’s The Roots of Dub, Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile, U-Roy’s Dread in a Babylon, Culture’s Two Sevens Clash… but it has usually been one reggae record at a time for me, each of them happened upon in an unexpected, seemingly random way. Whenever I tried to explore the genre more systematically, I’d either encounter too much stuff I don’t really like, or I’d feel like I was experiencing diminishing returns, the new releases never offering the same buzz as whatever recent discovery ignited my interest. Maybe my brain only has space for one reggae record at a time, and I need to recharge my batteries and approach the sound with fresh ears every couple of years. I can’t think of another genre where I have a similar listening pattern.

Hugh Mundell entered my life in a similarly random way. One night I was thinking about how I love so much music from the late 70s, that there’s something about the production techniques and/or technologies that were in vogue at that time that just sends me to my happy place. While I know that certain eras of music interest me more than others, I typically explore music through the framework of artists or genre, researching artists’ discographies or checking out best of lists around a certain genre. I made a deliberate choice to explore records by year, thinking maybe I’d hear something from an unexpected genre that had that late 70s patina that I seem to like so much. I remember I was looking at a list of someone’s favorite records of 1978 (I can’t seem to find this list again), and Africa Must Be Free by 1983 stood out as something I was unfamiliar with but looked interesting. I dialed it up on streaming and it blew me away from the first track.

First, there’s that voice. Mundell’s vocals on Africa Must Be Free By 1983 are thin, reedy, almost pre-pubescent. He sounds so vulnerable here, the dry, reverb-less sound revealing every little crack in his voice. He sounds so young—he was 15 or 16 when he recorded this—that I tend to compare him to a young, Jackson 5-era Michael Jackson. Generally, it’s instruments rather than vocals that pull me into a record, but there’s something special about Mundell’s voice here. The second thing that struck me about this album was its production. While this is definitely roots reggae and not dub, the sound is spacious yet heavy on the low end, rich and powerful at the bottom, but with a ton of space in the higher frequencies for the many instrumental hooks on the record (note: Augustus Pablo contributes piano and organ). As I mentioned, I’d gone looking for something to listen to that had that late 70s patina I love so much, and the slightly lo-fi production values of Africa Must Be Free are pretty much exactly what was looking for. Finally, the lyrics on the album hit me pretty hard, too. While some of the song titles seem conventional, if not cliche (“Let’s All Unite,” “Jah Will Provide”), there’s a specificity to many of the lyrics that sets my mind racing. I love the track “My Mind,” which finds Mundell (by the way, I don’t know if he’s the lyricist or not) following the stream of consciousness from family, to love, to war in a way that reminds me so much of my teenage years, when I couldn’t seem to figure out how life’s big issues and small concerns related, if at all. And of course there’s the title track, which is fascinating. Why does this 1978 album posit a precise 5-year deadline for Africa’s liberation? The verses explain a prophecy that the biblical Judgment Day will happen in that year, but listening to the album 36 years later, it’s tragic that, despite Mundell’s pleading, Africa was barely different in 1984 than it was in 1983. There was no Judgment Day, and if there were material or political gains for its oppressed peoples during that time, they were marginal at best. Things probably have improved little in the decades since either. Mundell’s earnestness reminds me of the evangelical Christian kids I rode the bus with in school, who were similarly convinced, with all the clear-eyed certainty of youth, that the Judgment Day would arrive during their own lifetime.

Reading about the record, I learned Mundell was murdered on October 14, 1983, when he was only twenty-one years old. I’m kind of glad I didn’t learn about Mundell’s story until after I heard the album, though. That story is so intense that it must be hard to hear the music through it, especially an album that is so thoroughly laced with tragedy (but also, I must say, with hope). Certainly the fact that Mundell’s was murdered in the album’s titular year is an arresting coincidence. Though the Biblical Judgment Day didn’t happen, perhaps Mundell’s personal one did.

Of course, I started looking for a vinyl copy of Africa Must Be Free by 1983 by the time I finished with my first complete play through. As with most classic reggae records, it’s been repressed many times by many labels, which I imagine is a symptom of Jamaica’s dysfunctional and corrupt music industry. Grey-market reissues of reggae records abound, and they vary widely in quality. I added a bunch of different versions to my want list and started waiting for a copy that spoke to me. I also checked the reggae section of every record store I’ve set foot in since I heard the record, where I found a few of Mundell’s other records (which are good, but lack the magic of his debut). I saw one gratuitously overpriced older pressing of Africa Must Be Free at Mills Record Company in Kansas City, literally locked in the store’s fortress-like rare bins. (It’s a tangent I don’t want to get into here… but what a weird fucking place that was.) Then, a couple of weeks ago, Usman was ordering a record from Japan and asked if I wanted to get anything from the same seller to save on shipping. Lo-and-behold, they had an older Jamaican pressing in G+ condition for a very good price, and knowing that Japanese sellers typically grade conservatively, I took the risk. This copy isn’t pretty, and I suspect the pressing didn’t sound that great in the first place (a common issue with Jamaican vinyl), but it gets the job done and, despite its shortcomings, feels more appropriate to have in my collection than a squeaky clean reissue.

Thanks for reading! I hope some of y’all enjoy this record. Until next time…

A+P: S/T 12” (Jupiter Records, 1981)

My pick for this week is the self-titled LP from the German band A+P, originally released in 1981. I picked up this LP a few years ago from the great Double Decker Records in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Given the paucity of information available about this record online, I can’t imagine I knew much of anything about it before picking it up, but I feel like I had seen it on some German punk discography or another. Maybe it was a total blind buy, but regardless of why I bought it, I think it was a pretty good score as I’ve returned to this LP many times over the years and always enjoy it when I throw it on. The music here—there 16 songs, so there’s quite a lot of it—is eclectic, but all pretty punk, ranging from snotty, post-Sex Pistols Europunk to more experimental moments that clearly take influence from Public Image, Ltd. Like a lot of music from 1981, it sits on the bubble between the initial punk explosion and the fully formed hardcore that would take over pretty much everything in the coming year or two. A+P sounds like they have all the youthful aggression and snottiness they need to be a hardcore band, but they don’t have that template available to them yet, so all those feelings come out in their music in interesting and idiosyncratic ways.

Unfortunately, I have very little information to share about A+P. Maybe a German-speaker could find more info, but about all I could find is that the band is from a town called Starnberg in Bavaria in the far southern part of Germany, south of Munich. To many Americans, Germany is just Germany, but anyone who has traveled around the country (even someone like me who’s mostly just spent time there on DIY punk tours) knows Germany is a massive country with many culturally distinct regions. Navigating those differences is daunting to a dumb, monolingual American like myself, and while Germany produced a massive amount of punk vinyl in the 80s, rarely can I connect the dots and understand how the different bands relate to one another (if they even do). Each band seems like an island, and it’s hard for me to hear common threads that run through the punk from different regions in Germany the way I can for the US, the UK, or even Sweden and Japan. Some quick research tells me Bavaria has a history of punk bands from the early band the Pack (a great band featuring, oddly, a member from Amon Düül II… their killer LP has been reissued several times and isn’t too hard to find) to full-bore hardcore like Vorkriegsphase. A+P’s LP came out in 1981, the mid-way point between the Pack’s LP in 1978 and Vorkriegsphase’s EP and LP in 1983, but I couldn’t tell you how or if they’re related.

One thing I find interesting about A+P’s LP is how well-produced it is. The recording is great for what it is, with a straightforward and unadorned sound (I think there’s only one guitar track), but rich, clear tones and a mix that gives each instrument space. Also curious is the LP’s unique gatefold sleeve. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it. Not only is it a gatefold, but also the gatefold folds out a second time to a huge 24-inch square, sort of like a poster sleeve, but there are still pockets for the vinyl and insert, the latter a half-size booklet in a classic punk cut-and-paste style. The inside of the gatefold is a classic-looking punk collage, while the fold-out reveals well-done black and white portraits of the four band members, all of whom look very young. This made me wonder if the band members were rich kids whose parents splurged for a quality studio and spared no expense on the printing, but the LP is on a label called Jupiter Records. I hadn’t heard of Jupiter before, but a quick look at their Discogs page makes me think they were a big label, starting in 1973 and releasing hundreds of records, mostly German pop music that looks like it would be of zero interest to anyone reading this. By 1981, when the A+P LP came out, they were distributed by TELDEC, a huge German label. It’s wild that an A&R person would have taken a chance on this raw, unpolished punk band, but even crazier that they apparently spared no expense on the packaging.

A+P released a 5-song follow-up EP in 1982 on a different label, Soilant Records. There’s a song on the EP called “Soilant,” so perhaps the label was connected to the band… certainly Soilant’s other releases have a punkier look to them than Jupiter’s, judging by their Discogs page. A+P’s EP has a bigger, tougher, hardcore-influenced sound, and it goes for a few bucks on Discogs, so who knows if I’ll ever connect with a physical copy of that one. The EP was bootlegged in the early 90s and A+P’s LP has been reissued many times over the years… maybe one of those reissues has liner notes that can shed more light on the band’s story? If anyone has knowledge to share, I’d love to hear it.

The Damned: The Black Album LP (Chiswick, 1980)

Lately I’ve been trying to shake up the way I listen to music on my own time (i.e. off the Sorry State clock). I write most of the content for the Sorry State newsletter—including the descriptions for the Record of the Week and each week’s Featured Releases—and doing that work for so many years has left its mark on how I listen to music. I have a philosophy about how I approach these pieces of writing. They’re not record reviews; instead, I always refer to them as descriptions. This distinction reflects a difference of intent. I’m not trying to tell you whether the record is good or bad (after all, I’m trying to sell these fuckin’ things). Instead, I try to give you context and information to help you figure out whether you might be interested in a record. Often my descriptions end with if/then statements that try to connect a release with its audience: “if you like classic power violence, then check this out;” “if you like post-punk but think it’s gotten kind of stale, listen to this band because they make it sound fresh again.” An essential part of this practice is putting my own tastes and preferences aside and getting into the head of a band’s intended listener. I’m always asking myself the question, “who is the audience for this record and what does that audience like about it?”

This is all fine and good for writing for the newsletter, but I’ve noticed this practice of self-erasure makes it difficult to access my own feelings on music. When I listen to something new, my habit is to see it from this objective perspective, analyzing the choices the artist makes and why. I’m sure most people reading this can identify with the sensation of hearing something and thinking, “this is good, but I don’t think I like it.” Maybe the band is skilled at playing, or maybe the singer exudes undeniable charisma, or maybe they make a sound you’ve never heard. Those are things you can appreciate on an intellectual level, but do you like it? Does it move you? I’ve kind of trained myself to see the good in whatever I listen to, but in doing that, it feels like I’ve lost that sense of identification—this is mine—that’s necessary to truly love a piece of music. I sometimes worry that if I heard something I could love as much as the Adolescents or Koro or Can I would just process it in this robotic fashion and move onto the next thing without giving it the opportunity to get its hooks in me.

I’m not sure how I came up with this solution, but lately whenever I listen to a record from my personal collection, I’ve been assigning it a rating out of 5 stars. I’ve long kept a sporadic listening journal, so I just note the rating there. Thinking about how I rate an album has totally shifted the way I listen. When I’m listening for the newsletter, I’m trying to locate the record within a context: what is the artist responding to? What are they trying to say? Who are they trying to say it to? But when I listen with this rating system in mind, I’m thinking about my personal relationship to the music. The context is myself, my background and tastes. What does this music make me feel in my body? How does it change my headspace? Is that a pleasurable change? Am I excited to spend more time with this, or am I eager to move on to something else? A 4- or 5-star record has to get me up and dancing, singing along, or at least intellectually engaged. It’s gotta “spark joy” as they say. A lot of the records in my collection are 3’s and 3.5’s: interesting, competent, not a waste of time, but I’m not gonna cry if someone takes it off in the middle and puts on something else.

The Damned’s The Black Album is a motherfucking 5-star record. I was listening to it because I recently came across an original double-LP Chiswick pressing. The copy of The Black Album I’ve had in my collection since forever is a later pressing on Big Beat Records, and while I like the cheeky Beatles rip-off sleeve, it sadly trims the original release’s track listing to fit on a single LP. From what I can tell, all the single-LP pressings of The Black Album simply omit the second disc in the set, ending the album with “Therapy.” While I could take or leave the live versions of Machine Gun Etiquette songs on side D (though they are well-recorded and quite different to their studio versions), the real crime is losing “Curtain Call,” the 17-minute epic that takes up all of side C. The Black Album starts with “Wait for the Blackout”—one of the Damned’s very best songs—and delivers one singalong pop hit after another until you reach “Curtain Call,” where the view suddenly widens and the musical landscape stretches to infinity. It’s the perfect way to end the album. Sides A and B are such a visceral experience, all the singing along pulling me out of my head and into my body, clearing my mind, setting the stage for “Curtain Call,” whose sprawling openness feels like a meditation. It’s a trip, a journey, and one I love going on.

So yeah, the Damned rule. Sorry if my piece this week was too heady or abstract or rambling… I live a weird fucking life and this is the shit I think about. Now go out and listen to something you really like.

The Alley Cats: Escape from the Planet Earth 12" (MCA, 1983)

If you watched the recent episode of What Are You Listening To? when Jeff and I were guests a few weeks ago, you already know how I came by this record. It was one of our fellow guest Dave Brown's picks (he of Sewercide Records, whose most recent release from Cell Deth we just got in stock), and when I said that I'd had my eye out for a copy, Dave generously offered to send me the spare copy he had in his "to sell" box. Dave is a stand-up guy and he followed through on his promise (dutifully ignoring my attempts to give him money), and it arrived the other day. Unsurprisingly, since Dave has incredible taste, it totally kills.

While I've had both of the Alley Cats' singles for years (including their classic "Nothing Means Nothing Anymore" on Dangerhouse), I'd never investigated either of their full-lengths, Escape from the Planet Earth or its predecessor from 1981, Nightmare City. Someone had mentioned Nightmare City to me in the months leading up to the episode (I swear it was Jeff, but maybe I'm wrong), so I'd been on the lookout for both albums, but Nightmare City still hasn't come my way. I'm sure I could dial up these records and check them out online, but I like to let my desire percolate for a while. Plus, when you're really anticipating hearing something, diving straight in with the full physical release almost always provides the best first impression.

Speaking of first impressions, not much about Escape from the Planet Earth indicates that it would be as good as it is. Four years on from their first single, this album found the band moving from the indie label Time Coast to the major MCA. It took me several listens to even notice the album was on MCA, though, because it looks and sounds so much like an indie release. The black-and-white cover with simple typography (the back cover looks a little slicker) and the bare-bones recording are more in line with something I'd expect from a self-released record, but in this case I think it's a good thing the Alley Cats didn't get the full major label red carpet treatment, because that might have ruined what is otherwise an excellent album.

You can definitely hear the Alley Cats' years of maturity on Escape from the Planet Earth. While even their first single featured tight and agile playing, Escape from the Planet Earth is the sound of a band that really knows how to play together. There’s plenty of barn-burning punk, but many of the songs on this album have rhythmically quirky, new wave-ish grooves the band executes with power and precision. The trio sounds totally locked in, a feeling that's amplified by the clear but unvarnished production. I hear very few overdubs on the album, just the sound of three musicians perfectly in sync. Even on the less straightforward songs, the band lays into it like they're gakked up on a pile of cheap powders. The drummer in particular is wailing, and the super dry recording with the drums right up front in the mix makes the performance hit that much harder. And when they hit you with a full-on rocker like the closer, "Just an Alley Cat," they're unstoppable.

Thanks again to Dave for turning me onto the gem and getting it into my hands. If anyone out there reading happens upon a copy—the going rate seems to be about $20—I highly recommend picking this up. There aren't too many early 80s punk LPs where original copies give you this much bang for your buck.

This week I have a hot tip for you: the first-ever vinyl reissue of the Only Ones’ second album, Even Serpents Shine, is in stock now. I’m a big fan of this album, and since it’s the first time it’s been available on vinyl since its original release, I thought I’d tell you about my connection to it.

The Only Ones are most famous as the band behind the all-time classic track “Another Girl, Another Planet.” As far as I can remember, I first heard “Another Girl, Another Planet” on this Rhino CD box set called No Thanks that was formative in the growth of my love for 70s punk. The box set is packed with hits, but I always particularly loved the latter two discs, which offer a hit-parade overview of the early punk diaspora, with massive pop tunes like the Real Kids’ “Ghosts of Princes in Towers,” the Members’ “Sound of the Suburbs,” and “Another Girl, Another Planet.” Even among such a strong track list, the Only Ones’ contribution stood out, as I’m sure the song does to so many people whenever and however they hear it. It’s just an all-time classic tune.

At some point I picked up Special View, the bowdlerized American version of the Only Ones’ first album, to see if the Only Ones were one-hit wonders. Special View was a US-only release that combined tracks from the first two Only Ones albums with a few non-album cuts for the US market. It’s in that tradition of US versions of 60s UK albums where record companies took the UK version, swapped out a bunch of the album tracks, and replaced them with singles, b-sides, and other bits and bobs. This practice had mostly gone out of favor by the early 80s (it was doomed once people began thinking of albums as coherent artistic statements), but it notoriously happened to the first Clash album. Truthfully, I don’t remember much about my initial impressions of Special View... it certainly didn’t turn me into an Only Ones fanatic, and I’ve barely touched the record to this day, though I still have it.

The next step on my Only Ones journey was the single for “You’ve Got to Pay.” Thankfully my copy still has the price tag, which jogs my memory as to where and when I got it. I was visiting my brother in St. Louis for a few days, and at some point I went out on my own to the local record shops. When I stopped at Euclid Records, they had this massive file cabinet for 7"s... it was kind of awkward and a pain to go through, but once I started flipping, I found all these relatively cheap punk-era UK singles you never see in the US. They were cheap enough that I made a few blind buys, of which I remember the Mutants’ “Boss Man” (a great, amped-up pub rock single) was the best. When I got home and listened to the stack I bought, “You’ve Got to Pay” was an immediate standout. Part of that is the loud-ass mastering job on the single. I’m not sure if they were trying to make the song stand out on radio or what, but the version of “You’ve Got to Pay” on the single sounds monstrous, its simple guitar hook stabbing you in the gut like a rusty shiv. As a song, “You’ve Got to Pay” is built on the same skeleton as “Another Girl, Another Planet,” i.e. big guitar hook at the beginning, massive chorus, and lyrics that are ostensibly about love but work just as well if the object of that love is drugs rather than a person.

Once “You’ve Got to Pay” hit me so hard, I knew I had to get Even Serpents Shine, the album it originally appeared on. It took some patience to find a copy here in the US since it was never pressed here and has never been repressed at all since it’s original release, but once I got my hands on it, it cracked open my brain and dominated my listening for months. Like “You’ve Got to Pay,” Even Serpents Shine has a great sound. It sounds like a major label production from the late 70s, crisp and clear in the manner of so much classic rock, and while the fact that it’s not crowded with overdubs makes it sound elegantly minimal, there are flashes of lushness when production touches like backing vocals and guitar overdubs come in. The songs are great too, like “Out There in the Night,” an upbeat pop tune that coulda been a hit. The b-side opener “Curtains for You” is one of the band’s best moments too, a slow-burner that has all the high drama of London Calling, but with a mature, world-weary sophistication. Honestly, though, I could write about every track. This album just rules.

A quick aside on our Only Ones journey. Ever notice the one guy in the band who looks visibly older than the rest of them? (I feel for him. When Scarecrow is traveling, I often get asked if I’m with the rock stars.) Turns out the Only Ones drummer is an old-timer who previously played in the band Spooky Tooth. This would hardly be worth mentioning, but one day Dominic handed me a Spooky Tooth album and told me to check it out. It’s called Ceremony and ostensibly it’s a collaboration between Spooky Tooth and the French avant-garde composer Pierre Henry. However, what actually happened was that Pierre Henry was handed a master tape of six Spooky Tooth tracks (which were written as a set to be a “rock mass”), and without ever meeting the band or discussing it with them, added his own strange musique concrete sounds and completely remade the album in his own image. Spooky Tooth was none too pleased, but the result is a delightfully weird classic rock / modern classical hybrid that fans of groups like Univers Zero will dig. Dominic assures me that no other Spooky Tooth records are worth my time.

Back to the Only Ones. Eventually, and again after much searching since it never came out in the US, I found a copy of the original UK version of the Only Ones’ debut. I was hoping the original UK version would hit me just as hard as Even Serpents Shine, but thus far it hasn’t. I can’t figure out why, as so many of the things I love about the second record are present on the debut. Peter Perrett’s lyrics are great, the lead guitar lines are hooky as hell... but aside from “Another Girl, Another Planet,” much of the record skulks along at these sludgy tempos that keep the energy level low. I could see these songs really connecting if I were in the right mood (maybe if I was on heroin?), but I’ve yet to have that moment when I really and truly fall in love with the first album. MOV has also reissued the debut alongside Even Serpents Shine, though, so pick up your own copy and decide for yourself.

And while I’m mentioning other releases that came in at the same time as Even Serpents Shine, MOV has also reissued the third Saints album, Prehistoric Sounds, which (like the Only Ones records) never got a domestic US pressing and hasn’t been pressed at all since 1987. This is another record I had to search high and low to find a nice original copy of, and like Even Serpents Shine, it was well worth the wait. Maybe it’s more “mature” than Eternally Yours, but I think it’s nearly as good, and many people out there prefer it to the first two Saints albums. So scoop that too if you need it.

By the way, this trip through the Only Ones discography (with a few other stops along the way) reminds me of my patented multi-record picks, as seen on the YouTube series What Are You Listening To?. Jeff and I, along with our buddy Dave Brown from Sewercide Records and host Mike Foster, will share some of our recent listens on WAYLT? this Friday evening, July 12, at 10PM Eastern US time. It’s way more fun to watch live and post in the comments while it’s livestreaming, so join us at this link if you can!

Scream: Still Screaming 12” (Dischord, 1983)

This week I’ve been jamming Scream’s 1983 debut album, Still Screaming. The ninth release on Dischord Records, Still Screaming was the first full-length by a single group on Dischord (the compilation Flex Your Head and the Faith / Void split had both come out a year earlier in 1982). It makes sense that this distinction would go to Scream, as they had a somewhat more diverse sound than most of their label-mates at the time. Even Minor Threat’s Out of Step was only a 12” EP, and I can see how the label might have been trepidatious about how a straightforward hardcore band would execute a full-length. Punctuating their hardcore with segues into reggae, though, along with their knack for crafting big singalong choruses, made Scream a good candidate to test whether a 15+ song hardcore punk album should be a thing or not.

Still Screaming bursts out of the gate with two of its best songs, “Came Without a Warning” and “Bedlam.” “Came Without a Warning” might be Scream’s best-known track, and it’s certainly a punk classic. My old band Logic Problem used to play this song… we liked to learn covers for specific shows, and since we went up to DC for gigs often, we ended up learning a handful of songs by DC bands. “Came Without a Warning,” while undeniably memorable, is a pretty simple song, but I think “Bedlam” really shows off what makes Scream so special. In particular, the chorus melody is more complex than on the first track, and Pete Stahl sells the fuck out of it too, filling his vocal line with so much expression and passion. I’m sure the song would have been strong if it had been stripped down to a barking UK82 style, but Pete just makes it come alive.

Revisiting Still Screaming for the first time in many years this week, I was also struck by how much of it is just straight-up blistering hardcore. I guess moments like the reggae and funk tinges from “American Justice” and “Hygiene” just loom large in my memory, because most of this record blazes. Maybe the melody in tracks like “Killer” and “Cry Wolf” gets obscured by the speed, but I’m glad these tracks are there. I may not be able to remember the song titles as well as the hits, but these songs keep the energy level high, and tracks like “Fight” meld strong melodies to pretty straightforward hardcore songwriting. Like I said, the more diverse tracks tend to loom large in my memory, making me think Still Screaming is more diverse than it is, but it’s a hardcore album through and through.

Still Screaming does, though, hint at how the hardcore sound was already expanding and evolving by 1983. “Solidarity” sounds to me like the blueprint for early Avail and Trial-era Verbal Assault, whereas the jangly, REM-ish guitars in “Laissez-Faire” presage the Revolution Summer that would happen two years later in DC in 1985. Scream was particularly ahead of the game when it came to vocal performance and arrangement, with Pete Stahl’s big melodies carrying so much of the record and lots of background and gang vocals (most of them featuring a clearly audible Ian Mackaye, who also produced the record) giving these songs more push and pull than your typical sparsely produced hardcore punk fare.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been listening to… I don’t have anything earth-shattering to say about Still Screaming, but maybe my ramblings will prompt you to pull this classic off the shelf. Oh, and I should also note that I was lucky to see the original lineup play many of these songs when the band did some reunion shows back in 2011. The show they played here in North Carolina was pretty notorious. This was when the Animosity lineup of Corrosion of Conformity got back together and played some shows. They had already played several times by the time they played with Scream at the Cat’s Cradle, but at this gig Eric Eycke (CoC’s singer on Eye for an Eye) jumped on stage unannounced, and Mike Dean from CoC started fighting him in the middle of their set. My old band Devour opened that gig and it ended up being the last time we ever played. Weird energy in the air that night, but I’m glad I got to see Scream crush it.

Various: Hell Comes to Your House LP (originally Bemisbrain Records, 1981; this edition Riot State Records, 1982)

Since I’ve been reading Welly Artcore’s new book Nefarious Artists, I’ve been spending a lot of time with compilations. As I noted in my write-up on the book, I’ve added a ton of compilations to my want list, and I’ve also been revisiting my favorite compilations in my collection. And, as happens when I spend time in one part of my collection, I’ve noticed gaps and started filling them. Luckily comps don’t tend to be very expensive, and when I dropped by Radiation Records in Anaheim while I was in LA last weekend, there were plenty of comps I needed in their bins. I’m sure I’ll write about some others in the future, but today I’m focusing on Hell Comes to Your House, the 1981 compilation on Bemisbrain Records (though my copy is a 1982 UK repress on Riot State Records).

When I read Welly’s write-up on Hell Comes to Your House it made me want to listen to it, but when I went through my comp section, I couldn’t find it. It’s funny how that happens... there are so many records I could swear I have, but when I go to play them, they aren’t there. But after spending some time with it this week, it seems entirely possible that I never actually owned it, as I’m not that familiar with any of the material. I knew what was on it—exclusive tracks from the early SoCal punk scene, with several bands leaning toward the emerging death rock sound—but this album isn’t baked into my bones how American Youth Report or Party or Go Home or Welcome to 1984 are.

A couple of things really distinguish Hell Comes to Your House as far as early American punk/hardcore comps go. The first is that it’s quite early. Originally released in 1981, the comp featured very early material from Social Distortion, Red Cross (though my 2nd pressing copy sadly omits their track), Legal Weapon, 45 Grave, Christian Death, and Super Heroines. The first four bands released their earliest stand-alone records in 1981, and while I’m not sure if Hell Comes to Your House came earlier than those records, if it was later, it was only by months. Rhino 39 and Modern Warfare were the veteran bands on the compilation, having released their first singles in 1979 and 1980 respectively, though 100 Flowers also qualify as scene elders, having only recently changed their name from the Urinals. While there are some sprightly tempos on the record, Hell Comes to Your House captures a moment just as hardcore was coalescing as a style, with all the bands having one foot still firmly in punk. Social Distortion and Legal Weapon tilt toward the more melodic, song-oriented side of that equation while Modern Warfare, Outer Circle, and 100 Flowers lean more experimental / post-punk.

The other important thing to know about Hell Comes to Your House is that nearly all the material here is exclusive. Social Distortion’s “Lude Boy” wasn’t even comped on their collection of early material Mainliner: Wreckage from the Past, though “Telling Them” got re-recorded for Mommy’s Little Monster. I think Legal Weapon’s song is a different take than the version on Death of Innocence, and the 45 Grave tracks are also exclusive, earlier (and superior, I think) versions of “Evil” and “45 Grave” from their first LP, with “Concerned Citizen” exclusive to this record. Christian Death re-recorded “Dogs” way down the road on their 1984 LP Deathwish, but this is the version you want. And Super Heroines sound like a completely different band to their first LP, much more aggressive and basically hardcore on their two tracks. If you’re a big fan of those bands, you’ll want Hell Comes to Your House for the exclusive tracks, but the sound here is similar enough from band to band that if you like one band, you’ll probably like almost all of them.

Indeed, Hell Comes to Your House is a solid listen all the way through. A lot of times with comps—particularly ones like this with exclusive material—the quality and style can vary from track to track. Often established bands bring their b-material, and sometimes the lesser-known bands blow their wad on their one shot at the big leagues. The playing field for Hell Comes to Your House, though, is pretty level. A year or two later, getting exclusive tracks from Social Distortion, Christian Death, and 45 Grave would have been a coup, but this comp catches them so early in their careers that their fame hasn’t leaped ahead of the lesser known groups. The consistent recording quality (cheap but competent, like so many of my favorite early SoCal records) also helps tie things together and ensure a consistent listening experience.

After doing some research, I might need to get a Bemisbrain copy in my collection besides this UK pressing because, while most of the track listing is the same, there are some differences. As I mentioned, Red Cross doesn’t appear on my pressing, and Modern Warfare’s two songs on the Bemisbrain pressing are swapped out here for a completely different third track. A totally new band, Outer Circle, is added to the UK track listing, and I like their song “Blind Venetians” a lot, an artier synth-punk track that reminds me of Nervous Gender. A quick look tells me this track comes from their 1982 12" EP on Bemisbrain, so I’ll have to check that out and see if the whole EP is as good as this song.

So there you go. I think anyone deeply into early SoCal punk and hardcore should enjoy this LP. Like a lot of compilations, the original pressing isn’t nearly as expensive as these bands’ contemporaneous stand-alone releases, but it might be tough to find as, barring a hard to find 1997 repress on Time Bomb Records, it hasn’t been in print since 1985. If you come across Hell Comes to Your House, though, it’s well worth a grip.

E.T.A.: We Are the Attack 7” (2002, Deranged Records)

This 2002 7” from Sweden’s E.T.A. (aka Epileptic Terror Attack) holds a special place in my heart. I picked it up when the band played Richmond in the summer of 2002. I’m not sure I recognized it at the time, but it was a significant moment. I had been gobbling up everything referred to at the time as “Y2K thrash” (Tear It Up’s Nothing to Nothing was probably my favorite record of that year), but there was something even cooler just over the horizon. I had seen Total Fury play the summer before. Brandon Ferrell had joined Municipal Waste on drums and they were covering early Poison Idea. Amdi Petersen’s Armé played Richmond, but I missed the gig (one of my biggest show-related regrets ever), but thankfully I made it out when E.T.A. played at the Hardcore Holocaust warehouse. Within two or three years, it felt like there was a whole scene of retro 80s US-style hardcore bands wearing combat boots, tight jeans, and denim vests, but as these early moments were happening, they felt like glimpses into another world, one I desperately wanted to immerse myself in.

Nowadays, I don’t hear too many people mention E.T.A., but when they do, it’s usually in the context of Regulations, which featured 3 of E.T.A.’s 4 members. It’s easy to read E.T.A.’s discography as the members groping toward the sound they eventually locked in with Regulations. I haven’t spent too much time with E.T.A.’s first few releases on the Swedish label Putrid Filth Conspiracy, but they’re more aggro than the later material, and while Otto’s vocals are pretty much there, the band hasn’t adopted that punky west coast style they’d perfect later. I’ve seen people describe E.T.A.’s early stuff as having a more traditional Swedish hardcore sound, but it’s not d-beat… more like fast scissor-beat hardcore… closer to Filthy Christians than Anti-Cimex or Mob 47.

By the time E.T.A. released their split 12” with Tear It Up and their No Faith LP in 2001, their music was showing more influence from early 80s US hardcore, particularly the more melodic west coast variety. Many songs referenced skateboarding in the lyrics. The guitar riffs were brighter, swingier, and more prominent in the mix rather than taking a back seat to the cacophonous drumming. And while the drummer still relied on scissor beats on the fast parts, they’re a notch slower, giving the songs a steadier, more confident groove, and there are more mid-paced parts that rely on classic surf-punk rhythms. Like the guitars, the vocals occupy more space in the mix, shouted in a youthful hardcore style and with memorable melodies, even serving up some hooky “whoas” on tracks like “Fucked for Life.” And in case you couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing, No Faith closed with a cover of the Circle Jerks’ “Beverly Hills,” just to drive the point home.

Which brings us to 2002’s We Are the Attack. You might expect E.T.A.’s final record to sound the most like Regulations, and in some ways it does. Certainly they’ve honed those west coast punk parts, as you hear on the mid-paced parts of “Looking for a Spot” and on their cover of “Dicks Hate the Police” (re-titled “Otto Hates the Police”), which makes that song sound like something from the Beach Boulevard compilation. E.T.A. is also confident in their delivery of big hooks, like on the singalong “I’m a Bore.” But on the other hand, We Are the Attack is more aggro than No Faith. Maybe that’s because it’s an 8-song 7” in the early Dischord / Touch and Go format, but the recording is rougher and the band sounds meaner too, with lots of fast scissor beat parts like on their earlier material. At their best, E.T.A. infuses this more hardcore material with their growing propensity for memorable hooks, like on the standout track “Lose My Mind,” a chaotic hardcore song in the Victim in Pain mold. As with early AF, though, E.T.A. weaves a memorable call-and-response vocal and dynamic rhythmic change-ups into the melee.

By the time Regulations released their first 7” one year later in 2003, they’d excised the gnarlier elements from their sound, fully embracing their early SoCal influences with a thinner, more vintage-y guitar sound and bigger punk hooks. I don’t think many people would argue that E.T.A. was a better band than Regulations, but in order to become Regulations, they had to leave behind parts of E.T.A.’s sound. In the context of these musicians’ development, We Are the Attack captures a unique moment where much of what made Regulations so great was coming together, but the musical possibilities remained more open and less dictated by their influences. And it also articulates this brief but exciting moment when the scene was right on the bubble between the Y2K thrash era and “the No Way years.”

Tomorrow’s Uproar AI Compilation (MA Glory, 2024)

I’ve spent plenty of time listening to music over the past week, but the sounds that have dominated my brain space are the ones on this AI-generated hardcore compilation my friend Adam sent me. Adam sent me the link to Tomorrow’s Uproar after reading my discussion with Woodstock 99 in a previous Sorry State newsletter, in which the band explained how they used AI on their new album, 99 Ta Life. While Brandon from WS99 warned us that AI was coming for our beloved punk subgenres, I didn’t think I’d hear something like this mere weeks later.

There isn’t much info on the Bandcamp page that hosts Tomorrow’s Uproar, just that “The music, vocals, lyrics, song titles, and album art for this record were all generated using AI” and the credit, “Generated using AI by Trevor Vaughan.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any coverage of or chatter about the album, and I’m left curious about the tools and methods Vaughan used to put together the release. Based on the limited time I’ve spent playing with AI interfaces, we’re not anywhere near the point where you can type “make a hardcore compilation LP” into an AI interface and have it spit out something as on the money as Tomorrow’s Uproar. I find that AI tends to work best when you get a back-and-forth dialogue going with it, refining its responses through multiple iterations, so while the AI gets top billing, I imagine a lot of human thought still went into Tomorrow’s Uproar.

My first impression when I scanned the track listing for Tomorrow’s Uproar was that it reminded me of hardcore parody projects like Grudge and Crucial Youth. Both those projects parodied hardcore’s tendency toward vapidity and embrace of cliche, and how AI cobbles together punk-sounding words into conflagrations like Edge of Resistance, Concrete Annihilation, and Steel Core Rebellion echoes how pastiche divorces form from content, using words as interchangeable puzzle pieces rather than as symbols standing in for more profound thoughts. You hear the same thing in the lyrics, like how “Concrete Annihilation” starts with the line, “I’m haaaaaard / like these concrete streets.” But while that line and titles like “Fists of Defiance” are ham-handed, others like “Stand As One” are more on the money. In fact, “Stand As One” is the title of a Cause for Alarm song, and has served many times as a band name or album title for hardcore bands whose members are all human. Maybe AI isn’t yet smart enough to figure out that “Stand As One” is acceptably cliche while “Fists of Defiance” is dumb, but it’s only a matter of time. I bet your first band was pretty generic, too.

The relationship to its source material seems in flux throughout Tomorrow’s Uproar. Sometimes you can hear exactly what’s it’s trying to do, like how the vocal on “Tomorrow’s Uproar” is clearly modeled on Rollins, or how “Curb of Broken Dreams” starts with a title lifted from Green Day, gets going with a total Blink 182 riff, then the vocals slide into Fat Mike. The lyrics are spot-on Fat Mike too, perfectly imitating his somewhat clumsy rhymes and metaphors. At other points, I can’t tell what the exact inspiration is, and those parts are more interesting, but perhaps it’s just because I’m not familiar with what the AI is cribbing from. It’s like how sometimes I’ll watch a sketch on Saturday Night Live and think it’s a hilarious piece of absurdity, only to find it’s some pop culture tidbit I hadn’t heard about, barely amplified or altered from its original source. Again, so much on Tomorrow’s Uproar reminds me of the work of a young artist who is too in love with their inspirations and whose radar for cliche isn’t yet sophisticated enough.

There’s also the odd moment on Tomorrow’s Uproar when I think to myself, “that actually wasn’t bad.” “Viper’s Betrayal” works perfectly well as a parody of tough-guy hardcore, but when the singer shouts “just another Judas…” and then the gang vocals respond “BETRAYAL IS YOUR ACT,” I have to admit it’s not the worst take on the time-worn hardcore lyrical trope of backstabbing I’ve ever heard. If that line had appeared in a Ten Yard Fight song when I was a teenager, you can bet I would have been singing along. Even 44-year-old me struggles with the last track, “Streets of Discontent,” though. This song’s tuneful skate rock reminds me of Code of Honor, and the line “chains and spikes we stand, we tower tall” sparks a twinge of feeling that I wouldn’t expect to get from computer-generated gobbledygook. This track is the clearest sign that, quite soon, AI might generate something I’d listen to unironically.

I think the biggest thing keeping Tomorrow’s Uproar in the uncanny valley is the songs’ lack of adherence to conventional structures. From what I understand, Large Language Models like ChatGPT work by generating texts word-by-word, calculating the word that is most likely to follow the previous words in the sequence… I think that’s the reason that, when you chat with an LLM, you see its responses appear on your screen gradually in words or chunks of words rather than all at once. The songs on Tomorrow’s Uproar seem to work the same way. Where you’d expect them to return to a previous riff and iterate an idea through another, similarly structured verse, they just keep plowing forward. The way songs seem to build toward a resolution that never arrives gives me a seasick feeling, like I’ve fallen into a bottomless pit. Again, though, that seems like a problem that shouldn’t be too hard to fix… I bet the technology that created these tracks could produce more conventionally structured songs with more or better prompts.

I’m not really sure what I think about Tomorrow’s Uproar overall. I thoroughly enjoyed that first listen when I was howling with laughter, and if you’re reading this, you’ll probably enjoy your first listen just as much. I’m curious to see what comes next, though. This time next year, will we be jamming AI-generated outtakes from Detestation? Could AI give us a version of Black Flag’s 1982 demo that sounds just as good as Damaged? Could it take a band like America’s Hardcore that only released a few scattered comp tracks and use that material to generate a full-length record that’s just as good as the real one would have been? Could it venture into an alternate universe where Discharge fired Cal in 1984 and replaced him with Jonsson from Anti-Cimex and bring us back an entire album from that dream project? I can’t answer any of these questions right now, but it seems safe to assume we’re going to see some wild shit soon.