Robyn Writes

Dear hardcore – we can do better.

Dear hardcore,

There’s a few things we need to talk about. A couple of months ago, when Kate and I went to the Emmure show, the age difference between us and the average hardcore fan hit us harder than ever before. I had to keep double checking that I was admiring dudes with facial hair as that seemed to be a surefire guarantee that they were above the age of 18. There was something that struck us far more though. As Chelsea Grin hit the stage, I glanced over at the moshpit. Around the edge stood three girls who were wearing lace bandeaus and nothing else on top. Now, if those girls were just feeling super confident about themselves and thinking ‘fuck yeah, I’m rocking this joint’, then I’ve got no beef with that. Their body language suggested something rather different. I watched them for a few minutes, maybe. They spent most of that time consciously pulling up the little bits of lace, staring nervously around the room. When they weren’t doing that, they were tentatively moving closer into the pit before moving back out again, unable to keep up with the furious slam dancing. Later in that evening, we went to the merch stand. On the way back up to the front, Kate had a slight wardrobe malfunction. Nothing major, just a little bit of bra showing, but the amount of disparaging glares from male members of the audience was shocking. The truth is, there’s not a lot of respect among young hardcore fans today. Misogyny and general disrespect runs rampant through a genre that was once a community of anger. Sure, you hated everyone else in the world, but all of the people in that room were your family for a few hours. That’s not the case any more, not by a long shot.

Lyrically speaking, there’s a few instances in today’s hardcore/deathcore/metalcore/insert-your-favourite-core that make my stomach turn. It’s funny when we’re driving along in my car and Kate yells “I want to watch you suck his dick!” in my face, but when Palmeri is snarling it out to a crowd, it takes on something a bit more sinister. The first Chelsea Grin EP is laden with violent fantasies about revenge on an unnamed woman. One song about a cheating ex-girlfriend makes sense, but the entire record is jam packed with references to diseased vaginas and choking on dick. Admittedly, it’s a trend that drops off very quickly in their career – the band start to delve into Biblical metaphors and general feelings of discontent in their later record. That first EP is a product of the follies of youth; rough and raw around the edges. Is that the only kind of anger the youth can possess though? There’s been plenty of young bands that I’ve seen around the scene at tiny shows, screaming out against bitches and sluts. Skinny, pale boys barely past school age looking wildly around a room, desperately trying to find camaraderie in the other guys in the audience, cry out that this song is dedicated to anyone that’s ever been slept around on before launching into their diatribe. These are kids that are stuck in suburbia, faced with a profound boredom that only comes from sleepy little towns where everybody knows everybody. If they’re angry about anything else, they don’t yet know how to express it past those initial feelings of being wronged, and it breeds a certain contempt. Some of this is general fuck-the-world kind of stuff. The rest is a disturbing hatred for the women who have wronged them in some way or another. And if it’s not violent, it projects the message that women are nothing more than sex objects. Although Fight Paris’ Paradise Found is a scuzzy blend of southern rock and hardcore that sounds incredible played loud, the opening line goes “Damn right that slut’s my bitch, she fucking sucked my goddamn dick”. And it pretty much goes on from there.

Yet, this is the kind of music that I love, and hardcore has been a ‘boys club’ for a long, long time. There are more female vocalists than ever before, and there’s a good number of ladies that play other instruments, but it’s still an overwhelming minority. Magazines still do polls on the ‘sexiest women in rock’. Merchandise is overwhelmingly sexist. Drop Dead Clothing’s collection is far less visceral than it used to be, but they used to have sweaters featuring dismembered girls and the phrase ‘sluts get cuts’ plastered on the back. Alternative club nights end up with guys being hailed as heroes because they get a blowjob on stage. But we get used to it. We nod and smile and go along with it all, because it’s just music, right? It’s ironic to wear the shirts plastered with ‘ask your girl what my dick tastes like’. This in itself creates a community of acceptance with no tempered awareness that actually, maybe, this isn’t that cool. I believe that we should celebrate the differences in gender, but we shouldn’t put one or the other down, or perceive that the other is weaker or lesser. We shouldn’t use women as vehicles for anger and aggression. We shouldn’t project our anxieties and our fears onto them, not when there so much else out there to be angry about. The worst part? Women are then conditioned to put each other down in these scenes. Not every girl that enters the moshpit has an agenda, but there’ll always be one who feels that she has to prove herself, to show that she’s better than all of the other women. There’s the scene queens who stand at the bar and scoff at the girls in oversize shirts and Vans. I do my best to be polite and pleasant because I just can’t stand the frostiness and the bitchiness that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Instead of dragging each other down, we should be building each other up.

Not every band needs to be political. You need only look at Black Flag, Minor Threat or Gorilla Biscuits to know the cry of disaffected youth. Not all disappointment and upset comes from within your core. It’s okay to be angry, but we need to be responsible with it. We need to take that anger and make something better with it. And maybe use the dismembered girl metaphors a bit more sparingly.

xoxo – Robyn

Shout out: Fights and Fires Make New Album ‘Pay What You Want’

Yo! Little thing here for you – if you’re into noisy Worcester lot Fights and Fires, all of their back catalogue, including latest album We Could All Be Dead Tomorrow, has been made ‘pay what you want’ on their Bandcamp. In essence, you could pick up all their stuff for free. Or you can donate as much as you feel like, and we would certainly encourage you to.

Check it out!

Where did all the good comps go? – A lament for the CD compilation

The internet is brilliant, isn’t it? Almost everything is there at the touch of a button. Stores reside within programs, ready to cater to your every need. In this age, we are the media, and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook tell you what to listen to. There’s sites like us, trying to do our best to showcase what we love! But sometimes, I don’t half miss a good Punk-o-Rama CD.

I grew up on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. We picked up the first game when I was ten and I dove into it with glee. And while it was extremely fun trying to get a mega high score in two minutes, the best part of the game was the soundtrack. Tunes from Goldfinger, The Suicide Machines, Rage Against The Machine and Powerman 5000 were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Before then, I’d been a Steps fan, occasionally subjected to my dad playing The Offspring in the car. Combined with a certain AFI video hitting the airwaves in 2001, Tony Hawk’s provided the necessary impetus to throw me into the punk subculture. I haven’t ever looked back. Thanks to that carefully curated soundtrack, and further ones, kids like me found our way into a world unlike any other.

You might have forgotten that record stores exist. With the slow death of HMV (it’s clinging on but you know it won’t last) and more and more indies disappearing, some of you won’t truly know the thrill of going in and picking something up that you’ve never ever heard of before. Why would you go and buy it when you can download it (illegally) for free on the internet, or listen to it on Spotify? Throughout high school, I would save up my allowance and go into my local indie every month, choosing one record that I’d never heard of before. But being cheeky, that would inevitably turn into a compilation to maximise my chances of finding something good. I picked up plenty of label samplers, including Epitaph’s now legendary Punk-o-Rama comps. Label samplers still exist – but they’re online, and disappear as rapidly as they appear. Some labels are doing really sweet stuff to make sure you know their bands – Paper + Plastick, for one, offer a free digital subscription service in which they provide a few tracks from a release each week, and occasionally, a full release! But there was something about picking up those compilations, poring over the inserts to see which album each track originally appeared on and copying it for all your friends. Making a Spotify playlist just doesn’t quite cut it.

So now, we find out about bands in different ways. This can mean that our music tastes are far more eclectic – we’re exposed to so many different types of music online these days. This zine, which was strictly punk to begin with, has moved on to cover all kind of music in the alternative spectrum. Nevertheless, there was something magical at seeing what all those bands had in common. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, it was generally a disrespect for authority and a quick tempo that led to their inclusion. For Punk-o-Rama, especially in the latter comps, it was figuring out why From First To Last could be on the same record as Refused. In the few Drive-Thru comps I have knocking about, it was how each band could write songs about effectively the same things but in completely different ways. And I could always find something to relate to.

I suppose we curate our own soundtracks now. I’m really into NBC’s Hannibal at the moment, and I follow a few fan blogs on Tumblr. Every day, there’s at least one fan mix, based around a character’s emotional state, or the mood of a certain episode. I kept the mix CD tradition alive at university – as president of the punk society (yes, it was a real thing), I invited people to bring their own CDs and swap them with each other. But there’s no big communal influence any more, far less of a shared experience, or at least, so I’ve found. This isn’t something that I bemoan, but have learned to accept. Magazines like Rock Sound still put comps out every month and I still listen to them in my car, but now, word of mouth is more important than ever. So keep telling your friends about your favourite bands. We’ll keep telling you about our favourite newbies. And pray to the gaming deities that they release a new Tony Hawk game.

Shout out: Will Tun and the Wasters need your help for their next split!

Our friends in Will Tun and the Wasters are putting together a new split EP with MC Amalgam, having worked with him on their last EP ‘Time Is A Bastard’. We absolutely bloody loved it – it’s an absolutely brilliant record, and the track with MC Amalgam was definitely the highlight. There it is, up above! But they need the funds to put it together and they’ve got a Pledgemusic running at the moment. Please go and add your pledge for the EP – you won’t regret it!

GO HERE AND PLEDGE!

Review: Singles roundup – 30/6/13

Single of the month – Counting Coins – Blue On Blue (5/5)
Stupidly upbeat ska with a political angle. Don’t let that put you off – instead stand up, take notice and get down to some hip-hop influenced rhythms and brilliant brass. And try and keep up with Harry Burnby’s vocals if you can. Featuring Robin Leitch (Random Hand) and Pat Pretorius (The Talks), it’s a melting pot of some of the best ska coming out of the UK at the moment. Genuinely exciting stuff.

Blitz Kids – Run For Cover (4/5)
K! darlings Blitz Kids have come forward with another banger. An absolutely massive tune with a classic rock and roll riff underlying the whole thing and a whopper of a chorus, this is going to be dominating the airwaves if it isn’t already. Plenty of fun, and the strings are a positively inspired decision.

PaperPlane – Chariot (4.5/5)
Chariot is an interesting slice of post-hardcore with folk punk influences threaded throughout. Jack Bennett’s vocals are incredible – somewhere between a rasp, a growl and a drunken sailor and that still doesn’t cover it. There’s a lot more to love here too, as PaperPlane intersperse beautiful, atmospheric verses with crushing guitar lines and some great synth work. One to watch.

Giants – It’s Not All Bad News (4/5)
Fast and furious punk rabble with a different slant from Giants here. It starts off like your typical hardcore punk fare, but dives into a seriously melodic chorus and rounds it off with a skate punk style breakdown in the middle. It’s a little disorientating at first, but the gang vocals bring it all together to create an interesting look at media misrepresentation. Nice one, lads.

In Dynamics – Liposuction (3.5/5)
Liposuction is a great rock track. The chorus has the potential to be the biggest chorus of the summer, but the hip-hop influenced vocals in the verses just doesn’t work as well in contrast. Nevertheless, In Dynamics build up an incredible atmosphere, particularly in the instrumental bits towards the end, and it’s the sort of thing that hopefully will be rocking the festivals this time next year.

The New Lows – Missive (4/5)
The first new song to be released from The New Lows since I Couldn’t Sleep, Missive has built on the band’s penchant for witty lyricism and catchy hooks and provides a bold statement of intent with some crashing guitar filled with punk rock fire. Short and sweet but with a great deal to adore, it’s a slow jam like no other.