Some hardcore songs I love.
I don't generally recycle content from elsewhere on the web, but I feel like this is worth making an exception for: On a message board, I've been posting mp3s of various songs that I feel are important to the history of hardcore and epitomize the best of the genre's different eras. I haven't been organizing them all that much, but I've been writing, sometimes in a decent amount of detail, about each song, and I'd like to preserve the writeups and share the mp3s in a more permanent format than that of a message board. So I'm reposting them here. This is probably only part 1 of a multipart series, as I plan on posting more in the future.
Bad Brains - Pay To Cum (Their first single, from 1980. Often credited as the first hardcore single ever, though if you ask me, Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" and Middle Class's "Out Of Vogue", both from 1979, count as having predated it.)
Black Flag - Modern Man (This is the version from the unreleased 1982 demo session--the only recording session in which Black Flag ever had two guitars. Yes, I know "Damaged" credits Greg and Dez as both playing guitar, but Dez had only been on guitar for a month or so when they recorded it, and didn't have parts written for most of the songs. All he actually did on "Damaged" was backing vocals. But yeah, anyway, this song was later rerecorded on "Loose Nut". This version's better.)
7 Seconds - How Do You Think You'd Feel? (From "Walk Together, Rock Together", a half-studio, half-live effort that is probably their best album. The studio side was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Washington, DC, with Ian MacKaye producing. The result sounds almost like Minor Threat, but with a much stronger melodic sensibility.)
The Misfits - Spinal Remains (From "Static Age". This remastered version is easily 10 times as good as the shitty mix originally released on "Legacy Of Brutality". Before I heard this version, I didn't like this song--now it's one of my favorite Misfits songs.)
Skewbald - Sorry/Change For The Same (Skewbald was a brief Ian MacKaye/Jeff Nelson project that happened in 1982 while Lyle Preslar was at college and Minor Threat were on hiatus. Eddie Janney, later of Faith and Rites of Spring, played guitar. Sounds pretty much like Minor Threat to me, only angrier, if anything. This song was released on a 7 inch that came out in 1991 as a Dischord 10th anniversary celebration-themed reissue. It was originally released as a demo, along with one or two other songs.)
The Minutemen - Paranoid Chant (From their "Paranoid Time" 7 inch. I don't think of these guys as properly hardcore, as I explained in that other thread, but their early stuff was closer than the later stuff, and this song is one of their more agitated and intense tracks, so I think it fits pretty well.)
Acme - Blind (From "To Reduce the Choir To One Soloist", which contains all 9 of the songs Acme released [2 of which are just live versions of earlier songs]. This is brutal hardcore from Germany, obviously inspired by Rorschach, Groundwork, etc, and obviously an inspiration to bands that came later and led to metalcore.)
Coalesce - A Safe Place (Their third single; if you ask me, their early singles are the best stuff they ever did, although that's not to say that I don't love their later work. There are some fucking insane live performance videos of this song out there, and I believe I posted a youtube link to one of them somewhere on here at some point in the past.)
Botch - Stupid Me (Originally appeared on a comp that came with an issue of Inside Front--#10 if I remember correctly. Has thankfully been collected on the expanded reissue of their first LP, "American Nervoso". Another intense brutal flip-the-fuck-out song. I think all 5 of these fall under that category, really.)
Cave In - Terminal Deity (My favorite song from their second album, "Until Your Heart Stops." At this point, Steve Brodsky, who originally just played guitar and did the sung vocals [which only showed up for, say, a verse of every other song on the first Cave In LP, "Beyond Hypothermia"], was doing all of the vocals, and as a result of his being unable to handle screaming, Cave In turned into a space rock band after this album. More's the pity; "Until Your Heart Stops" was an important advance in what was being done with metallic hardcore in the late 90s. It included two different 8-minute long songs, which was unprecedented at the time. This song is pretty short, fast, heavy and straightforward, but you can nonetheless tell that it's something new and original. Too bad Cave In never explored this direction any further. [And don't any of you even think about bringing up "Perfect Pitch Black". God, I don't even want to discuss it.])
Deadguy - The Extremist (The second version of this song, from "Fixation On A Coworker". An earlier, somewhat inferior version appeared on their debut EP, "Work Ethic". Deadguy featured Rorschach guitarist Keith Huckins and No Escape vocalist Tim Singer, and got a lot of attention as a result. The attention was merited, as this song and the album from which it's taken both indicate. However, after "Fixation", both Huckins and Singer quit the band, forming Kiss It Goodbye. The EP released by Deadguy's second incarnation, "Screaming With The Deadguy Quintet", is generally considered crappy, but I have no truck with the majority opinion on this one. It's very different, yes, but it's also very GOOD, and considering that Huckins' replacement was Jim Baglino of Human Remains, an amazing band in their own right, how could it be bad? Maybe I'll post a song from that EP later.)
Universal Order Of Armageddon - Visible Distance (Originally the B-side of their "Symptom" single, they re-used this song as the leadoff track on their Kill Rock Stars 12 inch EP, "The Switch Is Down." These days it appears on their CD discography [which isn't actually a complete discography, as it is missing 2 of the 3 songs from their second 12 inch EP, on Gravity Records]. UOA guitarist Tonie Joy also played in such bands as Moss Icon, Born Against, The Great Unraveling, and The Convocation Of... so you know he's talented. Drummer Brooks Headley was in Born Against and Young Pioneers. Bassist Scott Malat was in Great Unraveling. Singer Colin Seven was out of his fucking mind. You can tell if you ever locate any live tracks by UOA [there are two officially released live songs, and both end with Colin ranting Malcolm Mooney style while the band prepares to play another song]. I can't really describe what's actually going on in the song--the drum pattern alone blows my mind, even after owning this record for 13 years.)
Angel Hair - Lazy Eye (From their split 7 inch with Bare Minimum, later collected on "Pregnant With The Senior Class". Some members of this band went on to play in The VSS, and the guitarist is now in Pleasure Forever. Angel Hair epitomize everything I love about the chaotic hardcore sound of the early 90s, and are in my opinion the band from that scene that got it most right. I'm trying not to write too much, so just listen to it and hopefully you'll understand.)
Honeywell - Screaming Numbers (From their self-titled LP. Josh Ovalteen's voice might sound distorted on this track, but it's not--I saw Man Is The Bastard a few years after they broke up, when Josh was doing noise and vocals for them, and it sounded exactly the same way live as it does on this record. The thing I love most about Honeywell, though, is not the insanely brutal vocals [as awesome as they are] but the kitchen-sink approach they had to making records, with tons of between song noise and samples and the way you could tell they were sort of improvising the beginnings and endings of their songs. The spontaneity they captured with this approach really won me over, and continues to impress me to this day.)
Antioch Arrow - Chaos Vs. Cosmos (From their second LP, "In Love With Jetts." This album and their first LP were both collected on one CD from Gravity Records, but I don't know the title. Anyway, I read an article in Your Flesh magazine years after Antioch Arrow broke up that described how bassist Mack Mann wrote their songs as sheet music. It did a lot to explain songs like this for me. The first 100 or so times I listened to this album, I couldn't tell what the fuck was going on 90% of the time. It wasn't until I'd played it so many times that I had it memorized that I could start to understand the structure of the songs. I eventually figured out that--other than one or two exceptions on the whole record--no part was ever repeated more than four times, and once a part was played once, they never went back to it. Even though their songs are only around a minute long each, this meant that all of them were really complicated and had a whole lot of parts in them. No wonder none of their three albums were more than 15 minutes long! There are even stranger elements to Antioch Arrow's sound--Aaron Montaigne's vocals, which sound to me like Jello Biafra trying to be Rozz Williams, the occasional use of cheap Casio keyboards for melodic flourishes, the weird chords their guitarists use--but all of it still sounds like hardcore to me, even though it didn't to a lot of people hearing this record back in 1994. By their third album, "Gems Of Masochism", Antioch Arrow had gone almost completely goth, but "In Love With Jetts" has the perfect mix of weird goth atmosphere, complex and original song structure, and hardcore intensity. A stone fucking classic, no matter what ANYONE says.)
Heroin - Blind (From their second 7 inch, known as the "Paper Bag" 7 inch because of it's strange covers, made out of silkscreened paper bags. This record was the beginning of chaotic hardcore proper--there had been bands leading up to it, like Born Against and End Of The Line, but Heroin really kicked the whole thing off. This record was the first release on Gravity, the first of many silkscreened-bag/envelope record covers, and all of the members of Heroin went on to do other important chaotic-hardcore related things--singer Matt Anderson continues to run Gravity Records to this day [although I'm not sure how active they are these days], guitarist Scott Bartoloni went on to play in Clikatat Ikatowi, bassist Ron Johnson sang and played guitar for Second Story Window, and drummer Aaron Montaigne, as mentioned above, later sang for Antioch Arrow. I don't know what else to tell you about this band--listen to them.)
Oh and hey, I don't have any Swing Kids on my computer, but here's something almost as good: an 8-minute live set from a performance in Bremen Germany, 1996. The songs they do are "Warsaw" (Joy Division cover), "Line #1", and "Forty Three Seconds".
Bad Brains - Pay To Cum (Their first single, from 1980. Often credited as the first hardcore single ever, though if you ask me, Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" and Middle Class's "Out Of Vogue", both from 1979, count as having predated it.)
Black Flag - Modern Man (This is the version from the unreleased 1982 demo session--the only recording session in which Black Flag ever had two guitars. Yes, I know "Damaged" credits Greg and Dez as both playing guitar, but Dez had only been on guitar for a month or so when they recorded it, and didn't have parts written for most of the songs. All he actually did on "Damaged" was backing vocals. But yeah, anyway, this song was later rerecorded on "Loose Nut". This version's better.)
7 Seconds - How Do You Think You'd Feel? (From "Walk Together, Rock Together", a half-studio, half-live effort that is probably their best album. The studio side was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Washington, DC, with Ian MacKaye producing. The result sounds almost like Minor Threat, but with a much stronger melodic sensibility.)
The Misfits - Spinal Remains (From "Static Age". This remastered version is easily 10 times as good as the shitty mix originally released on "Legacy Of Brutality". Before I heard this version, I didn't like this song--now it's one of my favorite Misfits songs.)
Skewbald - Sorry/Change For The Same (Skewbald was a brief Ian MacKaye/Jeff Nelson project that happened in 1982 while Lyle Preslar was at college and Minor Threat were on hiatus. Eddie Janney, later of Faith and Rites of Spring, played guitar. Sounds pretty much like Minor Threat to me, only angrier, if anything. This song was released on a 7 inch that came out in 1991 as a Dischord 10th anniversary celebration-themed reissue. It was originally released as a demo, along with one or two other songs.)
The Minutemen - Paranoid Chant (From their "Paranoid Time" 7 inch. I don't think of these guys as properly hardcore, as I explained in that other thread, but their early stuff was closer than the later stuff, and this song is one of their more agitated and intense tracks, so I think it fits pretty well.)
Acme - Blind (From "To Reduce the Choir To One Soloist", which contains all 9 of the songs Acme released [2 of which are just live versions of earlier songs]. This is brutal hardcore from Germany, obviously inspired by Rorschach, Groundwork, etc, and obviously an inspiration to bands that came later and led to metalcore.)
Coalesce - A Safe Place (Their third single; if you ask me, their early singles are the best stuff they ever did, although that's not to say that I don't love their later work. There are some fucking insane live performance videos of this song out there, and I believe I posted a youtube link to one of them somewhere on here at some point in the past.)
Botch - Stupid Me (Originally appeared on a comp that came with an issue of Inside Front--#10 if I remember correctly. Has thankfully been collected on the expanded reissue of their first LP, "American Nervoso". Another intense brutal flip-the-fuck-out song. I think all 5 of these fall under that category, really.)
Cave In - Terminal Deity (My favorite song from their second album, "Until Your Heart Stops." At this point, Steve Brodsky, who originally just played guitar and did the sung vocals [which only showed up for, say, a verse of every other song on the first Cave In LP, "Beyond Hypothermia"], was doing all of the vocals, and as a result of his being unable to handle screaming, Cave In turned into a space rock band after this album. More's the pity; "Until Your Heart Stops" was an important advance in what was being done with metallic hardcore in the late 90s. It included two different 8-minute long songs, which was unprecedented at the time. This song is pretty short, fast, heavy and straightforward, but you can nonetheless tell that it's something new and original. Too bad Cave In never explored this direction any further. [And don't any of you even think about bringing up "Perfect Pitch Black". God, I don't even want to discuss it.])
Deadguy - The Extremist (The second version of this song, from "Fixation On A Coworker". An earlier, somewhat inferior version appeared on their debut EP, "Work Ethic". Deadguy featured Rorschach guitarist Keith Huckins and No Escape vocalist Tim Singer, and got a lot of attention as a result. The attention was merited, as this song and the album from which it's taken both indicate. However, after "Fixation", both Huckins and Singer quit the band, forming Kiss It Goodbye. The EP released by Deadguy's second incarnation, "Screaming With The Deadguy Quintet", is generally considered crappy, but I have no truck with the majority opinion on this one. It's very different, yes, but it's also very GOOD, and considering that Huckins' replacement was Jim Baglino of Human Remains, an amazing band in their own right, how could it be bad? Maybe I'll post a song from that EP later.)
Universal Order Of Armageddon - Visible Distance (Originally the B-side of their "Symptom" single, they re-used this song as the leadoff track on their Kill Rock Stars 12 inch EP, "The Switch Is Down." These days it appears on their CD discography [which isn't actually a complete discography, as it is missing 2 of the 3 songs from their second 12 inch EP, on Gravity Records]. UOA guitarist Tonie Joy also played in such bands as Moss Icon, Born Against, The Great Unraveling, and The Convocation Of... so you know he's talented. Drummer Brooks Headley was in Born Against and Young Pioneers. Bassist Scott Malat was in Great Unraveling. Singer Colin Seven was out of his fucking mind. You can tell if you ever locate any live tracks by UOA [there are two officially released live songs, and both end with Colin ranting Malcolm Mooney style while the band prepares to play another song]. I can't really describe what's actually going on in the song--the drum pattern alone blows my mind, even after owning this record for 13 years.)
Angel Hair - Lazy Eye (From their split 7 inch with Bare Minimum, later collected on "Pregnant With The Senior Class". Some members of this band went on to play in The VSS, and the guitarist is now in Pleasure Forever. Angel Hair epitomize everything I love about the chaotic hardcore sound of the early 90s, and are in my opinion the band from that scene that got it most right. I'm trying not to write too much, so just listen to it and hopefully you'll understand.)
Honeywell - Screaming Numbers (From their self-titled LP. Josh Ovalteen's voice might sound distorted on this track, but it's not--I saw Man Is The Bastard a few years after they broke up, when Josh was doing noise and vocals for them, and it sounded exactly the same way live as it does on this record. The thing I love most about Honeywell, though, is not the insanely brutal vocals [as awesome as they are] but the kitchen-sink approach they had to making records, with tons of between song noise and samples and the way you could tell they were sort of improvising the beginnings and endings of their songs. The spontaneity they captured with this approach really won me over, and continues to impress me to this day.)
Antioch Arrow - Chaos Vs. Cosmos (From their second LP, "In Love With Jetts." This album and their first LP were both collected on one CD from Gravity Records, but I don't know the title. Anyway, I read an article in Your Flesh magazine years after Antioch Arrow broke up that described how bassist Mack Mann wrote their songs as sheet music. It did a lot to explain songs like this for me. The first 100 or so times I listened to this album, I couldn't tell what the fuck was going on 90% of the time. It wasn't until I'd played it so many times that I had it memorized that I could start to understand the structure of the songs. I eventually figured out that--other than one or two exceptions on the whole record--no part was ever repeated more than four times, and once a part was played once, they never went back to it. Even though their songs are only around a minute long each, this meant that all of them were really complicated and had a whole lot of parts in them. No wonder none of their three albums were more than 15 minutes long! There are even stranger elements to Antioch Arrow's sound--Aaron Montaigne's vocals, which sound to me like Jello Biafra trying to be Rozz Williams, the occasional use of cheap Casio keyboards for melodic flourishes, the weird chords their guitarists use--but all of it still sounds like hardcore to me, even though it didn't to a lot of people hearing this record back in 1994. By their third album, "Gems Of Masochism", Antioch Arrow had gone almost completely goth, but "In Love With Jetts" has the perfect mix of weird goth atmosphere, complex and original song structure, and hardcore intensity. A stone fucking classic, no matter what ANYONE says.)
Heroin - Blind (From their second 7 inch, known as the "Paper Bag" 7 inch because of it's strange covers, made out of silkscreened paper bags. This record was the beginning of chaotic hardcore proper--there had been bands leading up to it, like Born Against and End Of The Line, but Heroin really kicked the whole thing off. This record was the first release on Gravity, the first of many silkscreened-bag/envelope record covers, and all of the members of Heroin went on to do other important chaotic-hardcore related things--singer Matt Anderson continues to run Gravity Records to this day [although I'm not sure how active they are these days], guitarist Scott Bartoloni went on to play in Clikatat Ikatowi, bassist Ron Johnson sang and played guitar for Second Story Window, and drummer Aaron Montaigne, as mentioned above, later sang for Antioch Arrow. I don't know what else to tell you about this band--listen to them.)
Oh and hey, I don't have any Swing Kids on my computer, but here's something almost as good: an 8-minute live set from a performance in Bremen Germany, 1996. The songs they do are "Warsaw" (Joy Division cover), "Line #1", and "Forty Three Seconds".
Labels: Music
posted by Andrew TSKS at 9:28 PM
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