Year End Top 10 from #358

lists are stupid but being a fan is the coolest thing.

12’’

Sickoids – Self Titled (Residue records)

Talking about punk perfection. Sickoids were the first band that made me want to do a list this year, they are that good it has to be said as many times as it’s possible. Cause they rise above almost all the other records from this year. This record has everything that’s good in punk it’s raw, desperate, melodic, angry, unstoppable, filthy, smart, ugly, young. And while it’s everything you have already loved they are using the old tools to create a new shape. To stay just what we all like: total sonic destruction that hears like love songs written by kids whose hobby is burning cop cars.

Rat Columns – Sceptre Hole (Smartguy records)

Winter is cool. No one’s out on the streets, lights are on due to the early darkness, mist clouds everywhere and all the time, nice cloths. Rat Columns is the soundtrack for me for these amazing days but will be for the upcoming seasons as well. And I feel like it’s a soundtrack for a documentary about my life. About our lives, it has so many different sounds and emotions it’s like this all. It’s like music that has to be made cause it’s in everybody who is a beautiful loser. This is what I’m listening to when I gaze in my everyday daze. Amazing stuff.

Merchandise – Children of Desire (Katorga Works)

I reached a point with listening to this record that made me put them into the guilty pleasure category cause it was embarrassing how much I played their record. I played this when friends came over, when I went on wet summer nights to get drunk at islands, when I went to dates, when I came home after failed dates. When we were just hanging out, eating spaghettis after midnight, all the fucking time. Even at work where people started digging it. This is just beautiful and ugly, a whole universe under a blanket, where people who maybe pushed down in and by life go into their strange rooms and they create something among their four walls that is bigger than life. New Order plays Beat Happening songs which are as serious as Angels of Lights with a Neu! sound. Eat drugs and dance love.

Creem – Self Titled (Deranged records)

I remember when glue sniffing punks were opening for bands like Terror. When i was 16 i thought Bridge 9 is the best label ever. Then there was a growing ditch between punk and hardcore but at one point in the recent past bands started to appear who could grab both the punk and the hardcore scenes’ attention. I mean those who are way deep in their own subgenres. Creem is a perfect example for this cause they are fucking amazing. Skinheads with sneakers, edge people in smoke stink shirts. They are disgusting in a way Life’s Blood or Negative Approach were, mixing that amazing blocked rage clockwork orange violence of the Blitz sound with filthy new york trash era hardcore. This band proved me that room moshing could be fun.

Baader Brains – New Era Hope Colony (Empyre Records, Clean Plate Records, Ebullition Records)

Sometimes it bums me out how some bands who actually sound pretty good have nothing to say. And sometimes I get bummed out cause I’m dumb to understand everything Baader Brains is saying. This band is amazing cause you could feel and hear and read that these people put their time and creativity and message and power into these songs and expanded them to their fullest capabilities. And the result is some unique record that is everything that is good in punk and the overall message is everything that’s good in being an intelligent mammal. And there’s a United Mutation cover!!!

Criminal Code - Cold Thought (Inimical records)

Criminal Code had a word about them before their sounds have reached me. Most of the times this triggers high hopes in me and the higher you go the harder you could fall. I put this record on for the first time and it was just beyond my imagination. Bands like Criminal Code: i can only call them punk cause they are bringing the essential of the genre as much as there is only this single word to describe them the best. They sound modern but timeless modern, they are powerful but melodic, raw but smart. The wall of sound guitars with their everyday life gloom. There’s tension in every of their songs which is constantly rising, it’s like brilliant punk through an overdrive. Every sound is killer on this one. This was probably the best guitar centric record this year. 

Neon Piss – self titled (deranged)

This record had to grow on me. I loved their demo and their live performances and while the record is almost the same it sounded so monumental in their final studio form that it was too much to digest in the first couple listens. They not only put their melodies, desperation and anger into these songs but the overall record is just full with the well thought construction of punk awesomeness. It just makes you find friends and while you skate around a smashed cop station’s parking lot you could sing along to these amazing anthems of the strange youth.

Puffy Areolas - 1982: Dishonorable Discharge (Hozac records)

Ordinary thing about smoking weed regularly is even when you are sober you imagine how better things were if you were stoned. Ordinary thing about Puffy Areolas is they make you feel you are stoned and it’s 5 am but you still just want to fuck your brain up with more materials. This sounds like if some crazy scientist drugged Void and made them into a creepy psychedelic hardcore jam band. Perfect background music for garden parties where you smoke your night in burning plastic among bile puking punks.

D-Clone - Creation And Destroy (540 records)

They said no emotions or memories in this list but I first heard this record at a filthy basement when two noise-not-music head friends were blasting it with making silly faces and satanic hand signs. Music like this has always depressed me in a way but then I have realized it’s more than fun. This record is amazing. It’s so distorted and loud and noisy and fast beyond being able to keep up with them it turns into something grotesquely beautiful that’s like funny or happy while it’s not. It’s the evil baby their parents love but everybody else hates. This is music what your grandma thinks you are listening to when you tell her about punk. Full blown noise terror which makes you spill your beer on leather jackets. I could say punk and hardcore but seriously this sonic madness is in another universe.

Uv Race – Racism (In the Red recordings)

For some reason I always just end up listening to Uv Race and their new record is maybe their best to date. I like it when music sounds like it would be fun to hang with the people who are making it. This record is just fun cause post punk supposed to be fun. Whatever, this is the only time that racism were cool in history.

7’’

Coffin Pricks – Group Home Haircut (Stationary (Heart) Recordings)
Shaved Women – Static (Pass Judgement Records)
Dark Times – Girl Hate (Fysisk Format)
Lower – Walk On Heads (Escho)
Shoppers / Panzram – Split (Feeble Minds Records)
Homostupids – New York Jammin’ (hozac records)
White Lung – Self Titled (sabotage records)

Tapes

Piss Crystals – This is crazy. Hailing from Budapest, Hungary Piss Crystals is mixing kraut rock, noise, hardcore punk and black Sabbath-ish jams. And they end up sounding like Dinosaur Jr playing deep wound songs. Soooo good.

Replica – this band is a total fucking rager and there was no question they were the band of 2012. Angry people creating amazing noise. My vocabulary is not enough for them so I rather just bang my head to their totally awesome sounds.

Spiritual Warriors – now this is what makes me happy. Some stoned hippies blasting distorted love hardcore. How the fuck did it happen that the live recording on their tape is way better than the studio one? Anyway, this is the music that I like.

Caged Animal – I was at a hardcore show where the singer said “the next jam is a stomper”. No idea about what that is but listening to this demo makes me wanna kick myself in the head with a boot it’s that good. Delete me from facebook if you disagree.

Index – Reverbed fun punk perfection for dreamy cool bedroom dance parties. The sounds are fitting shitty tattoos, awesome haircuts and midnight parking lot skate jams. This band is just so effortlessly cool listening to them will make you cool as well. In the punk way.

Proxy – if you like drinking beer, hanging with friends, wearing nice cloths and yelling oi too much this will be your band. Nah, they are way better with melodies and overall music that it’s like oi music for everyone. Anyway This is a crazy good demo even for closet skinheads like myself.

#357

December is coming and no one has any plans for the new year’s eve so just keep reiterating their hatred towards celebrating the end of another 12 months. They are all going to hug each other with puke breath at the end. A year ago on the 30th I got an e-mail. I got asked if I want to participate in telling my version of everyday life as a punk. All I did before was that I made a zine in English and I wrote a scene report. And I have a friend in the inner circle who, I guess, kept his back for me.
Years are time intervals and time is an opportunity for things to happen. Was this a good year or not? It was just a year. There are no simply good or bad things except punk is good and jazz is bad. Thus punk was good this year. It was for me. All I think about writing this for almost a year is I always wanted to participate from the first time since I have read this fanzine. And while the actual process of writing my columns does not give me more pleasure than it did when I was doing it for my own zines or blogs last month’s letter section with Mariam articulating that how we are punx and how we have our secret world made me almost broke down to tears of joy that in a way I’m doing something together with this kick ass girl. As we all do who understood her words.

The words are always the same. We say young, true, not, giving, fucks and so it goes. But if the secret is not a real secret for you, you could spot “real” even among ordinary things too. So whoever and wherever you are if you are doing it on the way you think is the best you will be spotted as well. Or not and live a terrible life and commit suicide as Kafka did.

I have no great thoughts or beef this time so I will mostly talk about music and regular punk enthusiasm.

We had Street Eaters over in our flat, town, rehearsal room for a last minute show and some early afternoon punk lunch with pasta and bottled tomato sauce and late night drunk conversations after their show. It started lovely. I was having a late night “drunk on his part, stoned on mine” chat with my friend, whose farm they were spending a day off and he seemed to be so high on meeting and sharing experiences with these two lovely individuals that around 3 am he suggested me to organize a little show for them if they agree in the morning to visit our town after having their breakfast. And they did and it was great and they stole everyone’s heart with their punk love towards everything and each other. So much harmony. Actually more in living their lives and dealing with the world than in their music which is already filled with great grooves and beats. So go figure how they are as individuals when the band is actually a bass-and- duo. I doubt that many people’s lives would be changed by well put phrases about happiness that may be true. In fact, those phrases are never true but simple and dull enough so you can project them onto your life to get you motivated. But when you see this in practice as other people really live their everyday lives by them, even on tour, which is not the most typical scenario in one’s life...that is so much different and inspiring. Their presence was unique. And it wasn’t stupid and dull like those phrases. It was more and in the same time it was just so simple. I don’t say that no one is happy but them as they also might have problems. It was just simply good to see lovely people among us. Maybe for a roomful of kids who have nothing else to do and are no late from anywhere on a morning following a Thursday night it could mean something.

Now to music and listening to records. Isn’t that boring that I put music always into the second part? At least this time there is no shady explanation why I was listening to bands and some pathetic bridge between the message and the entertainment. It is weird because while being important for life, music itself has so little meaning. There are books and movies that are analyzed and considered as materials of serious message, while music is just being reduced to entertainment as primitive indulgence since people realized that pieces of classical composers are not that good to listen to all the time. When people are analyzing music it’s more of a tale of the industry and the people behind music not the tale of the music itself. And tales of us as listeners. There are very few descriptions of music in terms of its the meaning. Maybe it’s too basic and ancient that we don't need to do all the thinking we normally do when we try to understand everything else. Even if we want to understand music. I don’t. I find joy in music. Music amazes me. I bet that’s why I like music mostly that’s either brutal or beautiful. This year was a blast in the sense of the releases of punk music and I have some absolute favorites meaning I let my enthusiasm decide what are the best records for me this year and I don't have to push my enthusiasm to pick some albums to create a list that represents my adoration of music. The good thing about punk is if it’s good it won’t get worn out by time and trends. I was cheated into liking ska music by the blindness of being young. As I see now, I won’t indulge myself in any kind of nostalgia and find myself banging my head to OPERATION IVY anytime soon. However, the bands I’m still listening to are covering a wide range in time and scenes and talking about them could still be fresh cause these bands are still fresh. Let’s start with something obvious: Christ Thompson is some angel voiced punk perfection. All of his bands are pure gold and it could be attributed to his amazing voice in great part. My favorite is FURY. Not because you almost can’t go wrong with less. It might be easier to seal your perfection into one 7’’ to last forever, Fury is a band I wish would have done more. This  is amazing “right-before-post-hardcore-hardcore” that hints into the future of sounds of a genre that draws it’s borders clearly. Fury is just so great in mixing viciously cool rage with groovy hardcore. The DC sound dominates on this ep while there is high speed rage that’s been held in chains by some epic, “slapping your tights on the bus as heavy as you can” guitar parts. Space love, space guitars, space hardcore. It’s so perfect like rocket science. Whole things feel like it’s a genius master plan done by some extraordinary juxtaposition of people. Like bandits of music committing the perfect crime. While it resigns from rolling with everyday bullshit and rises above us poor fucks it’s also very detailed and focuses all the anger they had into all those brief one and half minutes. The ep is so short it could fit into you and you always could reach for it. To be your ultimate weapon to throw it into the face of desolation. While it’s futuristic in a way it also stays true to the aesthetics of pure rage from the impatient youth. This is kinda how I hear Thompson’s voice. It may sound squeaky, almost childlike, but it is more like as if it would suffer from GHD as it has full potential for knowledge. One of the best things in music ever. One of the other best things, but this time in New York hardcore, is CITIZENS ARREST. One of the few bands that still can release good records. It seems like that there is a fountain of oppressed rage that never goes out. Usually I look for some relief if I encounter something this dark and massive in the way of being a complex house of suffering but the relief in citizens arrest is that there’s no relief at all. Their sound has filth, but not what they put into, but what they discovered around themselves in other humans. It’s just so honest and those fidgety guitars are rhyming perfectly with desolation. Their songs exist in a lifeless, brutally sterile landscape where all these frustrating noises while punching my brain they also cuddling with it with their fucked up beauty. Horrible things are carrying some beauty that’s what I have realized at a punk fest once where I was standing with a plastic bag full of beer and watching some Brazilian band shocking everybody. It’s easy to continue this analogy of weird brutality with ZOUO, the music I listen to nowadays. This Japanese band amazed me the very first time I heard them. The concept is beyond crazy, like they have translated whatever bizarre things I was thinking about japan in my own stereotypical way and that’s also what’s good about them. The menace sonic awkwardness goes along a solid backbone, meaning what they are doing is freaky good because it is freaky strange and it still feels like that it just has to exist. Just because some people thought why not to play ultra brutal hardcore restrained on mid tempo. That’s why it is good. Like if some people have read about united mutation and strange guitar centric apocalypse punk and created it their own way from their own imagination. It brings the warmness of fantasy through creativity into the rigid reality of existence. It’s just ugly psychedelic hardcore like a dough stretched out and lengthened, still can’t fail my attention even if I’m against punk over 2 minutes. The rule is that there is no control and no boundaries. That’s why everything they have thought to do is possible to be done. So just think about what’s life. We desire things and we struggle to meet them. If we can’t, we have to cope with grieving and this makes us different or better people. Form our identity. And if we can reach our highest desire which, according to the maslow pyramid, is self expression in it’s fullest we reach the absolute. And because punk is a platform where one's desire can be met, punk might be the absolute. If I’m listening to Zouo I can believe this.

The other aspect in music I’m listening to nowadays is presented by bands who are more like on the side of making life more bearable than focusing on why should we be angry. So there are bands that blow this bubble that it’s big enough for us to find some solace. Like GUN OUTFIT. First time I heard this band they sounded like I have already heard them. It sounded familiar. And not like I have heard it for the millionth time but finally the sounds in my head had a body. This needed to be done because it was missed and as it is so obvious it just makes it more close to nature, which is something truly/deeply for me in gun outfit’s music. The sounds are slacking, guitars slowly waking up from a sonic hangover with a stoned glaze. It’s music beyond music that resonates with the sub- and unconscious. Music to wonder about smoking weed and wasting whole afternoons with sitting in a garden swinging your legs half drunk. Their childish but brilliant melodies grab me just as their down to earth while dreamy lyrics. It’s dreamy enough that I wish it would be reality. One of the best current bands. One of my current favorite old bands as a rediscovery from underground noise’s eternal archive is THE CLEAN. I’ve knew about this band but I came close to actually nerd out and through them just in the last few months. Total rain music, where the drops hitting my windowsill are going hand in hand with the imaginary dance party they create and I have in my mind in my room alone. Wandering around sounds that are collecting the whole thing that is playing on guitars. So powerful while dreamy and familiar. It’s a soundtrack for everyone in every moment thus it makes life more bearable. Their sound is so wide you imagine landscapes to their music and whether there and people like a whole new universe or just a scene like a dream that you are carrying around in your pocket on your listening device. Wall of goodness that’s what it is. Oh shit I’m running out of space so I will quickly say that NEU! is fucking amazing space punk forever.