#382

Nowadays literature is taking over my life. Not if I have a deep knowledge of it or I could move as familiarly within as I do in punk, but I spend more time reading through the Paris Review interviews than I do hunt around on blogs to discover new sounds in punk rock. While there are obviously always so many to learn about. It’s a different kind of obsession but what’s good is that there is obsession in both. Music is instant, it lives up as much of my time as long a song is. While the same amount of words could take different amount of time for me to read. It’s all about the pacing of the text. And I have to read through books to know them, so now my bed is surrounded with unread books accompanied by a to-read list that exists in my head which will probably take me one and a half year to get done. But I’m already being enthusiastic in advance when I browse through the covers. As in books and music the core of the creation is self expression I look different on music than I did before I have become a book worm.
Also do you remember me holding a grudge against jazz? At work I do nothing but listening to Pharoah Sanders, Eric Dolphy, Derek Baily, Albert Ayler and an enormous amount of Kraut rock, sometimes music that is close to techno, monotonous, repetitive music produced by sad and dirty computers. It’s not about growing up because when I get home and put on a Wretched or Electric Eels lp I can appreciate the rear layers of their music where the visceral meets the thoughtful chaos. But as I have expanded my spectrum in music that I find interesting, I also was in hurry to get through last years music as I was preparing my YETT in parallel I have realized that I stopped appreciating the relaxing mediocrity of the majority of punk bands as much as I love bands who just go for being themselves aka individually good.
I also realized that time is not as bad of an invention as I used to think about it. Yes, it blocks our mind more than anything and silently controls everything that we do but it also reveals truth. Places answers next to questions. Such big words but I’m no longer afraid of not including the exact best bands of a year in my YETT list because using time and the kindness of the coordinators I knew whatever I will leave out from the list I can include here because I negotiated a later deadline for my column or I can talk about the leftovers in two years from now. It’s not the news as someone always has to be the first and smartest although I do desire both but desire works best when not satisfied. I can wait and until then dig up everything that was great in the ‘90s since obviously everything was perfect in the ‘80s and magical in the ‘70s. Couple days ago I started listening to the Eucharist lp and felt so stupid when looking back how I thought the ‘90s were super boring and nothing happened then. I have a medicine after taste, awkwardly bad feeling by how now in Europe everybody is fucking wanna go back and re-live those lazy days that were lit by fading neon lights and cheap drug nights. I mostly see my stupidity in giving too much relevance to decades as they would mark anything. Take Aspirin Feast, they sound like a systematic skull fuck that could happened whenever. Discovery of the week was Balance of Terror. A band that sounds as hardcore kinda should sound. Fast and ferocious punk music that takes itself as seriously as it’s still threatening for the buy-in-culture but doesn’t stink as a let’s-sit-in-a-basement-and-think-about-utopia bullshit. Oh yeah with them I skipped into another decade, but the early ‘00s still feel as very shady times, yet there was light too. Another new hobby of mine is buying records by instinct. I was browsing through records when Banque Allemande came across and I was amazed by their cover art in which well shaped naked bodies put together in a collage and I was convinced by SS Records who put this record out, so I gave them a quick listen online – yes, I was buying records on Discogs – and few days later I found this record glued to my turn table. They are an amazing german post-punk, kinda noise rock band. The heavy, modestly distorted bass and drums are making a solid base for the guitars to fuck around while the singer chants with bitter tone of a voice. They grab me down into a vortex of awesome guitar noise. The guitar sound (is it really a guitar?)  is swinging between the noise of things falling down from a shelf or someone cruelly rubbing rubber. Alas it’s not such experimental sonic journey. I can dance to it, I can jump around to it I can be happy around their music, it’s such perfect company.
It compensates my loss in how I failed to be quick enough to buy the Tampax / Hitler SS split 7” at the Rakta show. For expiation I went through both bands discography and now I want that fucking split 7” even more. All hail to freak scene, mutant punx.
There is a feature in every good music that makes music good. Although I believe in genres but I seem to find this essential component mutual in all the music I found great. The ones I can relate to not just understand its qualities. Common sense is something I want to leave behind. Umberto Eco discusses the difference between the empirical and the model readers. He says a model reader could place himself into the book, accept even the fictional rules of the book and decide who exactly tells the story, meaning who is the model author. The model reader is keen to understand every detail of a book while still enjoy it with all its heart. Still there is place for judgment because the model author creates the model reader as the author sets up the environment and rules within the reader should exists and following this there are millions of genres I don’t wanna look around not even for a miserable second. But what is great in great literature is similar to what is great in great punk music and this makes me feel sometimes that everybody all together is just writing one great tune. From Sex Vid to Sun Ra I have to move backwards in time but it’s not a waltz, I twerk around culture. I cross Skull Kontrol, Raincoats, Die Kreuzen, Execute, Organisation, Warum Joe, Born Against, The Fix, Kizárt Dolog, Skullflower, 45F1, Stigmathe, High Rise, Totalitär, Biztonsági Tanács, Venom P Stinger, The Slits.

Luckily as it turns out from my YETT this collective noise was done also in 2014. I already hate myself because I missed out Tercer Mundo’s agonizing brain destruction. Just like the contemporary mexico sound they also use a very rusty approach to tell the everyday frustration of that sinking country’s reality. It’s hardcore punk with sharp nails sticking out from it all around. Some of the songs have a weird groove in them which makes the whole atmosphere of the record more dangerous, since someone found time to dance in a battle field.
Right at the finish line I was introduced to Heavy Makeup from Gothenburg. Their demo looks like it’s gonna be another band mixing japanese craziness with the mangel sound filtering it through no wave noise. Rather they stick to the golden era Touch & Go sound and summon acts as Scratch Acid or Killdozer. Constant cynical headache. The repetitive minimalism hits me as a neighbor driller that wakes me up from an amphetamine hangover. Although this band wears it’s influences proudly it avoids the accusation of being a reproduction of something that happened decades ago. They have reminded me to МРАЗЬ who are hailing from Russia. Although МРАЗЬ’s sound is bigger as in Russia everyone takes whatever they do more serious than people do everywhere else. Their sound catches me as how a tidal wave wraps around your helpless body. Here are more guitars and manic obsession to play around with sounds. Still its charm is carried in its simplicity but simplicity that works is always real close to perfection. I can hear the effort they have put into their song just as Bulgakov worked on his masterpiece for decades. Their aggro strength stops before it’s being threatening to everyone, meaning there is no serial killer vibe just the pure power that is present in great music. Anyone who thinks this is just a russian black market bootleg of Pissed Jeans is stupid as fuck because they reach beyond Pissed Jeans cool but washed clean presentation of true filth. Pissed Jeans reminds me to music, while МРАЗЬ reminds me to how fucked up humanity is. Not if МРАЗЬ is rather bending towards to Brainbombs, Drunk with Guns mind hammering brutalism but it feels they went into searching for something and luckily found their true self.   
Going back to Sweden I recently received an e-mail from Två Krig saying: Fuck it we want to be heard - and they truly should be. I’m nauseatingly filled with the dark wave, neo-romantic sound and no longer interested to decide is it a new trend or someone just opened the door for million bands who were waiting in their dark and miserable rooms, spending days in valium daze with cutting out the eyes of poster stars. Två Krig doesn’t pity themselves, I have the luxury to not understand swedish thus I think they focus more on paranoid, block of flat reality rather than failed romance tragedy. They gather the Wipers’ Doom Town sound to flavor the swedish traditional melodies and it works really well. Lost in the Ikea. The only thing I had to do to became their model listener is to sink down to find the people within the music, the fragility, the risk and danger. There they sound more scared than sad and this picks them out from the line of all those post punk, neo wave bands. Deep down lay so many ideas and layers of these thoughts yet there is a disturbing sterility of their sound that is probably their frustration that needs to be transmitted.

What else? I liked the Mosoco Demo, Life Form’s Creepy Crawly, Sperm Demo, Status Null Demo, Gutter Gods’ Innersense. But this is not that much to miss out. 2014 see you in ten years when i know more about you. It was a great year but i always hope for a better.

PS.: There are two more Hysterics songs left behind, coming out soon both tracks are killer jams.