#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.

#370

It’s January the 2nd. I’m gonna be 27 in a few hours. January 3rd is the date when Nietzsche gone mad because he lost his faith in humanity. Not sure what is up to me but probably I will just go fat by eating homemade pizza while I will try to defeat my girlfriend in scrabble while we will drink gin tonic before cuddling. So humanity please don’t get too fucked up on my birthday.
Now it’s 14th of January and I’m pushing deadline with my Year End Top Ten. My birthday went better then planed even if my better half beat me with few points in Scrabble. But I got two cakes from her and from my mom thus felt a bit like someone close to Marie Antoinette. My girlfriend surprised me with a balisong knife (which turned out to be illegal to have with me in many countries, hungary counted as well) and a homemade Urinals t-shirt which are amazing gifts. She gave me a Modern Lovers LP for Christmas. Among other things I made her two mixtapes for Jesus’ bday. One of the tapes had Glue as the opening track cause unity songs are about love.
We were out at a gig the day after my birthday because one of my bands played a Food Not Bombs benefit show. The lineup was great with many of the best local bands. Too many friends again, too much moonshine always. I got so drunk at one point I wanted to break dance but people picked me up from the floor because they thought I fell and was rolling on the ground. I have jokingly reenacted horrible scenes from midday talk shows with my girlfriend, laughed a lot, started playing on a guitar that was in the neck of a performing guitar player at one show and woke up with vague memories. That show raised lots of money which is cool because Hungary is a place where the government is as dumb as they are hot headed so they do whatever they think is right and it forces many people out on the streets and FNB events are attended by more than a hundred people. This is where solidarity comes in, and benefit shows are a good way to support a noble cause while the only thing you do is you go to a show and have fun. But many times these shows have better vibes. For me almost every show is a benefit show since it benefits my every days when I’m being close to punk music among punx.

After this I have spent ten days with gathering almost everything that falls under my radar of punk music and I not just listened but tried to write short reviews for my hungarian blog. I ended up with many bands that I have missed out and twenty A4 pages of reviews. It was kind of an interesting / cool / painstaking / exhausting experiment I wish to happen with everybody who loves music and likes to have an opinion. In the breaks I was reading Rilke’s prose, not poems because I hate poems, and he writes a lot about sunlight and how it breaks through windows and how it encounters people’s faces. It was interesting because he has written about sunlight which is a simple thing and I was writing reviews after reviews of punk bands that most of the times are as simple and similar to each other as the sunlight that we enjoy every day. I tried my best but 70% of these reviews are sentences try to bullshit about music that is fast, ugly, dissonant, disordered, desolated, bleak, aggressive, ignorant, beautiful and funny. I don’t really care anymore how it ended up. I do want to be a good writer, I do want to improve and I do think there is more to music than a guitar player who shreds chords and a singer who screams lines which might rhyme. But other times even if something is really good you just can’t express how good it is without starting to speak about awkward, rambled thoughts. Which is fine with me.
I have also learned that critics are useful because they do the dirty job. This is one of the jobs where it’s the purest form of that you gave your time for others. Now if someone wants to know about punk records in 2013 in hungarian they just have to hit up my blog and decide if they trust me or not.
Conclusion One: We use channels (critics with platforms) to learn about new things. There won’t be hordes of bands kicking in my doors, presenting their music. MRR is a channel; blogs are as well as live shows. But I feel like I listen to too many American bands and I wanna find out about bands from more hidden, distant places. I’m sure amazing things are happening there as well.
Conclusion two: Punk is still amazing and fuck everybody who says there is just too much music that has been made. Music is not for critics, not for fans, not for listeners. It’s for people who wanna express themselves in a sonic way. There are people out there writing essays on the subject that there is too much culture and people should might stop making it but at the same time we just shrug our shoulders on the bullshit that is fabricated by the leaders of this world. When and why have we become our own enemies?
I’m also aware of how many bands have I missed to include in my list which is one of the reasons I made this list. I made this list because I hate lists. I can’t put up orders thus I felt I will write about every band. And I wrote about a few. This proves that lists are not sacred and who knows what will be the best thing from 2013 like even in a year from now? Wipers influenced more people in the 00s than they had in their hey days. Does it matter to listen to fresh bands? Are they fresh? We are punx we can do whatever the fuck we want to.
So what do i want to do in 2014? I started putting together a fanzine where i want to have lots of interviews. Never did this, i was never really down for interviews but this is something new i try to do. I will try to use my time way better than i manage with it now. I wanna write short critics on my own language about music, movies and books for my blog, I wanna keep doing shows here at Budapest, I wish Norms will be able to write, record and release a record. I also wanna make other zines, a graphic novel with my girlfriend who is a talented graphic designer. I just want to keep doing my punk things.

What do I expect from 2014? Not really an expectation because I have already heard it but the new White Wards LP is the shit. It’s everything! I also heard the Hysterics 7” (Nah, I don’t get promo shit, sadly, I do use soulseek – szivdkianyadbolageci). Hysterics will play here in May and if any of you ladies are reading this you will be hanging with me and I will make you pizza for breakfast. A month from now I will have Autistic Youth in my room and later Pleasure Leftists, Condominium, etc. 2014 will be sick. I guess every year is a bit better than the one before and 2013 was kinda cool. My band got released on vinyl, we booked shitloads of bands, I did my radio show, continued writing for MRR, joined bands, toured, got together with my girlfriend, left my shit job, was an intern at the coolest news paper in hungary, bought cool records. Check my YETT there I talk about music.
I accept gifts from anyone. Even digital links for non-usa bands.

CREEM interview / report

Creem is hailing from New York. A city with great history of hardcore/punk. In the very recent past this city and the whole East Coast is on a huge boom, being the nest of myriads of amazing hardcore/punk bands. Creem is one of them who made their name with creating an authentic mix of punk/hardcore/oi. They not only sound like a combination of genres but they are writing a soundtrack for living this misfits life.  

What a surprise I have fucked it up again. Maybe it’s a curse. Could be, since it’s the second Creem interview that disappeared before it could have been transcribred and printed on the pages of MRR.

Who cares, I’m writing the story anyway. It will be different since Creem is not your average hardcore band. I know what we do is hardcore and punk but there are times you can tell there is a fine line between the two genres. Time goes by as trends come and go. Sometimes the whole world feels like just one big scene, other times there is just too much shit talk with throwing around labels like bro-core or gutter punk.

And here is Creem who just merges everything. Hardcore with oi, punx with skins at hardcore shows held in basements. Everybody just goes for the kicks and having fun, while leaving behind the everyday frustration. They rip, they smile. They put on Wire records and sing along, compliment on Hegel books, they say sick all the time and seem a bit too obsessed with instagram. They climbed on street walls and tried to lift up a one seated tiny car. Bringing some ruckus for fun of course. They are touring along with Nuclear Spring with whom they share a member as well, Colman, who is a nice gentleman and who  seems to keep the tour together.

We started the interview after a long night spent with partying and stuffing our faces with midnight munchies. Everybody was kinda tired, I was way too drunk since I had brushed my teeth with a good morning beer. We were tripping on European coffee which for the US bodies might have caused panic attacks and to be honest I felt weird as well. Planet Mental was silently playing in the background and constant nu-metal jokes were flying around. These guys were full with patches, some of them stank of beer but were articulated, funny and punk. We missed to detail who plays on which instrument, we forgot to be ironic or try to be pathetically funny. What we had was a great, seemingly two- hour conversation on life as a punk in New York or all around the world. Of course we were specific about them but it was more of how they, as individuals see this whole thing. Mostly it was Colman (bass on Creem and Nuclear Spring), Mike (Guitars on Creem) and Jay (drums on Creem and Hounds Of Hate) speaking. Alex (Vocals in Creem) was quiet but when he started speaking he said such great things. Reggie who also plays the guitar stayed silent which is a bummer because out wild on the streets of my town he was just an unstoppable force of energy and fun. The Nuclear Spring fellows seemed to be hung over too much but Lauren (guitars and vocals) sometimes gave her two cents to the table as well as Rob (bass in Nuclear Spring) but he seemed way too tired.

I started out by asking them what they thought about the fact that back in the day people rather just had ideas of what frustration they wanted to put into or express through their music and weren’t thinking about specific sounds but now bands seem to have an idea of what they wanna sound like either in music or in images of what will happen at their shows. The bio they gave me anyway told me that all of them lived in one huge house and at one show that they were setting up they started jamming Chunks from the Last Rights and Alex filled in for vocals and that’s when they learned that he can sing.

Spontaneous yet satisfying fun turned into semi- serious business and this is how Creem was born. They had no specific plan for their music to unite everybody who has ever liked fast, short, noisey music. They had no such intentions. Today it’s still just mostly Mike delivering riffs after nights spent listening to GISM and Poison Idea.

They are a bit bummed on how everyone is comparing them to the Boston-sound while,  as they said, it was just one guy and the rest only borrowed his description. For them it’s more like Negative Approach. For me it’s Life’s Blood and they took it as a compliment.

Later on we talked about how everybody who has a specific agenda or plan to sound like something pretentiously new or pre-planned only to achieve desired circumstances with their music will end up failing. It should rather come from instinct as they say. So they had no idea in terms of what will happen to this band, how will they specifically sound or what should people’s reaction be to their music.

Drunkenly I kept on visioning aggro skinheads on lsd crawling on the ceiling but even though they liked this picture for themselves they said it’s enough if people come and seem interested in what they are doing. It just happened the way it is now.

At one point Mike started to talk about how Crass mixed avant-gardism with punk plus weird art and ended up sounding like they were recorded through a mobile phone which is strange since there were no mobiles back then. And it still sounded visceral and natural, not forced or pre-planned, but if every band went for this, most of them would just end up being terrible.

The conclusion around the table was: for big things you need specific times.

We talked about the need for progression in punk. Either in sound or ideas. But since it’s established as much as a culture could be there is no need for progression if you like one specific thing that feels complete.

They just wanna do their thing.

Still, even though punk has many tools people can choose from to express themselves, it is not yet something that is easy to adapt to with only rationalizing and understanding it instead of feeling it cause when people try to analyze and learn punk they always fail. This is why academics couldn’t understand punk since they don’t have the heart just the brain for it. It still feels like we are holding ourselves for a secret.

 And who wants big things anyway?

We started to talk about lyrics, of how important they are in the sense of saying something new or original or whether these are just also tools, instruments in the mouth of the singer. Alex said his lyrics were simple but are completely his own and just as a power chord that had been played before, even these lines mean a lot for him and could express parts of his view on the world.

But these guys are much more than just regular kids feeling angry of not having brotherhood in the pit. How you tell your story also matters and this guy, while on stage looking like a frightening manic psychopath staring with wide open eyes on the ceiling and never smiling, loses his vicious look when the band finishes their last note and he just transforms into a smiling, charming young man who is fun to have around even if he is moshing on the streets with a plastic bag full of instant ramen soup in his hands or talking about post-modern dystopian books.

We discussed bands with agendas. Crass again and Earth Crisis got mixed in one sentence and we all together started to realize around the table that bands with the intent to change the world have disappeared and punk has just become so culturalized that we don’t really need the world to change. Maybe just ourselves. Which could be depressing for some but maybe just as the world has opened itself people have just closed up themselves, thus this culture has become one’s frustration. And since hardcore punk has become a culture you can indulge yourself in it.

I was curious how they saw themselves in the future. As heard, some people plan to leave punk behind but they did not seem to have such intentions. Colman didn’t think he would ever give up playing guitar.

Then Alex broke his silence with a long speech about punk being so much more essential in one’s life and thus being much much more than just going to shows, knowing bands, forming bands or dressing the way we do. It should be with you in your everydays as well while the world is forcing you to change and be a conformist. It’s the attitude. It could be with you even if you have a family and kids and you are over 40 and although it’s hard to leave it behind you are tempted every day if you wanna operate and survive in the world that surrounds you. I listened to him and lost myself in his words which again in my morning daze of tiredness and boozing were pretty touching.

On the one hand I feel comfortable that I understand him when hearing that it’s much more than the rest of the world thinks and then I get frightened whether  we are just far too gone into our own world. Maybe because I was still drunk, but he just made so much sense.

This is a struggle and we are kinda losing it but there are people still fighting, staying young, smart and ugly.

We started to talk about the gentrification of New York cause sooner or later it would happen to all the cities and we could be thrown out of all the spaces that real people made cool. They said the city has changed even though it’s still a huge and strange town but they also enjoy the everyday life of middle class bourgeois and feel themselves a bit wrong in it too.

They are just broke kids too, who wanna have cheap rents and not be bothered. But despite everything they didn’t seem scared or sad. Only Colman was a little worried when he said he might have lost his job for this tour but Lauren started to calm him down stating he did not know it for sure yet.

We could agree in one thing: punk life is not the normal one and sometimes you have to come to terms with the nonsense bullshit. But these guys still live in the same house and just hate to work.

The New York scene seems to be on boom who remembers since when. They said maybe Perdition was the band who kicked life into the city, but nowadays a lot of young kids are attending shows and forming bands. It could be that there are 300 people at a regular gig and everybody is going crazy, doing something crazy. New bands are being appreciated and there is just life in the scene. Bands are hanging out, since there are many bands with shared members. Lauren is in La Misa and some of them just formed a new band called Garbageman, which as they stress it, is a real band.  

Since this interview was done in Eastern Europe I asked them about the differences between touring Europe and the States. They came here with door deal and the only requirement in the booking sheet was to make them feel at home and book them a diy show. Although every night they got food and a place to sleep they still said it’s cheaper to tour in the US since the gas price compared with Europe is still amazingly low.

And although Europe has a better infrastructure in hosting bands it’s maybe better for those acts who are kinda nameless in the states but here they are big hits. They forgot to name examples, but we all know those that came to life because they were too stupid to go to college and too lazy to work so they formed a hardcore band with an always changing line-up to rip off madball songs and tour the world.

A friend of mine told me once that for Europe the seemingly cruel conditions of touring the states makes a contra-selection of bands and emphasizes the rock and roll gene in American bands. Kinda like either you are super good and then will survive or you are not even officially born. Creem seemed to argue that this is not the case. Not just because they have seen Slang from Japan lately who blew them away but because again, touring America is not that hard as they say and bands who tour a lot and have been playing for a long time sound cool. The fuel is cheaper and there will be people to book you, at least in their living rooms. So there is no such thing as rock and roll gene in Americans. It’s all about playing a lot of shows and focusing on how to play them.  

At the end of the interview I realized that everything that had been said got lost and we could only rely  on the capacity of our memories. But we don’t have to worry because, as their driver Sascha summoned it up, it was just a bunch of bullshit anyway.

#365

Whoops. It’s getting seriously deadline time. And it’s 1:43 am I’m dead tired, I just came back from a show and I will play a show tomorrow on a boat for people who dress better than I do and after the painfully hang over morning I will travel to another town to hang with people. Streaming New Order’s performance Taras Shevchenko session right now. Writing a pamflett against a band and our government. Reading too much of the middle-east situation and foreign wars. Proxy wars. Whatever. Sometimes I wanna do serious things here like no cursing and being a bit more journalistic or literaturical or other things. Like not saying “and shit” all the time. Other times I just wanna be like how I like to be. Like a bad dream of a weird memory. No order, full blown emotional wreck, drugs, anti jokes. Don’t know If anyone is reading this. I do skip some of the other columnists because the subjects I care about is not what they write about. As John Peel said the problem is with those who listen not who are providing something to listen to. Except if you are being a spokes man for child molestation. I’m doing so many other things for MRR now I kinda forgot I have to do this as well and since all of my texts need heavy edition I need more time.

Also please if you like what I do here check my blog too. Since that not only has extended versions of my columns but sometimes they are less edited = more weird. To be honest I don’t really remember what has happened since I wrote my previous column. It should not be due to drugs since i can’t remember the last time I smoked weed. Probably at some park. My first band will do a reunion show in support of one of our friends who is having health issues. I’m not really a big fan of reunions and somehow it depresses me that to get people’s attention you need to reform something that happened years ago. But on the other hand we see it as a nice gesture. This friend of ours went away to work and live in London. He is one of the coolest, most energetic and dedicated people I know. He is just pure positive energy. He is sxe hardcore, I’m a drunk loser punk. At one point we stoped our daily conversations but I never thought we went cold. He is just a person I will always like. And now it’s heartbreaking he has to re-learn to do things which seem so natural for all of us. This way it’s the least we can do to re-learn some of our old songs and just like we did to perform them as hard as we can.

I missed playing with those 4 guys but truth be said I’m in a band with one of them and frequently hanging and touring with the others. With getting a bit confused on ecstasy of reunions I started planning to organize a local festival with local bands to show the country there is punk worth feeling threatened by. Sometimes I think about maybe punk is no longer a threat it’s more of a protection. Also with just lining up all the local bands for this fest I felt like I have to do a scene report. So be prepared. I think the key for a good scene is that you should just appreciate the good things. And the good things are not only a world wide hype. There are millions of bands like Iceage around you but they are better but to realize why you just have to listen and not only be told. Just today I was listening to this band called Ragana and I have no fucking idea who they are and what they do but their demo is rad. You just have to be happy and with punk around you it’s not that difficult.

I was also rereading layla’s review of my zine. And it made me wonder back to those times when I did it. Also to times when she was writing columns which she should do again. And for fuck sake I should finish my fanzines and I should finish my scene report and sort out pictures for the interviews I made and finish this column. I have started working as an unpaid intern for a news site which is cool I guess. I have never wanted to be a journalist because I know I have no intention to keep a proper word order and I could not give a flying fuck about gramer. But I do like to write and I do hate the government and assholes who I can just in a micro way piss off and it’s just so cool. The first time I had to call around government offices to fact check something about corruption in a district and it turned out those pigs are dirty as shit I was just so happy that I could be the part of busting the balls of those assholes. I always thought having a job is not important. I mean what you work shouldn’t be the most important thing in your life. But for the first time doing something daily for 8 hours what I like to do and in a way feel capable to do it, it’s just really rewarding. 

Ah fuck, I’m out of step with the world. I barely listen to any new bands which I really should cause I want to but I’m lazy as shit too with reading books and watching movies. I can’t remember when was the last time I cooked something that is a meal not just fried eggs or a cheese sandwhich with mushrooms. But I eat out a lot. Who cares? When did food become the new rock and roll? The new Svenonious book on rock and roll and mostly on life is really worth reading. I think I seriously did not listen to any music last month. But we recorded a new demo that will be out on vinyl. I rode a bike drunk for long hours and after that I have slept in a Christian dorm’s chapel almost naked with one hand in a glass of booze. I did not piss myself. I was at a garden party and a seventeen year old girl told me to fuck off in a punk way because my band covered a lame song at one of our shows out of a joke. But how cool is this teen girls being punk and telling old farts like I’m to fuck off. I just did mushroom alone while my friends were sitting around me and it was so weird to talk about people breaking their edge. Who gives a fuck? It’s not about burning out, I respect all my friends who are still straight edge but for fuck sake there are things in life that is still punk but matters a lot more. At the end Marx wasn’t a Marxist so please realize forced ideologies are killing us. I should force some fucking counter culture on me cause I’m being afraid I will become lazy and boring.

#364

Thank whatever higher power for being kicked in the face at shows or falling on the floor with my face enough times to have a nose that is completely useless except for serving as a target of anti-Semites and making me unable to smell the punk life that should be circling in my room right now. This is written from a worn out bed among possibly stinky sheets. And the ride has not ended. This week I had three bands in my flat on two nights and shit has happened. Now I’m listening to my gifted Wipers lp through my headphone and getting paranoid as the caffeine is sneaking out from me and my good night beer kicks in. Will grill some mushrooms for a cheese sandwich later. Gosh I ordered some ‘shrums. Future tripping. Also jamming Kinks, the early recordings. And Gas Rag as yesterday I was in a wild van that was cruizin around my town looking for the right bar and blasting this particular band’s demo, full with punx singing along and spilling shit on each other. I still think every single day that Gun Outfit’s new album is the best thing ever, their totally dreamy music is for those who will sleep when they are dead and stay awesome while alive and awake. I’m gonna lay down in the grass and let the sky suck me in while I blast this from a broken stereo. It is meant to connect you with things beyond objects and time. Why are things that are damaged able to tell the truth in a better way? I just wanna eat pizza in my bed, beat the shit out from my computer in chess and surround myself with art. Other people’s art. Whatever. I started to appreciate architecture since last Saturday when I had to spend some time in a dystopian-failed-futuristic, now-rotting-in-it’s-own-shit train station in my country and was watching neo nazi skinheads drinking beer in a happy way while I was just wondering about my glory days spent in the Rat / Xerox van while yeah, I was listening to Gun Outfit. I love music, and I can’t believe how good it is. The whole thing. All the bands. The feeling that it’s not certain. It’s not what you see, it’s not what the story should be. It’s only noise that resonates in your head and the rest is up to you. I love The Pin Group with their spooky, gloomy, wonderfully strange sound which might be familiar to you if you have ever had strange thoughts like still finding warmth on a cancelled beach day, or The Packs with their mellow power of bright darkness, Krakdown, Psycich TV single collections with the greatest lover of all time. Genesis P Ordige is a weird human and I hate myself for having stucked to the attitude and rather playing a show with my band than seeing him perform on PTV3’s final tour in my town. I’m so obsessed with that The Fall song Barmy that I wish Mark E Smith would have taken an E when they played the Hacienda. And listening to Siege, DYS and New Order till the sun comes up. Or getting high every night for a week via my pipe and watch early videos of Meat Puppets, Die Kreuzen and Das Damen for endless hours. I should finish my zines. And my short stories. People, do your shit and be better than me. I wanna listen to bands that start with a C. Sometimes I want to do so many things that I end up doing nothing but thinking on how I could watch movies and listen to music at the same time. I love music that sounds like puking at 4 am and I like fanzines that read like they were written in one night and their authors just created another universe on their pages. I have been to so many good shows lately. And I saw My Bloody Valentine and When You Sleep is still better than almost anything else. Like a wake up kiss from a deep sleep. Music for the dreamers. These sounds are like secret visions going on in your head that they surprisingly seem to know about, at the concert they sounded like the 90s, the whole decade, which was, by the way, so weird and emotionally exhausting that at one point I felt like something will just end. I feel this nowadays very often,too. Doomsday or finally heaven? Will find out.

Kriegshog is cool. I love hardcore that is not hardcore. Or not played by either mentally or physically healthy people. I just want that over-the-edge madness to be the hard in the core not just replaced by studio production and tuning down. I love that Japanese bands can’t really speak English still they are obsessed with writing lyrics in English and thus use their lyrics and the language as another instrument. Still there is that amazing frustration coming through their words from the singers’ throats. So Good. Zyanose is super sick.

Bands we booked in the recent past: Divided Minds, Black Gust, Creem, Nuclear Spring, Sickoids, Rank / Xerox, Rat Columns. The Divided Minds, Black Gust show got cancelled if you can call no electricity in a club a cancellation, so we replaced the gig to our rehearsal room. Hordes of drunk punks showed up from nowhere and were dancing wild with their skateboards in the fucking filth. The show was great, noisy and everything. Balkan desperation at its best. Leather jackets, patch distros. Black Gust is all the filth you can summon from your collection of kdb hardcore bands. As if germs were born into Zagreb, fed on glue. Chronic Sick with nice people, who after all still puke into your parents’ bed. Especially live, mostly in a dirty rehearsal room. Divided Minds is also hardcore but more from the Beach Blvrd era: stoned, pure raging, with lightly distorted guitars and controlled rage, very weird and powerful.

The day after this show my band and local noise makers CHAPPA'AI played a flat show in a city central house’s third floor. No neighbors, no cops. Sick shows, weird crowd, no punks but at least a girl came in a black flag shirt. People said that while singing I looked as if I could kill someone. Sorry I just have emotions. I was only paranoid that the floor will collapse and we will fell into another resident’s flat from the ceiling.

Creem and Nuclear spring were amazing. The show was tight, even some Hassid guy came down to be a pogo monster and kick up everybody in pit. But they are amazing as people too. You wouldn’t expect a hardcore band say siiick on your Hegel book and quote randomly Slavoj Zizek but they did and were just really cool people. Sickoids also, what a band, what a humble, quiet, awkward but lovely group of individuals who can do a massive and loud destruction when playing their desperate punk hymns. Awkward raging. At one point they just got so drunk that when we went out for cruzin and boozing with them we even sent a picture of our balls to the compound.

I have three bands now. There‘s lots of work, things are overdue all the time and my ears started to ring. But I have written a song that is just a very dumb psychedelic menace oi-core, so funny I was wearing a second hand fred perry shirt. I practice songs at nights and I only drink coffee on rehearsals.

Now I’m chugging beers but it’s a Sunday. And blasting Bad Brains. I should make a tape. You should make a scene. Or just stay up late enough so that your brain starts to process by itself. I feel like I’m losing my edge. I swear I haven’t listened to Crass in months but day by day I just see less point in all of this. How we go and play along with this punch line-less comedy, measuring ourselves and putting price tags on everything we do. But everybody can do almost anything if they are not totally stupid. There is money that is going in circles and seriously it is just given around and there you go, join your circle or shut up. Bow your head to the bullshit. I think I just wanna be happy and that’s all. Many times I envy people and more times I envy them for things I don’t even want. To be honest what I want is just to feel safe and be able to say no. So first I should feel safe, then I should be asked and then I could say no.

These are all just random thoughts typed out from a damaged brain through several 10 minutes of permanent midnights. Feelings. Nowadays I’m obsessed with record reviews. Ones that tell stories, situations, circumstances. There is music that captures a scene, a landscape, a mood and those couldn’t be sweated down to be described as simple songs played by musicians with instruments. These noises that surround music couldn’t be learnt to be fabricated. It’s on the dirt of the pants the bands are wearing, the glue that they are puking out while singing, the desperation they are carrying around even after leaving their rooms. We can hear and understand these, feel them. Not knowing them fully but just being sure that yeah I got it. Some things are just hard to transcribe. These are when you wanna punch something but don’t know what and why, you just shake your hands in happy delusion. And you wanna do things, wanna escape from something to be in the light, just spin around and cry while you are laughing. While real life shouldn’t mean that much to us. We rather roll around in sauna-like vans and talk about silly youtube videos and unknown records or are trapped in stoned daze in a strange kitchen / backstage discussing telepathy and fate or dumb hardcore singers and shell shock rock bands. Listening to kraut rock and paranoid wave, ndw feel. Soviet sounds. Music that was composed on soulful computers bleeping the binary sadness of modern life. I think Rank / Xerox is the best band ever, they are violent and collapsing while it feels all the time they are keeping the control, and even though they are some of the nicest people I have met there is something very outsider in them especially when they perform. Purely amazing and universal. I will interview them so you could be disciplined too. Do you know that feeling when a band is playing and it just feels like they are not just understanding whatever you are going through but they also made a soundtrack for it? So it feels like you understand them and thus you and the band are just one and then it becomes a huge US. Now I feel lucky, now I feel that life sometimes is amazing. I have read one sentence in their van and I’m gonna leave you with that: Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! – Nabokov.

fuck fact-core!

# 363

If I think about what is the essence of MRR for me I have to say it’s a 16 year old punker interviewing Kathleen Hanna or reading about Complicité Candied on the first when they made it to the first place in one of the ex coordinators’ top ten of decade zerozero list. I live one country away from the Czech Republic and have never heard of this band. Still it states that if you do something what is really good you will be recognized.
It’s a lie to say we are all equal in punk cause for sure if you are in a crust band your chances are higher to be recognized if you are hailing from Scandinavia or Japan. If your scene is on fire you will be in spotlight too and for sure bands will get more attention who are from western countries, have better economy, more established roots in punk history etc. This is just obvious, for nothing else they can get more money even for shitty jobs, so they can have better equipments with what they could sound better or at least have a specific sound. They can tour more thus be a tighter band and it matters if you can say “fuck it, rock and roll, whatever” and be just cool.

While bands from poorer or disadvantaged countries have to prove themselves and many times these turn into struggle that sounds awful. This is the sad truth but luckily here is this magazine with amazing people behind it. I’m not behind this magazine as much as I’m sad to be in the position of the forgotten from birth but I also mostly keep my focus on bands that has born with those advantages I have listed above. So why should I blame anyone if I could be stoned too? But I also have this idea that there are things what are just that good that they are irresistible no matter where they come from.

I really believe in songs and people and whatever else their cultural outputs are in a similar way as it was in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey where there was some higher power in people’s work that united everybody and brought utopia for the whole world. I truly believe in this that one day it will happen or if not we should strive to try to get it out from ourselves even if we die at one point of the process. This way all the beaten and forgotten and misfortune will find their way to rise up.

The reason why I love this zine is because it gives opportunity to people to be able to present their lives to the world. I think even I’m a good example for that cause, believe me, most of the people who see me wouldn’t even think that I’m being published in an international magazine and been read by others from all around the world. While I’m no different from you.

And I love that the people running this magazine are people who step out from this spotlight every day. They hide behind shitty jobs and don’t rush themselves to grow up. I just heard that people think I’m wasting my time with hanging with younger folks who mostly act like junkies and with setting up shows and why I don’t wanna grow up. Well the truth is even I get depressed sometimes of thinking I will at one point realize I was wasting my time with avoiding real life and now it’s too late and all I will have is to pine over my so called hey days spent with being a teen in my twenties and thirties.

But couple days ago while leaving my bathroom I looked into the mirror and found my reflection smiling back at me. I saw a man with a smile of a kid who still loves things that are meant nothing for the rest of the world and I want to keep that smile on that specific face. And it is just so fucking sad that people in punk are thinking I’m a deadbeat because I’m still a punk. What else should I be? I still love to do punk things, be among punx and to keep my punk attitude. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t order a fucking meal at a restaurant properly or deal with adult shit. Not growing up doesn’t mean I have to stay dumb or a useless child. Being punk and living a diy life means you are providing and doing an extra, smarter job to avoid selling out your soul without a safety net under your ass. Thus maybe we don’t ride jet skis as hobby but we spend that extra money which we never earn on not giving up our conscience. On that smile that shins back to you from the mirror.

Maybe I wear the cloths I do cause I like them. Not because these are the only ones I could afford or because I don’t care about the holes and rips and torns. I just like it this way. I love my denim jacket and I love that my friend made me a Dead Moon and D-Clone patch. My pin with the back cover of the salad days 7” and my tote bag with the cover of in a car 7” which was a gift from an amazing person. This is still a fanzine run by our common and mutual love for something that is still a threat otherwise there wouldn’t be people always everyday dying to prove it’s dead or we should grow up. Fuck the haters.

***

Skateboarding

Spring had been lost, here’s the summer. Mix tapes in my brain and denim jackets are covered with pins. Bars could go fuck themselves with their stupid law of smoking is forbidden inside and you can fall asleep at island cause you won’t freeze to death. Drunk hike through hills in the morning and trying to walk on water cause it’s a river and it will take me home quicker while I only need to stand still. Moving ground. Don’t tell me jesus was better than any of us. Fuck the hippies, always anyway. Punks have two official sports but one is just for transportation. I would love to ride a bike but I’m afraid of dying too much and I have pretty bad reflexes so city biking is out for me.

Skating for fun. For me skateboarding is the only punk sport and I swear this is not a fat wreck advertisement from the ‘90s.The two things (punk and skating) are so similar for me the simple joy and basic situation of being that annoying weird outcast, that person who still hasn’t cared too much of not being awkward. Mark Gonzales says in one interview with him that sometimes people look on the fact that he still does skate as if they were asking him “are you still playing with yoyo?” They don’t know. They have no idea how is it just to cruise around and sometimes reach higher than you can and try to Ollie up a curb and actually succeed with it and feel unstoppable. How much pleasure could that be. Just to be in the streets to always do something.

Skating is like you are constantly on tour with your favorite band. That band is you, yourself. You roll through life, the air is bursting into your face and you smile like a dog. You make noise, you move, you are in the street, you are part of everything and everything is an opportunity that you can use to have fun or express yourself which is basically fucking shit up that your stupid city built to cover the stupid reality and make tourists’ life a bit less boring. Still it’s up to you to decide what to do with what. And like with punk it’s just part of everyday enjoyment. It never gets old or you don’t go bored doing it. It’s beautiful like the poetry of the body and movements and speed and danger. The constant risk of falling.
It’s full with breaking boundaries and inventions, this thing was not built so people could flip down 12 stairs but somehow people didn’t give a fuck again about what they are supposed or not supposed to do and since then it’s just the magic that’s happening. And while people are almost killing themselves to deliver their stunts even folks rotting in parking lots skating around boom boxes on acid are sharing the joy of this amazing piece of wood and iron and rubber wheels.

***

punk as college

I have a business school degree. Won’t tell in which field cause it’s kinda embarrassing. I don’t wanna get fired from here but it’s almost that bad as if I were an intern for Vice. But sure the school taught me how to think like a manager. Business brain and shit. It helped me a lot. Being in bands since 16 with older guys (some were/are 10 years older than me) always meant I was the kid. In many cases I would have been the little guy patterned by my older brothers. But in reality while the other guys had their works, colleges and other shits I mostly just had free time. So I was mostly responsible to handle all the work with band stuffs. I was doing the mail orders, I was negotiating with printers, screeners, was sending out records to zines, booked shows, tours, manufactured records, while I was publishing and distributing my own zine and with the help of the college I could always realize how I could do things in a more logical, easier and better way. I’m operating things successfully without contracts just based on mutual trust, I have achieved all my dreams in my hobby which is punk. No wait, punk is my life, my love, punk love and thanks to education I could use some professionalism in doing my diy the best.

I don’t know any grammar, have speech impediment and a neurotic as much as I order pizza through internet cause I hate to phone. Still I write, I speak, I run shit and eat pizza every day. Punk is the best thing that has ever happened to me and sure it’s a hard job as well to convince people in the real world the things you have done under the ground are useful in their world as well, but just at a job interview for a multinational company many of the questions I got was about how I work in teams. Well for 10 plus years I do nothing else daily but try to be successful with other people in the things we do. Without a safety net. I have learnt from how a magazine is been published through how shirts are screened to how cut a tape into length at home and many other things too. Managing skills and shit.

What do you think people who run this magazine couldn’t be useful in a business environment? Punk is fucking nothing but problem solving and hardcore management. With the weirdest people who are sometimes the least motivated, very flakey and still we are here and everything is mostly alright. And if every idiot could do the work what punks are doing the world would be a better place.

This does not mean I wasn’t lucky. I was a bit but I had to work a lot before I could be lucky. It’s like maybe luck could lead you into circumstances you always wished to be in but when you have arrived then you’ll have to prove yourself if you don’t wanna fall out of luck. Also, never think that this hard work is just something that must be done. It’s fun when you are spending your nights and days and thoughts on your own shit cause this is what you are. Don’t be afraid to do things in the best possible way but keep in mind diy is the best possible way. Basically this all is just avoiding failing and believe me if you care you will succeed.

#362

I’m listening to so much good new music and new music that suits my state of mind nowadays that I  can hardly think about topics that would be worth to discuss here. Thus being smart or decide for you how to do punk is out of the game. No meaning, just nerding. Awkward raging but that isn’t true either. I feel like I have disappeared from my social life - still I was there when a friend of mine almost beat up some hip hop dj at 4 am with whom i I was smoking weed in the back of a bar - and think that everyone is having the blue around me. Truth is, I’m the only one who’s having hard times which in my mind are harder than in actual reality but total apocalypse hanging as a lure in front of me in my one-competitor dog race might indicate some radical changes about the way I survive life. Anyway this should be about music because hearing sounds are still the best thing in life. It’s sometimes funny. That how people think about you just because you could be the one to think about. I was listening to an Ian MacKaye Q&A and he said it’s really depressing and stupid what has happened to straight edge. It was his thing, it was a personal lyrics and now it’s a good excuse for people to call me and my friends drug addict fucking faggots. Dude you should try weed with beer and then tell me that it’s easy not to get at least half naked and make out with your best buddies. I find it funny how serious some people take our circle of friends aka the defekt scene just because I have written about it couple years ago here in the magazine. While it was just a personal report on Hungarian punk that I liked back thenFor some it’s sealed in cement ever since because this is bible. Like how shocked people are when I don’t know some legendary, musician, song, or band. Yeah I don’t know everything. First of all because I have a strangely functioning memory, second: when I’m listening to music I focus on  enjoying it rather than to learn it. For me it doesn’t matter when it was recorded, by whom neither what color of shirt was the producer wearing and in what type of chair he was pressing buttons and turning potmeters. Why should I give a fuck? I love how humans’ brains work that they are obsessed with information but why the fuck does it matter? For me it is just if I could connect to the music emotionally or not. That’s why I just said new music for my state of mind because I’m listening to lots of music that I have already owned or known about but lately I approach some of them differently  to how I did before. And this is how I like it. I don’t care about facts or trivias I love them when I care enough to memorise them but they won’t make music better to me. Shirts on the lp cover’s might but not the back information. I would fucking hate CIRCUS LUPUS if I knew Joan Jett was the producer for one of their records. I hate fucking rock and roll, that’s the last thing I wanna love. Alright I love the fact that Hüsker Dü was doing backing vocals on the first DYS record but for me this is when life becomes a mixtape. Some people just cram all the informations that are available into their heads and others just try to understand the basics of the subject. It is like how acting works. In some movies you see people play a character while in the best movies you see people being filmed, who by the way are actors. There’s a difference between transforming into another person or just acting in a role. So for me the best bands are not just playing songs because they have learnt notes and figured out how three tunes fit together but because they play themselves, they have something that could be told through instruments or through screaming like a baby. And I can enjoy the fact that Crass put out Minor Threat in the UK but mostly because I love both bands and adore their connection even if their music sounds different. But I only have vague ideas about the exact date of this release cause does it really matter? It’s just their music that sounds different, not what and how they do it. It could be called pear or could be called apple what matters at the end is how they taste. And I have no idea what color that girl’s eyes were I just remember how I felt when I looked into them. Quoting Modern Lovers here it’s that power that matters. I’m in love with that.

There are just too many things in life that I wanna do in a really short time. To mash everything together and have that elevated fun. I have this will to do basic stuffs. Like write again a zine about music and about how fun is it to fall in love with bands or just one of their songs. I wanna go down to a rehearsal room and jam with a drummer with me playing guitars blasting out simply raw hardcore songs. Like Faith demos, mixed with no wave New York falling apart shit, with Beach Blvd total drugged up youth drying dead on the sun, entertaining nihilism. I listened to the first Mika Miko lp and that sounded like this. While it’s just simple noise made by awesome people. This is it what I’m looking for, complex things in simple cases. I want people to play power chords the way I can hear through their shredding that they love million bands and still they have found their peace in playing infinite adolescent punk songs. I want to listen to bands that sound like bootlegged Neos shirts or reading coffee stained novels after midnight in your bed but in a coat. I want this collapsing cottage to be my shelter. I wanna disappear and live forever as a footnote. If anything being a fan of punk music made me, is a recluse, but I love this solitude. It has become fun to act for the outsiders like I don’t have a life, I don’t have thoughts or things I like just so I don’t have to blow my cover of being a fan of crazy damaged music and radical ideas of surviving life. Or living it. Nowadays I’m getting confused by it. But I have high hopes. Cause as how it happened with music I believe that there’s gonna be a point where the stone wall of bullshit will just break and through it’s cracks the real things will come out. Some guy called me up if I want insurance for the flat I live in and I told him no, and as a reply for his question why? I told him because I live like a 16 years old. He then asked me to hand the phone to my parents but I corrected him. I’m not 16 I just live like one. And it felt good just to blow my cover to rise above the bullshit. To tell him how all this game will go but I won’t be a part of it. This is what I look for in music as well to stop the bullshit, to be brave enough to be freaks. I’m jamming Finnish spunk and Fall and weird post hardcore punk records like Middle Class’ Homeland lately. I’m siked for the new Sickoids record and will be amazing to have them here in Budapest, get drunk with them. Good Throb is my jam, so Crass-like but more concrete of what they are angry about. Crass is articulated for sure but they sounded like they are playing music for the whole world while Good Throb is yelling against assholes. Also avant-garde-ish bands like Pink Military or Raincoats. The whole world is a mixtape if I have enough space for everything to fade into each other. And the worst fucking shit happened: I started to listen to some jazz musicians but even though they are technically more advanced than the punk players, I love, in a way how this chaotic „we play against each other, we play what we want, we play ourselves with instruments” method could click with the total teenage angst music that is the kick drum for my heart. But don’t believe it’s progression. I still don’t like it that I can appreciate some crazy tunes and I mostly love it’s benefit to get my focus improved when I look on my music. Maybe it’s a better thing to be open to new tunes or realize their greatness than learn all the useless infos about bands you should love. Fuck everything that is mandatory.

So many great records have come out lately, this means 2013 will be a joy ride of a year of listening to punk and used-to-hang-out–with-punx-but-now-rather-have-buddies-as-pr agents bands. Even if I think Church Whip’s excuse for naming their tour what they had, and while I hate it when people just shrug their shoulders when it comes to people might get offended and hurt – for real I even hate bands being named after rapists, murders and criminals - I also think stating that something stupid over a whole coast is like when you say fuck everybody, that’s a usual but still stupid punk sentence while saying fuck a specific group of everybody is just as dumb as racism. So on one hand I think what they got, they have deserved it. Open a bottle and don’t be surprised when something might spill out. I also think that the new Merchandise lp is just soo good and dreamy it starts to grow on me. Hope they won’t be lived up by shit culture. I just recently saw The Men and it was sad as fuck. A band that used to be interesting with mixing almost everything that is good in guitar music has become a band that plays alt rock country bullshit, American dream in Dylan shirts and just a band who plays a type of music or tries to keep up with a trend not creating their own sound. They played for mid level managers and for people who drank their cocktails with straws. Maybe it was just me who was enchanted for no reason from the start but at least I have woken up. New Milk Music is mellow as well but cool too. Even if it’s a bit more rockish and mostly stays on mid tempo rather than how raw and more straight ahead they were on their previous records. Even if I suspect some tricks I can indulge myself in this living for the moment cause everything else is shit but „hey, I still got some pot and dumpster dived pizza so let’s party” sound. They are not doing something new or original still it seemed people were hungry for their full lenght lp. And I could no longer say it was anticipated because finally the music was played again by whom noise should be played. They toured Europe with a fucking plane. They are not making anything new still it’s refreshing to have a band this simple. They don’t lie about  their music, it sounds like the lp cover for Beyond Living. Total nihilism. It’s for you to make you swing your hair around the room. I’ve heard lots of lame things about them but I’m not innocent either. Is there a better proof of that your band is playing awesome music than having a really stupid name as Milk Music still no one cares about it’s goofiness really? They sound like artificial nostalgia. They create long time sweet memories of events that you only wish have happened. And here they are with their grand work, a perfected rock record that sounds like a dream of a pot head locked into his room with the will to write songs about his whole world which is basically his room. It sounds like late night music for those who worked the whole day or haven’t worked for ages. They have lost their rawness but they seem to stretch out as far as they wanted and luckily not further. It’s just a great rock record that still carries some of the dirt of their past. No, Nothing, My shelter sounds like the never ending story sequel where that boy flies with the dog what looks like a rug. Here’s also the new Gun Outfit. Which is amazing for sure. I was raving about that band here before and they still have it or have it even more. Making epic soundtrack for the spoiled american dream, of how the sun forms all of us, it really sounds like people in confusion among doing something and there is that creative power that gets us out of bed but also that fear of failure in the real world. So imagination creates this shield that is a moment of fragile innocence. Hard Skin always as fun as hell but catchy as hell, like if they have figured out the right formula to write amazing oi songs by listening to decade of amazing punk. Just perfect and everybody was right that there are too many bands whose name start with S, lately I’m nerding out on total hardcore trash of Society Nurses and Stoic Violence. And these are just the new records. I just love everything that is filth and failure based punk music. And I ran out of space.  

this column was edited by the amazing Dori Radics who is a hairdresser on fire in London. Go visit her: The Rabbit Hole - Vegan Hair Parlour