# 352

Sickoids you are living all over me. I saw you twice and thought it’s great. I even did some john-cleese-losing-his-shit type of dance moves in a pit during your set to receive a beer shower. But fuck, how could you write such a record? Alright it’s obvious. In my head. That it’s Mecht Mensch with Hüsker Dü. But fuck this is just brilliant. Total sonic destruction happening while the sounds are doing a lovely waltz on a distortion landmine field. So good. Desperately beautiful and uncontrollably angry. The rhythm and all those harsh melodies. Manic and unstoppable restlessness which actually sounds sweet. Like consumer music if you are selling counter living. Should have grabbed an lp and wear a pin as an insignia of loving awesome music. Those all of a sudden guitar slayings which are totally out of place but still perfectly fitting to the mindset of confused people embracing their inner fire to be against this world what doesn’t make anything easy for us in ways of living here.
But we have records at least. I already mentioned Hüsker Dü and Mecht Mensch. And nowadays there are only few things what are better than reading after midnight and listening to my husker dü lps on my headphones in my bed, tired and lonely but still in a volume that is replacing some kind of stimulant. Beautiful collages of broken hearts, broken amps and amphetamine. Knowing that I deserve more and waiting for someone to enter my world. There are so many things out there and maybe I will discover a few with my headphones on, wondering around all alone. Sonic blown out perfectness like if beach boys were a cult’s house band for angry people with big hearts. Sunset music for those who don’t believe in the sun.
You don’t really sense it, cause I don’t write like a fat person but I have a big belly and a swollen face and I move slow and I like eating. And what is weird about eating is I guess most of us taste food in a different way. Not every food, but our tongues are different that’s why making out is fun or just interesting. But I think we hear things different as well so It’s not a big surprise that we interact with our ears in a romantic way as well.
And for me music is sometimes so close to food. It is made by people for people, like ethnic food, which is best when prepared by natives. Like punk, who doesn’t feel it can’t make it just reproduce it. It’s totally up to your taste and most of the times the more you chew the more you can discover. I had such relevant revelations when I was listening to the second blitz lp eating some sandwiches and there was one song where the guitars were just so aggressively beautiful and so distant from everything else while they fit perfectly to the whole song.
Forgot which song was it and maybe I will never find again that feeling but I guess that’s the point in finding a feeling in specific times of the nights and remember it for a long time when it was only me and a sound from decades ago. That moment made me realize there is always more layers in music. I mean, I already knew that but that’s good as well in punk as in being a fan that you feel like you are a baby. Sometimes bands sound like I hear them for the first time, or I just hear music for the first time. The music that finally fits me.
And what I like the most is my head being a mixtape and bands’ complete albums are the tracks on it. During the beginning of summer I love to listen to super wild horses, brilliant colors, Grass Widow and the new Broken Water lp. With all those dreamy guitars and voices from a secret cooler world. I always wondered about listening to these bands while riding my bike but I live on a hill and I’m fat (as I already told you) so I rather spare myself from the torturous biking part. These bands are like cruising with skateboards in a gang or just with another person you will might kiss if you fall together.
I remember when Grass Widow played here I was telling the bassist and their roadie that I’m incapable of listening to the Nerves cause those songs are so viciously true they make me cry and be angry on people who don’t love me. Gosh I want to listen to Nerves again but as I said, I can’t. The new Grass Widow record is so beautiful. I can imagine that when all the people who go to operas in fancy clothes will die out and those theatre buildings will be deserted we will go to there and occupy them  and listen to such beautiful music as internal logic with grey hairs and bended backs wearing band t-shirts, balancing by canes. Not to say this is music for the older and pretentiously sophisticated pack but it’s an another levels of perfect harmonies. Yes, it still is underground music, played by people with tattoos and sunglasses for people who wear  junk food-stained shorts even at opera houses.
Brilliant Colors is just so cool. Since I’m back at home and waiting for the sun to warm up the nearest lake I listen to brilliant colors and imagine myself back on the beach of the Pacific Ocean walking barefoot among rotting crabs in excruciatingly cold salty water, wearing my trench coat and mumbling Morrissey songs in my head. They make me spend my weekends with things that are of meaning . Like making flyers for upcoming shows, or just try to be collaborative with amazing people. So raw, thus viscerally cool and fresh like they play these songs for the first time and they work instantly. As good as novels which feel to be written in one night. There is some kind of melancholia in Brilliant Colors which always makes them sound they just don’t give that much fuck about feeling crap. They have instruments, the ocean and themselves to have fun. I wish I had seen them.
All these bands are as beautiful as the weeping guitar sounds of Born Against’s Shroud and Universal Order of Armageddon’s Mud. Two bands’ two brilliant songs I’m constantly jamming these days while exploring my inner thoughts while wondering through this dirty city where I live. One of such inner thoughts I dug up is we just have to listen to guitars a bit more. Or to all the instruments. To find something perfect. Sounds what are telling us something.
Few weeks ago i went to a no-idea-what-genre show but it was supposed to be connected to punk in an alright-why-not-to way. and they really could play their guitars but that was the only thing that they were telling me. Their talent and technical skills. I felt worse than I did during the two years of government of our dictatorial ruling party. It was this terrible and nonsense pointless musician jerking off.
For me, music is about putting yourself rather than your skills into your chords. This way it matters who you are not what are you capable of. Guess what, everybody is capable of anything.
Like with this new Broken Water lp it’s obviously a weeded out Sonic Youth fandom. But there's also something much more as well. They sound more like people who grow up smoking pot and listening to early Sonic Youth than a band who wants to make it with slacking. These people are like us and we don’t want to make it. We just need music to represent the goodness in moments.
Broken water is what I feel when I stroll around on empty beaches after mowing the lawn at my parent’s weekend house, drinking warmed up beer and watching the wind surfers eating shit. I feel that my job sucks, I don’t really make any money but right now I’m supposed to be happy and relaxed because I'm here on the beach. But the beach is empty because everybody is at work and that makes me feel that my life sucks even more. They are adults and I’m just a dude balancing on a fucked up curb like a free kid. I know I shouldn’t be like that but what will happen if I stay to be that for a little bit more? This is how broken water sounds to me. It feels like there is something they are holding back, pace changings and heaviness. Like having fun while you should be serious. Staying in your bed and let your smile solve all your problems.
Back to the beginning Mecht Mensch is perfect. They are not just a band who you know that have influenced others but their music would stand out even nowadays. Without the context of time just in context of forever punk. They are just a band that is good because they are good. And I never really listen to bands because they are cool but not good. However, I play sudor sometimes with the image in my head of a show I’ve been once at and it was an amazing punk night and one of the guitar players was wearing a sudor shirt and it was just an irresistibly good look. Memories and fashion.
Anyways, mecht mensch is just a crazy good crazy hardcore band. With smart kids fucking being aware of their shit. Amazing. For some subconscious reasons I bumped into their acceptance ep. I already heard their split with Tar Babies but that time I didn’t pay that much attention as it would have deserved. But here it is again to save my hours spent in contempt. No rest, no relief, still it’s so much better than reality. It’s just another proof of how common anger relaxes us and makes us feel better about ourselves. The more they hate the more we love. Wire walking balance of guitars that could fall anytime but these guys know better than anyone that they won’t. Seems that they even risk some crazy voyages into sonic craziness but there is always that organized, well targeted hatred which keeps them in the safety of being righteously fucked up. So good. The whole music is a huge blast with the hectic drums and massive teen angst.
I have to listen to commercial radio at my workplace. I guess it's weird that most of the songs the radio is playing are supposed to be songs for having fun but almost all of them have a huge depressive, melancholic hint which makes me suppose that these hits will push people into the blue unconsciously. I know that ordinary people are happy to hear such tunes but it would make me depressed if that would be my only option. I bet it works vice versa but I like to cherish the idea that even bands like Mecht Mensch or Outpanties could be big hits for us, who make us party or feel more alive and connected.
Also, regular people think that they are alright so why do they want anything more from a songs than to break the silence? By demanding more from these songs they would admit that nothing is alright and even these sad songs make them feel a bit better. We know that everything is shit but their “everything” is nothing for us.
As always, it will become a bit better because we are making it better. We are embracing the beauty in tragedies and nonsense and creating something out of them that is just the best thing. To cut ourselves out from the shit. So make your noise in any forms girls and boys.


ps.: i wanna finish my long overdue fanzine which will be in english and also there will be an artsy-fartsy zine in english as well for which i provided sentences and one of my best friends did sick drawings. but if you are interested in my previous zine just hit me up and we will figure it out. Also, send me cool shit, because I’m as poor as I have to share a room with a 18 year old kid.

more columns about bad records and girls

I love music. Mostly because it’s done by people, and I hate music when I can’t feel people behind it just people in front of it. I hate music other occasions as well but the worst is when you only feel like it’s a service provided for a perfectly targeted and specific audience. Once I read a great line in a review about a band’s show that said the problem with them was that they wanted to seem like a band looking forward but rather they were just looking around for others’ reactions, whoring themselves for their attention. And for me this not only translates to shallow wannabe Dadaist no-wave bands but for all immoral, mainstream music in general.

I love music when its players are looking inside themselves and forgetting what’s right and what’s wrong and who will give what kind of shit. Nothing to prove, nothing to lose. But then I also just love when they are creating something unexpected, and this column will be mostly about awful records which I do not love, but I guess they still hold some higher meaning not only for punk but for life in general as well.

Because sometimes I really just love music and music itself, the whole thing. Not just some bands but sometimes every band. I don’t feel like bands have to have an agenda. They should be whatever they want to be and being boring is one of these things. I never want progress from bands. Maybe I’m a terrible music nerd ‘cause I never really can say who my favorite band is and which is my favorite record. I only know what my favorite song is currently. I knew what was my favorite band but I’m not so sure anymore. I just don’t see the point. I used to have a best friend but we have gone cold and I haven’t even talked to the guy for more than two years. Since then I have many people I love but could not put them in order cause I just don’t feel the need. They are just people who are interesting, understanding or just not fucking hard for me to stand. And music is the same to me if not better cause I guess sometimes I like my turntable better than people.

Sure, often I get floored by one band’s unique awesomeness, but other occasions I just listen to bands’ endless flow of rehearsal room demos recorded before they broke up and vanished forever, and just staying in my constant state of loving punk in general. I never desire “progress” from a band when I feel like they have reached the point where they are playing whatever they want to. I don’t want a punk band to end up sounding like Factory Records could have released them cause then I would just rather listen to someone that was born to play such music. I love when bands do progress and something cool comes out but I never have any problem with the Ramones-esque approach of playing and recording the same song over and over again for decades. All I want is bands to be themselves. They should die to tell me their stories and this attitude should trigger reviews like the legendary Sniffing Glue’s Clash one.

Music is interesting because it’s done by people and people are strange and fucked up and funny. I guess a bit it’s like love. Or relationships and break ups, finally-fulfilled love and the always-burning feeling of being afraid of ending up alone for the rest of our lives. When we find true love we just want to anchor it and sometimes we forget in a relationship there are at least two poles. So while being happy yourself, there might be someone on the other end who wants something different from you. That is when just you find true love and it doesn’t find you. But luckily while boyfriends/girlfriends (and by the same token, bands as well) can come and go, records can stick with us in their full glory. ‘Cause after all, records are memories that are better than photographs. The confusion comes when we can’t tell the difference between the past and present, we want to stick to bands we used to love, the partners we used to love.

So because there is this connection for me, I really hate fucking professionalism when it comes to making music, but also professionalism in the fan-dom of music—because if real life is always in flux and forcing us to adapt, so should our approach to loving music.

Maybe it comes from me being incapable of accepting culture as a rule—like somehow there is fine art and it’s opposite. I just think there are people who are expressing themselves and people who get it or not. I hate it when people go beyond being critics and start to act like fucking producers, managers or band members who know better and feel like they are in charge to make decisions. All those lame people complaining: “That band should have broken up after that record,” “They shouldn’t sound like this,” “Why do they keep doing this?”  Why do you keep doing this?

You know, while it might entertaining to treat bands like football teams and want them to come home with good results, it’s also a schizoid thing to do. I hate Bad Brains I Against I (and everything after) but why would I be disappointed in them fully? It’s definitely not good that they stopped making good music at one point and just turned into a boring proto nu-metal shit, but I can live with that cold fact. Maybe I won’t be the biggest fan of the upcoming Fucked Up records, but I can let them go and I’ll stick to Generation or even that song “Twice Born.” But sometimes bands just grow boring. And it’s in a way obvious. People like to play music and write new music but some genres have their own barriers in creativity. And some bands are fine with this. Or their listeners have barriers to being open ‘cause after all listening to music is not a duty—that’s why having limits to our attention is natural and to except otherwise is an unnatural snobbish thing to demand.

The end of the ‘80s were a perfect example of bands making it intentionally challenging to listen albums, while nowadays it’s more like bands breaking up and reforming in other genres and having million side projects. Now it’s the music that’s changing within punk and not the bands. Just take Johnny Moped or Swell Maps from the past and Home Blitz, Merchandise, the Young, the Men from the present. Bands who are rooted in punk but from the start trying to do something different. Nowadays if Saccharine Trust wanted to do a horrible jazz band, they’d do some spin-off project rather than keep playing with the same name.

I also don’t think a label like Matador “kills” good punk music ‘cause good punk music wouldn’t even be signed by a such label. No beef with them, but it’s not a punk label. I doubt that SSD really believed that they could be such big hard rock stars. I doubt that bands like Meat Puppets played such beautifully chaotic music that so perfectly represents teenage confusion only because that was all what they had at the time, and really deep down they wanted to be a mellowed out pothead country band that they are right now. Why would people wanna play terrible music if they got popular playing awesome music?

I just chalk up these “changes in direction” to total craziness. Getting into a bubble where you only care about yourself. When you allow yourself to be embarrassing and crazy. When you think you are the best or could just do anything, and not for money or for fame. It’s just that heart of darkness megalomaniac obsessive craziness. Like being in love when you open up way too much. Bad records are like other people’s love, or the things that make us feel like depressed, so you could say that from these records we can learn about them and ourselves as well—in general about human existence. Isn’t this the point of Into the Unknown?

Most of the time good punk bands’ terrible records are cheap copy-cats of a genre they wanna ape. And it doesn’t matter how good musicians they are cause mostly it’s about stepping forward and discovering what they are capable of. Into the Unknown. But these shit records are the perfect testimonies of their true punk heart and nothing more. Cause great music is rather played by enthusiasm than by hands. And a punk can’t play shitty music with enthusiasm. Cause punks are not assholes. We can’t betray our hearts! 

So these bad albums are not just total failures for not succeeding in a new territory but more because they are just boring as shit, but somehow with that awkward style like when a charming kid who is smart in kindergarten tries to talk to the adults. This is punk’s point, I think. We are who we are, and doing what we want cause we want it. Not because we are not ready or equipped enough.   

While these records are born in the bubble of total confidence of their makers, to us listeners it’s everything outside the bubble. It’s life and living. In these records there is happiness and sorrow and joy and boredom. And maybe punx are sometimes not too ready or equipped for these, cause “real life never meant too much for us,” right? These records are like the opening monologue of Annie Hall: the living proofs that sometimes temporary mentally illness is not a too harmful thing—for some of us. The rest of the listeners are dying out of disappointment, and their loyalty for eternal quality is amazing, but as I said they are stupid as well. Cuz it’s beautiful isn’t it? The whole thing: bands going crazy and either their fans following them into falling down and losing all their glory or being heart broken by that familiar betrayal of stopping to write awesome songs.


I mean, while the Wipers are one of the greatest bands ever, we all know that Greg Sage sucks in soloing, but he sticks to it!  On the other hand, straight edge bands starting to do coke and playing U2 music? 7 Seconds turning into soft rock shit and Dag Nasty being even worse?  The math rock, white jazz downfall of SST and the static, serious studio sound of infinite other bands. I don’t think anyone who loved Die Kreuzen Cows and Beer would have wanted a record like Century Days or Cement.

Maybe we should take more advice from Daniel Johnston when he is singing “I love you more than myself.” And while it’s one of the most heartbreaking sentences in the history of weird music, sometimes it’s also true. By accepting the border lines between bands and us, we can accept that they are doing something they want to. This doesn’t mean that we should support these acts with full heart. Just let them leave with a gentle smile and a warm hug for the amazing records they gave us while the only thing they were really doing was playing the music they loved to play.

I always looked on records as capturing a moment that the band wanted to capture—but only that moment. That’s why it’s hard to make a good record. ‘Cause sometimes the worst pictures taken are from the best parties. Or our coolest memories are connected to friends who later turned to assholes. But maybe bad records could make us love good records more. Love people more. To remind us to want to be forever in that moment when everything was fine.