Deathcharge-The Hangman 7" (2006)

If you read DrugPunk, you're probably aware that one of the latest crazes in underground rock is fusing punk, deathrock, goth, and all things -wave. The result is typically a blackclad stew of chugging Motorhead-inflected riffs, ice-cold synthesizers, and brooding lyrics about death, et.al. If you're new to the genre, today's post serves as an introduction to the sound; if you're a bitter old crank like myself, Deathcharge's third 7" is simply a classic and trendsetter for those of us who like The Mob or Bauhaus as much as GBH and the Germs.

Well, Deathcharge was way ahead of the curve on this whole trend. They started cranking out fairly pedestrian Discharge-carbon copy tunes in 1997, and along with fellow Pacific Northwest bands like The Spectres, Bellicose Minds, and Arctic Flowers, are the best that this darkpunk revival has to offer. They were doing D-beat when bands like Earth Crisis were still big, and when they dropped "The Hangman" in 2006, everyone else was busy aping the D-beat style they had already abandoned.

Anyways, this album really threw me for a loop when I first heard it in 2006. I was expecting more D-beat massacres; instead, what you get is a brutally monotonous drumbeat that is synced perfectly with a colossal guitar riff that chugs along at a glacial pace. The singer's voice is halfway to the grave; he alternately mumbles, gurgles, and howls in resigned disgust as he awaits the noose. Midway through, the guitar drops out and a voiceover whispers in the background; it makes the song that much more effective when the guitar comes squalling back to life. It ends abruptly, with a strangled grunt. "New Dark Age" is more of the same: a massive, doom-struck guitar riff that steamrollers the band along. The singer sounds like he's at the bottom of a well, or drowning: bitter, ugly, incoherent mumblings more than lyrics are what you get with Deathcharge. The guitar riffs in the bridge are to die for: wailing brutality that sounds like Motorhead slowed down and flattened out.

Like I said, if you're new to the dark side of punk, start with this. It's one of the best punk records of the last decade, easily. Souciant did a great survey article on this sorta music, which it's labelled "G-Beat,' which is well worth reading. Check out Deathcharge on facebook for show dates, tours, etc.

The Observers-Walk Alone EP (2004)

"It was midday and Eric was trying to remember how to get out of bed. At this point in time no one seemed to care whether he was human garbage or not, and it was just killing him."-Richard Price, Lush Life

I first heard the Observers when they played Chicago's Ice Factory back in 2005 with Clorox Girls, on the "So What's Left Now?" LP release tour. Even if they hadn't dropped that LP, this three-song EP would still cement The Observers' place as one of the best punk bands of the '00s for those who never got a chance to see them. From the twinkling guitar notes that open "Walk Alone" to the squalling instrumental mess that closes out "Slipping Away," there's not a flat moment or fake sentiment on this thing.

Musically, the Observers were one of the only bands of the period talented enough (i.e., they were song-writers as well as simple instrumentalists) to move beyond crude Wipers worship and develop the Greg Sage-inflected guitar sound in an original direction. The heavy bass lines, tucked away just behind the guitar on this EP, catch my ear now in a way they didn't when I first bought this EP back in 2007. But it's the guitar, for sure, that takes pride of place here:  in lockstep with the rhythm section, it sets the pace and shines, snaps, and cracks through the mix like a time-keeping whip.They're one of the only contemporary punk bands that have gotten compared to The Adverts, and that's apt: like Gaye and co., The Observers' songs always hovered on the edge of dissolving into arrhythmic chaos, and were all the better for it.

There are two basic schools of listening: those who give a shit about lyrics and words, and those who don't. Hyper-textual loser that I am, I've always been firmly in the former camp. I'm also a cynical, cranky old bastard on the best of days, so this EP quite accurately reflects my typical state of mind. To my mind, Doug wrote some of the best lyrics of recent years (and continues to do so, for the Red Dons ). "Walk Alone" is a succinct account of urban anomie and isolation: "walk these streets where I'm a stranger, seeking out new directions/lost and found..." As the chorus swells, the grinding frustration of wanting something different than the misery you're stuck in, but having no clue how to get that something different, bursts out: "Fear's what I've found/I'm in over my head/....I just want something different than what I'm feeling right now..." It's that line that's stuck with me since I first got this EP.

 "The Void" stands out because of the chanted vocals, while "Slipping Away" really displays the Adverts influence: the instruments are mixed in a muddy stew that emphasizes the near-clarity of the choruses. The song dissolves into a frantic, confusing swirl of guitar skronk and violently repetitive drumming. As far as I can tell (no lyric sheet in front of me), the song's about watching your dreams whirl down the drain as you get older: anyone in their mid- to late-twenties is familiar with that sentiment.

The Observers one of the very few bands that I loved when I was 18 that mean more to me as I get older than they did back then.

Anyway, this review is probably too long for those of you who come here for the download links, but The Observers fucking mattered, man. To me, anyway. And this is my blog, so you have to endure my obsessions and neuroses. Deal.

HERE. I think this EP is long out of print, but try dropping Jonny Cat Records a line on their facebook page and find out for yercelf. Four fifths of The Observers now play in Red Dons, a band who deserves your attention and money. They just dropped a new EP, go buy that.

*EDIT, 3.28.14: Re-up'd the file, you can now get it here.*

Lebenden Toten-Cataleptic Noise Contamination CS (2008)

The Fourth of July is one of the few annual occasions upon which I will post things political on Drug Punk-for my problems with the genre of anarchopunk, read this. I'm not fetishizing apolitical apathy, but rather tacitly acknowledging the inherent silliness of protest music. Anyway, enough blabbling; last year it was Tragedy's best record ever, this year it's a 2008 tour cassette from Portland's finest.

The tracks on here are nothing radically different from previous and future LT releases: savagely distorted dbeat misery, with contorted, frantic drumming and guitar that sounds like electrodes sparking just before they hit yr neuron receptors. Noise punk has been trendy lately, but Lebenden Toten is the only band that can hold their own against the originators of the genre like Disorder, Confuse, Gism et. al.: the band is incredibly tight (playing this fast is an art form unto itself), and there's nothing superfluous in any of the songs. Chanel's lyrics cover a variety of topics, but can be summed up pithily: late capitalist society is a cancerous body too atrophied to kill itself, and instead keeps itself going on the productive energies of us all. We built it, why don't we destroy it?

So throw this on, and melt yr brain on fireworks or distortiontildeafness, it's yr choice. I'm reblogging this from Robert's most excellent blog, Terminal Escape.

The Observers-So What's Left Now? LP (2005[?])

"I was a teenage zombie...." pt. 4 (in a semi-occasional series)

The following account may or may not be a conflation of two different events. Don't make no nevermind nohow, noways....

Mid-way through high school, I fell in like with a well-read (she knew of Burroughs!) girl from Chicago's south 'burbs. All I knew about the south 'burbs back then was that Screeching Weasel was from the general vicinity, so she musta been cool, right?

Naw, no dice. First time we did an all-day hang, we wandered around Chicago, so young and uncool, we couldn't even score street drugs. What a dismal situation...ended up making out by the river. Don't ask which one. We were stone sober. The next time we hung out, we went to the beach, then to some rich kid's house by the beach, where  I proceeded to get so bombed on downers and anti-depressants that this girl  made out with a friend of mine (I think...I was on A LOT of vicodin and xanies)for 15 minutes while I sat across from them, so wasted I couldn't move, let alone protest. My friend drove me home that night with the counsel of "dude, forget about it." Words of wisdom.

Awhile later, we were hanging out at a friend's house. Shit was ok...she wasn't making out with my friend, right? Wrong. We smoked a spliff, drank some wine...did some dancing, even! Washed Out, Okinawa Lifestyle, all that good shit! Talked about life, love, and other such hippy nonsense....by time we got to the bar, I was 2 grams and a bottle 'n' a half of wine into the evening. By the time she disappeared with a different friend, I was too wasted to do other than lean against the bar's wall, chain smoking and incoherently mumbling self-pitying garbage ("why does HE get to have her...but I don't?!?") to a friend who courageously heard me out. I vaguely remember passing out to Pink Reason blasting from my speakers at full volume, dreaming of Xanax. Hey you! Got some Xanax?

This is probably the best punk LP of the '00s. It has everything: heroin-level addictive hooks, brutally introspective-yet-social lyrics, jaunty bass lines....Fuck you! Like it!

*EDIT, 1.5.14: Re-up'd the LP, get it HERE.*

Lebenden Toten-Near Dark LP (2009) [or, Winter in America]

 *Edit, 12.23.12: Reup'd the file. Get it here. *

"Of course there is hope, all the hope in the world. Except not for us."-Kafka, ca. 1923

"it comes late at night/without warning/it's near dark..it's near dark"-Lebenden Toten, "Near Dark," 2009

So a decade ago the CIA engineered simultaneous attacks on "civilian" targets, and ~3,000 people died. Who gives a fuck. This is nowhere close to the ~500,000 children whose deaths the U.S.A. directly enabled via medical and food sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to ~2001.
  But I do give a fuck, if only because I have to live under the  consequences of this post-modern Reichstag fire. While things have become inestimably worse for Afghans and Iraqis, conditions in the USA since 9/11/01 have become unbearable, too. The gutting of what small welfare state existed in this country, pre-Ronald Reagan. The beginning and continuance of 2 full-scale (Afghanistan, Iraq) and many small-scale (Pakistan drones, Phillipines "counter-insurgency," the bin-Laden assassination) wars, the rise of a violently nihilistic, extreme-right wing party, the ascent of a corporate oligarchy. The knee-jerk, violent hatred of non-white immigrants. The planned assault on public education and the Supreme Court.
It's not that the U.S.A. was a great country before 9/11/01. But since all of my teenage-to-adult-life has been spent under the sign of the Twin Towers, this has become my frame of reference.

   So I bring you Lebenden Toten's Near Dark LP. Eleven years ago, I would have said that the ideas this LP expresses were conspiracy theories: a military-corporate dictatorship of the U.S.A.; the presidential elections as a reality TV show. All of this, a joke in 2000, is reality now. Personally, like Adorno, I still sometimes feel "...shame that there is oxygen to breathe in hell." But mostly I just don't care anymore.

Neo Boys-s/t 7" (1980)

Portland's been producing great punk bands since day one: the Wipers, the Rats, and the Neo Boys. Produced by the Wipers' mastermind Greg Sage, and released on his label, Trap, this EP is a forgotten classic of first wave U.S. punk.

Usually overshadowed by the aforementioned bands, Neo Boys definitely did not fit in with the nascent U.S. hardcore scene of the early 1980s: i the ladies of Neo Boys offered bouncy, oblique tunes closer to what these folks were up to than, say, Minor Threat or The Nihilistics.

"Never Comes Down" opens with a spritely, echoing surf guitar line accompanied by a hyperactive rhythm section that never slips into thrash. "Give Me the Message" might be the strongest of the three tracks, though-

I really like how the guitar chord punctuates the vocals, and it has a weirdly sunny beat. " The husky, slightly sneering  quality of Kim Kincaid's voice appears most clearly on "Rich Man's Dream."

God save the Queen.... This is available as a bootleg from Bowery Records, no idea where to get an original-EBay? Peeps this for a good history of Neo Boys, and some live footage. Fuck PDX stenchcore, this is the real deal, folks!

Arctic Flowers/Spectres split 7" (2010)

I don't listen to much anarchopunk these days. I like the politics, I like the music, but I fucking hate the scene. Living in Portland on and off for two years, being surrounded by black-clad trolls whose politics didn't really extend beyond yelling at people for eating meat, was almost enough to shift me to the Special Duties end of the Crass/Special Duties split(almost).

So I'm pretty out of the loop on the Northwest anarky scene that spawned this 7". Both bands have been around for awhile, though, and this is an enjoyable two-song split. Arctic Flowers goes in for bass-driven punk with somber, lecture-style vocals; Spectres moves more toward the glam rock end of the glam-rock/post-punk hybrid they've been mining every time I hear them. Crank it up and hum along and feel self-righteous if your Sunday is as grey as mine has been.

...is not what she seems!  Charged/Distorted Rex only pressed 500 copies, so the split's disappeared into the hands of EBay trolls by now, I'm sure. Neither band gets out of the Northwest much, I think, but peeps 'em if you're in my neck 'o' the woods!

*EDIT, 1.6.14: I re-up'd the file, get it HERE.*

Tragedy-Can We Call This Life? 7" EP (2001

I think it's Independence Day back home by now. The last time I was Stateside for the 4th, I got falling-down drunk and saw Tragedy for the first and only time, at a scuzzy, horribly over-crowded house show in Portland. Easily the best punk show I've been to in the past five years. So it's only right that I celebrate by posting this gem.
  Greil Marcus once said of The Clash's "Complete Control" that, after listening to it, you couldn't understand how anything could be the same in its wake. Well, I'd say the same about Tragedy's first three releases, but especially this one. The three songs here are a cumulative, crushing release of all the brooding, anguished violence that the first LP accumulated. This is the tipping point at which despair becomes all-annihilating action, and the agonized, dissonant torpor of the first album shifts onto the road leading to the remarkably melodic second LP, "Vengeance."
   Tragedy never sounded tighter, Todd and Paul never angrier or clearer on what is at stake, than here. The first two songs slowly build into the coruscating majesty of "The Ending Fight," with its truly ominous (the most over-used adjective in punk music writing of the '00s) drum-guitar build up to the transcendent catharsis of the bridge and finale.
   If I haven't scared you away with all those superlatives and polysyllabic adjectives, this EP is essential listening for anyone as disgusted as you should be, living in the USA in 2011, with the impoverished fight for survival we're forced to engage in every day. Ten years later, these songs haven't aged a day, and it's depressing that so few of us have heeded Tragedy's clarion call and, as Kevin Seconds put it thirty years ago, "Fuck your America, fight!"

When the beating of hearts has ceased. This went out of print almost immediately after hitting shelves. The three LPs are still in print, however-try Ebullition if you're a weirdo and don't already own at least one Tragedy record.