Black Sheep Squadron at the Westcott Community Center, Syracuse 2006

So it’s hardly a new concept, but for a long time myself, and occasionally others, were putting together an annual Halloween show that always occurred close to, or on, the holiday. Everyone would be encouraged to come in costume, bands would play, everyone would have a blast, and that …

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It should come as no great hurdle to do an interview with Matt Michel, guitarist for No Man. After all, I interviewed his old band Majority Rule before, they used to come and play my area at least two or three times a year without fail. Heck, I booked a bunch of those shows and he, along with the other members, became familiar friends that I was always happy to see. Additionally, No Man vocalist Maha Shami was more than likely present for at least some of those shows, as she frequently traveled with the band. But a lot of life has happened for everyone between those years. Majority Rule split up, there was a long period of time where I didn’t see any of them for several years, and then they did some reunion shows awhile back, and then No Man started. In that time members moved around to different parts of the country, Maha and Matt had a kid, Matt runs a studio, and No Man is about to release their fourth LP. There’s a lot of catching up to do. For the unfamiliar, No Man is all the members of Majority Rule with Maha as vocalist, and yet it sounds like a significantly different band. They make a very bold statement with their music in a way that is very uniquely personal, and they carry the torch of shows-as-community and family that I felt Majority Rule did so well, but in an even more welcoming fashion. Both Maha and Matt took some time after completing a West Coast tour to chat for a bit and bring me up to speed in the goings on of their world.

No Man feels like a band that started out as very part time, and very low-key, at least for the first couple albums. But it feels like in the last few years the band has been way more active, or at least visible.

MAHA: Well, Covid overlapped with the beginning of our band.

There’s that.

MATT: Majority Rule was still in the process of doing those reunion shows when we wrote the first No Man record. So Majority Rule was still doing stuff.

MAHA: Majority Rule did the reunion shows, which were awesome. And coming back from that everyone was excited about playing together. Having felt like an honorary member, and having travelled with them over the years in Majority Rule version 1.0, Matt and I had talked about doing music together. I had done some cameos with Majority Rule in the past so it was a sort of natural progression. We came back and Pat (Broderick, drums), Matt, and I…. was Kevin still in Europe?

MATT: Yeah, he may have been on tour with someone else, maybe Battery? So anyway, Pat stayed with us for a little while, and that’s when we first started writing songs.

MAHA: We still do what’s sort of just right in front of us. There’s never an intention of ‘part time’ versus ‘full time’. Here we are, about to put out our fourth record, and so some things have gained some momentum, and maybe over time more people hear it.

MATT: I think if my time line is not wrong the we wrote the first (No Man) record after the 2017 reunions, and then it was right before the 2019 stuff we finished the second record. And then Covid happened right when the record came out.

OK. I guess I was coming at it from there maybe being other barriers keeping No Man from doing too much in those first couple years. There was distance between the members, right? Is that still the case?

MATT: Yeah. But Pat’s been all over the place during the entire existence of the band. He went from New York, to Los Angeles, to Seattle, to Santa Cruz throughout the past however many years.

MAHA: Pat was in school finishing his masters degree and now he’s teaching. But he’s been on the West Coast. Kevin’s (Lamiell, bass) been in New York the whole time. He had a kid during that time. He’s had a lot of life! But it forces us to be very intentional about when we do hang out. We’re friends, but we’re also family. When we get together we write, but we also travel, eat meals together in the same house. Matt, being an engineer, records all of our music. The studio is connected to our house, so it’s all part of ‘the hang’ of creating art and music together.

I think you opened up a few questions I already had so now I have to parse them out one by one! So, first, I think what you just said in regards to keeping everything ‘in-house’ that feels a lot like how Majority Rule tended to operate frequently, and definitely the way you all operated in No Man with releasing those first couple albums on your own, and recording all the music. But for the last couple albums you’ve had people involved and I wanted to get your thoughts on how that change feels.

MATT: I’ve always liked doing things on our own. I don’t know if it comes from a control freak place, or from just knowing how to do it because we’ve been doing it for so long. We don’t have some grand plan to be a big band or anything. So having a direct connection with the people who are buying the records is something I love, even though it’s exhausting to package everything up and ship it. It feels good to see your old friends names in the bandcamp list of people who bought it. It keeps you connected on a different level.

When we started working with Casey (Horrigan, Iodine Records) we were super apprehensive. But he came over and explained how he does things. From our perspective all it feels like is that I don’t have to have more records in my storage space. He helps get them distributed and does a really good job. I still sell direct through bandcamp for all our stuff.

MAHA: It’s been a really pleasant experience with Casey. We were super apprehensive, and I think if it weren’t Casey we wouldn’t have done that. He has stayed true about when we need support, and when we need things to be totally hands off with any of the art. We still have full autonomy.

Was there any particular reason for the apprehension?

MATT: It just doesn’t feel like we needed a record label? We’re a small band. Does anyone really need a record label anymore? I guess any time you involve someone that you didn’t grow up with you don’t know what to expect because you don’t know them that well.

MAHA: We also have a lot of friends who have the same story, and are cut from the same cloth that we are that have not always had great experiences. I’ve always enjoyed staying close to it. By staying close to it it keeps this a community and not a business. We’re not a business.

Maha, is this your first band that you’ve been in?

MAHA: It is.

Was it intimidating to be a front person, or was there no intimidation at all and you jumped right into it?

MAHA: It was not intimidating. It has felt like a super supportive atmosphere. Maybe I’m over-stepping, but I always felt like part of Majority Rule, from traveling with them, and being a part of some of the songs. The part that was, not intimidating, but of stepping into a room writing music and creating songs with people that have been collaborating for decades, since high school, seemed like a lot. But they are the most supportive humans in the world for anything that I wanted to try. People talk to me about my development from record to record, and that’s not intentional. There’s growth that happens from practicing inherently over time when you start working on something. I don’t think of one record as being ‘better’ than another, it’s more of just a reflection of what was happening in my life, and each record documents a time period for me. The growth people notice isn’t intentional. It’s just what happens when you practice over time.

So if you start with the first record, which was a year of major loss for me- I lost my dad- having this band was super cathartic and gave me a place to put that pain. That’s what I think about when I listen to it. All our records are little time capsules.

So I don’t feel intimidated, I feel supported, and I feel like this is something that is a group project.

I suppose I thought of that question more in terms of being on a stage and looking out into an audience.

MAHA: I don’t have that. I don’t know what it is. I feel like as long as we practice I always feel prepared. But I don’t have anxiety about playing. Maybe it’s because of that community aspect that I mentioned before. It’s very a much a connection, whether you’re sitting in a crowd watching a band, or you’re on stage, it’s all assuming different roles but the beauty of it is the collective and how it comes together. It doesn’t feel that different to me.

Again, this may be me being out of the loop a bit, but I feel like there was this long gap between Majority Rule and when you all started playing together again where it seemed no one was doing any music. I know, Matt, you were as Haram was around for a minute right after Majority Rule, and you also did Cloak/Dagger. But I kind of fell out of touch with all of you after seeing you all frequently for a number of years. Was it difficult reconnecting to play new music together again?

MATT: It all happened because of those Majority Rule reunion shows. I hadn’t really been that in touch those guys. I saw them. When both Pat and Kevin were in New York they did Ancient Sky and Ghastly City Sleep. Kevin also played in Beasts Of No Nation. So I would see them if they played DC, and they would stay at our house. I remember them staying over when Kamelah (Matt and Maha’s daughter) was a little baby. But I hadn’t kept in touch with them really a ton in over a decade.

Mike Taylor (from Pg. 99) called me and asked me if we would do the reunion shows. I thought it sounded like a really cool idea to do a string of benefit shows, seems like a reason to do this. So I got in touch with Pat and Kevin seeing if they were interested at all, and the premise was to first practice and see if we could still do it. I just didn’t want to do it bad. And before I even said ‘yes’ to Mike they came down to our house in Virginia, we practiced, and we still sounded good.

None of us had been screaming in a band, or playing blast beats in a long time. That’s something you typically need to practice. And from there it was super natural, and you realize you have a special connection with certain musicians, and it’s almost second nature to just write new songs.

I don’t think it would have happened without those Majority Rule shows. It’s a direct result of Mike Taylor asking us to do that stuff.

When did you start doing stuff as an engineer?

MATT: That was probably about 2017. That was a natural progression. I was always the guy who had the four-track since I was in high school and I would record practices. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was the one responsible for that. The one Cloak/Dagger record that I helped write we recorded ourselves and then had Kevin Bernsten (Developing Nations Studio) mix it. So that was my first attempt to do something all myself. But I still didn’t make the leap into mixing stuff. I think that was a natural thing.

The first No Man records and the first Portrayal Of Guilt record might have been my first main things doing myself.

Experiment on your own band.

MATT: It’s also a money thing. It’s expensive to record places. It can be a money and time thing. You can be more creative and spend more time doing it yourself than spending a huge amount of money renting a studio.

I find, more and more often, when I’m talking to bands that many of them have kids of their own, and that’s probably due to speaking with a lot of band people who are a bit older. However, No Man is in a unique position here because you’re the only band I know of that takes their kid on the road with them pretty often. How cool is it for a family to be able to do that?

MATT: It’s super cool. We’re dealing with the fallout of our last tour right now. Our daughter was able to get some kind of work exemption thing through school to do a ‘learning the business of music’ to be on the road with us. But she missed a bunch of stuff and she’s having to figure it all out now. But it’s still early in this year.

MAHA: It’s pretty great. The Pg. 99/Majority Rule reunion shows on the West Coast happened during her Spring break in, like, kindergarten. That’s why we did it when we did. The timing worked out. But what was also funny was it wasn’t just our daughter. My sister and my nephews came as well! To me there’s a connection between growing up in an Arab-American household in that it’s an all-ages culture literally in how you all spend time together. I grew up going to Arab night clubs with my parents!

So now, travelling with my daughter feels natural because she was doing that when she was so young. It’s pretty great. She’s super helpful now! She helps with merch, with equipment.

Where have you taken her on tour, to date?

MATT: She’s been to the West Coast a couple of times.

MAHA: She did the UK tour with us in April. She’s done a European tour.

MATT: She’s gone down to (Gainesville) Fest a bunch. She’s done some regional stuff. We did two Canada tours. That’s the only time it gets hard, where we’re in places with much stricter liquor laws, like Canada and California. So she can’t be at the shows and we have to find ways to keep her busy. But now she can be on her own. But back then there were more annoying aspects to it that were annoying for everybody.

That’s a very unique concept, but you phrased it in a way that made it seem so much more natural when you said basically, ‘this is what families do’. It’s strange to think that because it ought to be a normal thing- families travelling together and doing things together, even if it is punk rock.

MAHA: I remember taking her to shows locally when she was younger. And I’d think, ‘why are people staring at us?’ And it’s because kids go to sleep at like 7pm.

It’s only a matter of time before she starts playing on stage with you all.

MATT: It’s closer than you think! I joke around about teaching her the songs so she can be on deck. She can play drums and guitar. If any of us hurt ourselves, or something happens, she could fill in. She’s done sound check before.

MAHA: I was really sick in Scotland and had to go to the hotel to steam out everything. So she did the sound check and someone sent me a video of it, and I thought, ‘she was too good at that’ (laughs)

You’re being replaced.

MAHA: The new and improved model, ready to go. But she also has her own music. She has jammed with the son of our friend Colin, who plays drums for Cloak/Dagger. So his son and Kamelah have some songs and practice, so it’s happening.

I wanted to dive a bit into a comparison on lyrical matter with No Man. I felt that back when I used to book shows for Majority Rule on a regular basis the band felt political without overtly saying it. You could just feel it more than anything. And No Man feels very overt, and very direct. It’s a different experience. And I think you all are saying things that feel relevant, but approached from an angle that feels very personal and unique.

MAHA: I would say depending on the Majority Rule show that you caught it may have been more overt because they had their moments. I think issues involving Palestine is way more headline news now than it was back then, but it’s pretty incredible the number of people who will connect with No Man who aren’t aware of Majority Rule. They’ll tell me this is the first time they’re hearing about these things, that happens. The sad part is it’s still happening. This didn’t start three years ago, this occupation has been occurring for over 75 years.

It is probably fair to say that what people consider to be personal is political. It really is a lived experience. What my family has gone through for generations and the loss they’ve gone through is real. So maybe the lens of the general population might be different and they’re tuning in to more things because of that, if that makes sense.

I think so. I think what I was getting at it is it feels that a lot of hardcore punk music isn’t quite as political as it was at one time, though I suppose that depends on what bands you’re checking out. But the ones who do say something, while it may be heartfelt, it often feels a bit generalized. A band may say, ‘fuck the police!’ and the reaction to that is, ‘Yes, of course’. But maybe elaborate on that? I think maybe because, as you said, you’re presenting it through a different lens the message resonates a little bit more because you have a personal perspective on things.

MAHA: I know what you’re saying. There’s times where I feel happy that anyone is saying anything at all. But it almost feels like a rattled off slogan without going a bit deeper. I experience that for sure. I don’t know if some people might be afraid to speak to these things because they don’t know enough about it, or-

- Or the band is just trying to get to the next song so they keep it brief.

MAHA: For sure. I think it may land a little different when there’s a direct connection, or a personal story that illustrates the atrocities that we’re living through. I honestly struggle with it because I don’t want to be anyone’s trauma porn. There are times where depending on the space and how safe I feel, or how connected I feel to the audience, I will or won’t share how I talk about things. I don’t plan it, it’s just what happens. Lyrically, especially given what’s happening right now in Gaza and the West Bank, it may be more prominent given the over 75,000 lives lost in the genocide currently happening.

The name of our record is “Between the Sword and the Neck”, which is a reference to Ghassan Kanafani. Are you familiar with it?

No, I don’t believe that I am.

MAHA: Basically, there’s this famous interview where he is being asked about peace talks, and he pushes back to say, ‘peace talks for whom?’ The whole point is to say with surrender and capitulation, a conversation with the oppressor and the oppressed is like a conversation between the sword and the neck. So it refers back to him. He was assassinated, along with his niece, by the Mossad. So a lot of this next record is tipping our hat to him, as well as a lot of other Palestinians who are no longer with us. There are a lot of Palestinian poets who are quoted throughout the songs. So you’re right. I am maybe more explicit with the lyrics than I thought now that I’m saying it!

I think that was the last thing I wanted to get at, in regards to how you feel this record is different than your previous albums? The cover art, for one thing, is very striking and rather dark, versus “Glitter and Spit” which was very colorful and vibrant.

MATT: There are intentional things with both records. The art for both of them was done by Zach Hobbs, who has done a bunch of stuff for us. With “Glitter and Spit” we wanted something that looked different that wasn’t just some black and white, skull, punk. So he made that very cool. For both we sent inspiration for the ideas he came up with. But they’re both very intentional. The new record wasn’t exactly planned out this way, but it has a thread running through it. Our last record did not have that.

Photo/image by Zach Hobbs

So the new album doesn’t exactly have a theme, and it’s not quite a concept record?

MATT: It’s not a Queensryche record (laughs)

MAHA: It’s our “Operation: Mind Crime” (laughs)

It’s not song-to-song talk about whatever, there are themes.

MAHA: I would say not intentionally, but yes. Have you seen “Adaptation”?

Yes, a long time ago.

MAHA: There’s a scene where he says, ‘you’re pathetic, you’re a narcissist, you wrote yourself into the screenplay’. But as I was writing there was a lot of obsession on words and what I say, or what will convince people soon enough so more people don’t die. And then I was obsessing on people like Ghassan Kanafani, and the poets I mentioned. There’s a song on there called “In Tongues” where I quote some of those Palestinian poets who are no longer alive, and my daughter actually sings on the end of it. She’s singing, ‘words like knives, words never die, speak of her over my grave, and watch how she brings me back to life.’ It’s basically that she’s my legacy. After I’m not here it’s her. As the world continues to commit genocide and look away we’re here for forever, and our words will outlast us.

I think that is a thread that is throughout all of the songs. My mother is a poet who writes in Arabic, and there’s also a song on there that is her poetry that has some really cool music behind it. And the last song on the record is our interpretation, or translation, of that song. So I feel there is something there about our resistance, and persistence as Palestinians.

Again, that is a very unique and personal take on issues that you wouldn’t normally hear at a show where the band just states ‘free Palestine’ or something. It’s not an empty gesture, per se, there’s just not much to it. But what you just described really adds weight and substance to these issues.

MAHA: The other thing that I’m constantly thinking about is that I feel there is connection and feeling needed for what we’re all going through, and it really matters in terms of what you can do to strive towards action. I was saying to Matt, in regards to the Ghassan Kanafani quote about the sword and the neck, I saw a quote over the weekend that came from him that was basically stating that anger and rage are enough to sustain protest and rebellion. But love is required for revolution. I’m paraphrasing on this. But I keep thinking about how do we move from here to there and create that other world so that we’re not all sitting in shit together, which is what it feels like some times.

I have no consistency this month. My normal order of substack entries is skewed, my brain is a little scattered, and so are my musical choices. But hey, welcome to my thought process. I’m breaking a couple of my own guidelines as well by adding a discography for a band long split up, and a compilation of previously released tracks for an old band that is not broken up. Grindcore is being offered up side-by-side with post-punk thinking person’s music, and several releases here are showing their own brand of ‘chaotic’ to stunning effect. I don’t know what to tell you, maybe don’t get stuck on just one kind of noise; take a listen to all sorts and play connect the dots to see that they’re not all that different from one another in the end.

GREAT FALLS, “The Bite That Grows Up”

Over their last couple of records Great Falls didn’t just make albums, they made epics. Not many groups that play as ferociously and violently as Great Falls can churn out double LPs, let alone two in a row. But they have a vast catalog of releases- at least 6 albums, numerous EPs and splits, and singles all scattered about. They have decided to rein it in a little on this new LP (it’s still a gatefold record, just a single LP) as there’s no 10+ minute songs to test your patience or have you questioning your mortality, though the subject matter remains intensely personal and rather soul-searing. Even still, their music demands repeated listens as the sheer visceral force of these songs can be confounding, damaging, overwhelming, but always jaw-dropping in it’s intensity. Songs are jam-packed with various parts, often a mixture of math-y complexity and ugly, chaotic primal aggression. They will combine emotional heft (whether it be through quiet, discomforting strumming or mountain-moving Neurosis-esque tectonic riffs) and at the same time have you completely flabbergasted at how they’re able to pull off certain parts. And then there’s the lyrical weight and the artwork that plays into it. The band is known for a consistency in their visual presentation (guitarist/vocalist Demian Johnston handles nearly all of it, and a bunch of their releases have some amazing hand-crafted packaging) and this one accentuates the themes of generational trauma, and the complicated feelings around how that stuff is in you, and now it’s in your kids too. Great Falls are not music for a summer picnic. It’s for when you want your hair blown back by a chaotic force, or if you’re going through an existential crisis and you’d rather ruin your brain to music instead of hard drugs.

PROTOMARTYR, “Hotel Usona”

They might already be used to hearing this, but Protomartyr is a band that took me a long time to get into. That may be the case for many people. There was always something intriguing about them, but I couldn’t figure out, or nail down what exactly they were doing. There was no frame of reference for me. A couple guys who look like they’re into metal and a singer who stands at the mic talking, wearing a suit coat, holding a beer and a cigarette the whole time like the saddest lounge singer you’d ever seen? Oh, and Kelley Deal being an occasional touring member? The whole thing screams ‘post-‘, but ‘post’ what? I suppose that’s the allure for me. That and like their six or so albums before this there’s always really great art and packaging to their records- including big posters, a zine full of lyrics and artwork, etc. They really go all out. So again to the music: I have several of their records and I’ve been chasing the question of just what they are for years. That question arises more than ever on “Hotel Usona”, as a band seven albums in attempts to try some new things to keep it interesting. But I like it. Sometimes it feels orchestral, other times it’s very much post-punk, at one point almost industrial (“Feed the Sewer”), but always anchored by vocalist Joe Casey’s spoken-style stark poetry that is more political than ever, exhibiting themes of powerlessness and hopelessness against the horrors of the modern world. They bring in numerous guitar effects, synths, horns, and strings to most of these songs keeping it engaging to pick apart and digest. They excel at building tension, drawing out quiet sections to epic endings (“Exalted Eagles”), or taking a creative spin on the loud-quiet-loud format with a song as strangely heavy and alluring as “Sounds We Cannot Hear”.

RITUAL ERROR, “Terminal With Benefits”

This is my first experience with this English band. Due to some associated mutuals and like-minded bands they found their way into my orbit (I suppose the algorithm is occasionally useful), and I’m better for it. At times, on songs like “The Worst Is Still To Come”, they display a precision akin to a Shellac record with sinewy and sharp playing, lurching bass and jangly guitar. It’s lean. And other times, for instance on single “New Slime”, it’s a cacophonous joyride, careening and going off the rails in every direction. I’m reminded a bit of later 90’s American bands that had this amazing frenetic thing going on that was sort of lumped into the emo world, but far more chaotic (they just didn’t use heavily distorted guitars). Bands like Sleepytime Trio, early Frodus, Ten Grand, Atombombpocketknife, or Wallside could all be reference points for Ritual Error’s wild side. But they do so in a way that also knows restraint when they want it, being able to play their instruments with precision and not giving into the urge to just fall all over the place like they’re exorcising demons from their guitars, and knowing a thing or two about how they want those instruments to sound (they sound like aluminum neck guitars but any live evidence I found does not seem to confirm this). Either way, they sound really, really good. And this is a cool and chaotic-sounding, in a very determined fashion, record.

SHINER, “The Y Section”

I tend to shy away from reviewing reissues, re-releases, or otherwise stuff that has already come out in some fashion or another. I’m not completely against it though if I feel it’s something that would greatly benefit an audience who would do well to explore it for themselves, and I’m also a big fan of historical progression and how things came together. So this collection of odds and sods from the long-running Shiner helped give a greater context to their process as songwriters over their lengthy span as a band. I’d always firmly placed Shiner as part of the 90’s space rock/heavy shoegaze progenitors along with Hum repping the greater Chicago/IL region, Failure laying claim to LA, and these guys staking out KCMO as home turf. Of course, they all point to My Bloody Valentine (of which they lay out a most excellent cover of “Only Shallow”) as a North star. I lumped all those bands in together, and while they admittedly all share a sonic like-mindedness it’s worth noting that Shiner has found themselves influenced by a lot of different stuff over the years, as evidenced by these tracks pulled from across their long discography. These are all rare singles from various lost 7”s, comps, EPs, and assorted bonus tracks. The exceptional linear notes by mainstay Allen Epley goes into detail about how at various points they were looking to groups like Shudder To Think, Chavez, Slint, even Radiohead as influences. As with their last several releases there’s an additional focus on sharp and eye-catching packaging making the whole thing quite a nice collection to dig into and dissect. Plus, these songs aren’t just leftovers. They all fit nicely into the band’s exceptional body of work.

SPLIT SILK, “Be the Divine”

Opening your record with a bass riff that is eerily reminiscent of “Six Pack” may lead to some certain expectations, though it’s not long before Split Silk break into catchy post-punk melodies on their first full length in their current formation after an EP a couple years back flexing their skill in that iteration. But make no mistake, regardless of the hazy melodies, catchy earworms, and occasional soft vocals this trio is just as vitriolic as any harsh punk band with manic vocals taking the lead and a loose/semi-chaotic disposition across even their prettiest of songs (i.e. the tracks “Mess” and “Fawn”). Both “Orchard Garden” and “Spin For You” are more upbeat and have fun, exuberant bass lines to keep it catchy before they close the record out with the rather Seaweed-esque (musically anyway) “Excess”. While past efforts saw this group exhibit more Unwound-ish elements to their music I feel like that’s all but gone here. They’re definitely fans of the spooky/noisy side of Sonic Youth, but pair it up with an emo (informed by Ebullition Records more than anything)/punk attitude. It’s a bit of a change for the band, but if you were a fan previously you’ll be pleased with what’s presented here.

YAMMER JAW, “Burth”

I’m not sure where these cats came from (Nashville, in a physical sense; though I’m thinking more mentally), but they have a sturdy disposition that posits them in the current big riff stew that counts bands like Iron Linings, Tosser, Cell Press, Knub, or Yellfire as contemporaries. Yes, if current noise rock heaviness is your bag, with maybe just a dash of the more rocking end of an Every Time I Die song (not the metalcore side), and some great stop-start off-time riffing like early Helmet (go to the track “Gun” for impressive evidence of this), than Yammer Jaw is for you. Add a good dose of wildly hollering vocals and enough riffs to keep you out of the express line at riff store check-out (don’t even attempt that self check-out, pal) and I think you ought to pleasantly satisfied. While “Lamp Of Freedom” takes a bit of a reprieve from the hammering with it’s background noise and distorted vocal slough diatribe it’s the aforementioned “Gun” and record starter “Golden Shovel” that really push the energy and excitement forward for this group.

FALSE BODY, “Tomorrow Starts Without You”

Having written a bit about this band less than a year ago I was anticipating whatever came next. After all, they did what any really awesome band does- they keep you wanting more, which is sort of easy for False Body because their two EPs before this are probably less than 10 minutes of music total. But what they did on those previous recordings- grindcore mixed with some elements of metallic hardcore and thrash packed into 90 second songs- opens up a bit more on this full length (which is kind of stretching the definition of a ‘full length’). Our friends in the Great White North have doubled down on a very polished recording to give maximum impact to these tracks where they incorporate a bit more in the way of technical leads and incredibly heavy, but certainly not cheesy or forced, breakdowns in addition to their light speed hardcore/grindcore. It’s all put together with an effort to be absolutely ripping and appeal to reptile-brain aggression, but still exhibit exceptional creativity with the arrangements. Lyrically, this album seems to revolve around grief and pain associated with the loss of a loved one and you’ll see the different perspectives that takes from the inner feelings they deal with, as well as the way the outer world looks through the lens of mourning. Definitely worth investigating if you’re into grindcore blasting/metallic hardcore that’s far from sloppy spontaneity, but not so engrossed in technicality that it looses it’s energy… or if you’re Canadian (so you all can have yet another thing to be proud of, compared to our stateside shit show).

THE UNHEARD ONES, “Stories and Songs” discography

For a band that existed for probably a year, wrote maybe a dozen songs, and played a total of about a dozen shows this discography comes with an exhaustive retrospective book/zine companion. It takes longer to comb through this written document than it does to listen to the entire output of this short-lived Baltimore-area group that existed in the mid-to-late 90’s. The package it all comes in is great- cardstock silkscreen covers, the aforementioned full color zine, colored vinyl. I have no idea why there’s some download-only tracks absent from the vinyl when they likely could have fit on this easily. As it stands they probably composed maybe 30 minutes of music in their entire tenure? For reference this is the kind of band where they probably had kind of a cool art aesthetic going while they were together. You’d probably see their name on a 7” comp, or EP in various distros. Maybe you’d take a chance on plopping down $3 for a 7” to see what you got and be pleasantly surprised by the results. It was basement practice-space emo rock, leaning more into indie rock than anything. The first two tracks (also repeated in demo version on the B-side) are the band’s strongest with “8 Minute Absolution” having a gruff, herky-jerky clattering rhythm to it, while “Bermuda Triangle” took a slower, more melodic and meandering approach while remaining catchy. Bands of this style popped up everywhere in that time. They’d exist in short bursts, barely leave a footprint, but get cited by bands who did go on to do stuff as local pals and minor influences, talked about by half a dozen people years later. This seems almost too exhaustive of a deep dive for a band that barely made a blip in their local scene some 30 years ago. But passion projects are like that. It means a lot to someone(s) to put forth the effort to preserve all this and that, in and of itself, is impressive.

HAVANA SYNDROME, s/t 12”

Bananas hardcore punk with zany synths packed into 90 second songs about government surveillance and microchips being implanted in your brain, made by screaming maniacs. You gotta love the lightning in a bottle quality of this immediately gratifying and wild bunch of freaks- short songs, nothing over thought, spraypainted and glued-on cover art (this easily could have all fit on a 7”), and a little cowboy sort of outro. Honestly, without the synths it would have lost a lot of that energy. This sounds like if when Weird Al was writing the “UHF” theme song, or “Dare To Be Stupid” he instead took a bunch of poppers, snorted oven cleaner as a chaser, and stayed up for three days straight banging out whatever twisted thought was tucked away in some corner of his brain where parody songs don’t have dominion.

I feel like I’ve been mixing it up a lot this year so far. All sorts of interesting stuff coming across my radar. But this month, it’s a solidly nasty month of noise rock ugliness…. with one exception. Maybe two if you remove the ‘ugly’ part. I’ll let you figure out for yourselves where that fits.

CHAT PILE, “Who Loves the Sun”

What can I say about the new Chat Pile without committing sacrilege? It isn’t as immediately gratifying as their last two LPs? How about that? Is that acceptable? They’re trying a bunch of new things on this record. Some of them land, some of them don’t. Kudos for giving it a go though. In all honesty, it still sounds just like them because no one else quite does what they do. You still get those massive heavy parts and grooves. There’s still unhinged, bizarre vocals, and there’s plenty of strange and otherworldly guitar effects. I have generally enjoyed when they flex their more melodic side quite a bit, evoking certain post-punk and goth-y sorts of qualities. Yet on “Who Loves the Sun” some other attempts at melody- more harmonized vocals with accompaniment, and traditional metal-tinged solos on slow lurcher “Christabel 26” seem out of place for Chat Pile, or at least an attempt to bend something different to their will and it not quite working. But on the next track, “Influence”, that same attempt at paired and harmonized vocals works out awesome amongst the faster and grungier groove. “Intruder” might be the most listener-friendly track they have ever written as it borders on big venue alternative rock… but it’s a really well-written and solid track. You still get the Chat Pile you expect- “Pen I S Mall” is all ass-beating thump and groove; lead off single “Deep Blue” is an upbeat and unsettling, yet oddly pretty, four minutes of energy with an awesome stop-start part near the end; and opener “Creature” checks all the boxes of what a fan wants in a Chat Pile track. All in all, it’s a bit of a grower and not a shower, it just feels like some of those more chaotic and unhinged moments on previous releases have been sanded down a bit.

FOREIGN BODY, “Libertine”

The phrase ‘I was born in the wrong decade’, or some variation on that, gets tossed around a lot by people who are often just too corny for any decade, let alone the one they’re in, as a way to justify their corniness. But the band Foreign Body? Sorry, but New York is far too polished and sterile these days to accurately account for the absolute vulgar gutter filth they serve up. This band truly exists in the wrong decade. They would be right at home in a Bowery slum in the early 80’s, scoring cheap crank and entertaining themselves with questionable…. uh, ‘escorts’. Their most apt contemporaries would be the likes of Couch Slut, Brainbombs, or even Drunks With Guns. They’re the type of band to take one filthy riff, repeat it for three minutes, and then move on to the next scuzzed-out noise-freak diatribe. And if you think the music sounds off-putting and grimey wait ’til you get a load of the lyrics: a lot of disconcerting and uncomfortable zingers on sex and domination, humiliation, submission, and associated issues that you don’t find all that much in music like this. But they’re aiming for the ugliest and bottom-barrel verboten sorts of topics and forcing it upon the listener through grating, nasty noise rock. Not bad. The only thing that would make this package complete would be if the record came with a used ball gag and a cat o’ nine tails.

EX WIVES, “BWP” 7”

This is a name I’ve heard many times over the years, but never personally sought out. But better late than never right? It seems this UK group like to release music in short bursts, and have been doing so for the better part of two decades. So fuck me, right? I should have gotten on the wagon sooner because, A) this is awesome, and B) I like short, noisey songs. This new EP is two very awesome songs and one very brief track of just yelling, shouting, and some instruments maybe being tuned in the background. That last one is completely unnecessary. But the other two? Well, I’m at a loss coming up with a band that has better dialed in the bass tone of the harshest of Jesus Lizard songs, or the mightiest Big Black screeds, or the more recent 4-string deft noodling of the late, undeniably great Rebecca Burchette (RIP) of Multicult. “BWP” gets a bit more involved (after all, it nearly 3 minutes long…. three minutes!), but rocks all the same. Second track “VL” is a short shot of quick, knotty basswork, skronky guitar, and a beat like a jackhammer to yr skull. Not too shabby I say, not too shabby at all.

CONCRETE VEHICLES, “Cut Ties” b/w “Text Stop” 7”

They’re a rather hard-to-define band out of Vancouver, but that’s certainly a good quality (both being hard to define and being from Vancouver). I’ll say this is definitely a more hostile and direct approach than their last full length, but this is a 7” after all. It sort of demands brevity. Whereas on their last LP most of the songs were a bit more long-form and took their time to build and evolve, and explore different side quests the two songs here kind of get right to it and come at the listener with a bit more aggression. So what is it exactly that Concrete Vehicles are giving us? I suppose you could say it’s heavier music, but rooted in an almost experimental post-punk with a considerable amount of keyboards and saxophone added to the mix. It’s very exciting and interesting music that feels, at times, instantly gratifying but then giving way to more thought-out and complex sections that demand repeated listens to figure them out. Dumb Waiter with less metal maybe? Rhododendron with less prog and more hectic parts?

BLUTO, “Two Ton Grudge”

Imagine just how massive you need to sound to evoke the heaviness of Floor, the sludgy morass of Crowbar, the feedback of Eyehategod, and the stop-start crunch of Helmet. And yet Cleveland’s Bluto have pulled it off. Hell, they even do a blistering cover of Helmet’s slow-burn stalker anthem “Sinatra”. I also feel as if Bluto is trying to put a fine point on just how heavy they are with song titles like “Concrete”, “Sludgehammer”, “Crushed Beneath the Weight”, and the almost comically-named title track (look, if I were from Cleveland I’d be pretty pissed about it too), and I’d say they may be reaching overkill levels on it if all of it weren’t true. You won’t catch anyone who takes one listen to this band complaining of false advertising. Bluto, in name (and titles), are giving you exactly what they say they say they’re going to give, and do so quite wonderfully. No song overstays it’s welcome (an aspect that can occur with alarming frequency in sludge metal); in fact most of the tracks are fairly succinct in their pulverizing. If you like shit that’s really goddamned heavy there’s no reason you ought to neglect checking this out.

AMPHIBIAN SKIN demo

Now for some lighter fare. This is almost treading on folk music, so I’m trying to watch myself here. But think more of the trance-like repetitiveness of Lungfish mixed with the blissful and more mellow moments of something like Rival Schools, or when Self Defense Family decides to be more upbeat. It’s just a demo at two songs, but it’s really enjoyable and I’d love to hear more of what they got. It’s also not really a thing I typically reach for, but every once in awhile I need to switch it up, take a breather, and dig into some more chill music. Amphibian Skin is, thus far, not eliciting excitement through sheer volume and density, but instead exuberant through it’s expansive spaciousness and wide-eyed bliss about what’s ahead. Thank you for putting this out in the world.

GRIZZLOR, “Cosmic Joke” EP

Grizzlor has been sitting on this EP for a good bit now and have decided to finally self-release it out into the world and if you’ve felt misanthropic in the past after listening to their songs then prepare yourself to feel even more miserable and agitated. In other words, a successful follow up. Grizzlor hardly re-invent their own wheel, instead you will always know exactly what you’re getting. It’s chunky and off-putting noise rock scuzz, complaining about the mundane but at the same time openly stating how little of a shit they actually give about frustrating video games, the redundancy of playing tepid local shows, or getting stiffed on band practice. While all that subject matter may seem about as exciting to hear someone gripe about as getting a tax audit Grizzlor have always done so with a depraved sick sense of humor and caveman-like riff prowess that turns the banal into the eclectic. Closer “Who Cares” slowly lurches and drags with a loopy and disoriented fever dream vocal delivery and broken-string guitar scrawl before breaking into downward-spiraling heavy thunder. The mania just gets more and more ugly and weird as it goes on, yet the impact is there. “I haven’t spoken a word in an entire year, and I don’t care, because it feels pretty fucking good to just disappear.” You said it pal.

THE CUSTOMARY SILENCE, “Distress”

This Milwaukee group bring all the hallmarks of gruff and abrasive noise rock to bear with what appears to be their first new output in over a decade (though I can’t say I was familiar with them prior to this). You got your burly and surly chunky Helmet-esque opener in “Critical Drinker”; a move into more grating gutter rock a la Unsane as things move along. But there’s an additional emotional tinge happening throughout as well that points to a kind of post-hardcore/indie influence, particularly on songs like “Resignation Letter” and the first half of “Hostile Architecture”. But then they just throw all that to the wind by the time they get back to “All Eyes” with primitive skull-bashing and go full-on monkey beating on bones in front of the obelisk in closing knuckle-scraper “The Boats” . For a band that has been closed for business for a solid decade-plus this seems to be a pretty good return to form showing off some pent-up frustrations. At a taught 22 or so minutes they get in, get right to it, and then wrap it up. I can appreciate that.

WRONG MAN, “Here’s That Feeling”

I had been really excited about this group when they kicked off with a pair of EPs, one right after the other. The band had a solid pedigree- members of hardcore blazers Rise and Fall doing the most legit take on Rollins Band you’d be apt to find anywhere (though let’s be honest- not many outfits are capable of doing that), and I was stoked to hear it. So now a couple years have passed and they’re on their first proper LP. I was thrown by the first couple singles from this record because their approach had altered significantly. I couldn’t really place it at first, but now that I have the entire album in context it’s a shift that blends other influences into an unlikely stew that I think I’m still kind of sorting out. Gone are the more heavy-handed elements that brought significant heft to their bluesy hard rock/hard core and instead replaced by greater emotional weight and somewhat lighter (let’s just say less ‘heavy’) approach akin to the likes of Fiddlehead. So I know, kind of weird right? Rollins Band meets Fiddlehead is the best I got for you here. Is it an unlikely pairing that raises an eyebrow for me? Yeah, absolutely. Does it work? I think so. Mostly. I love the random saxophone solo in “It Won’t Wash Off”, just as an example of trying some unorthodox ideas for a band whose members were rooted in metallic hardcore. They shift tempos throughout the record with upbeat tracks like the aforementioned “It Won’t Wash Off” and “Mystic Eye”, and slow burn bluesy tracks like “Petty Thief” and closer “Ripped Open II” making for a varied effort that’s beginning to shape itself into sound the band can call their own, despite unlikely pairings of influences.

Photo by John Oakes

Demian Johnston is one of those people where an interview truly feels like way more of a conversation and just catching up rather than an actual question and answer session. Part of that may be due to the very big influence that he has had, completely by chance, upon my own trajectory. I’m sure I’ve detailed that influence numerous times throughout my published efforts. His band Undertow was the first hardcore band I ever saw. His next band, Nineironspitfire, played the first show I ever booked as a promoter. His bands Playing Enemy and Great Falls have both released records through my label, both utilizing some cool and unique packaging ideas I hadn’t done up until that point. My interest in art and design parallels much of the same kinds of art and design he finds himself engaged in and I like to occasionally pick his brain on the details of that stuff. It certainly helps that he’s a friendly and easy going guy, despite the person on record who is screaming like he’s literally getting his heart ripped out of his chest.

Speaking of which, Great Falls are about to release a new full length album. They’ve been at it for a really long time. In fact, out of the bands Demian has been a part of this one may be the longest running and most prolific. But it wasn’t until their last LP, “Objects Without Pain” that they started receiving the attention they deserved. Part of that was the addition of drummer Nick Parks, who truly filled out the chaotic vision the band had wanted since the get-go making the album exceptionally more powerful. Another part of that was a boost from record label Neurot Records, who were able to give them a bit more of a spotlight. And now they’re on to “The Bite That Grows Up”, a record once again delving into the extremely personal amongst the profoundly chaotic and cathartic. It carries the momentum they have been running on these last few years, and I think it merits the deserved attention they have received as well.

Here’s what Demian had to say about family, the creative process, keeping abrasive art going into your fifties after a lifetime in the game, and getting clocked in the face by your own bass player.

Great Falls, Seattle, 2022, photo by Hex

What do your kids think of your music?

That’s a good question. My stepdaughter, her dad was also in a band so she has just kind of grown up around it her whole life. So I think her thought is ‘it’s just a thing dads do. Dads just go and play shows. That’s a normal thing for dads to do.’ So for her I think it barely even registered really? I think she knows, she thinks it’s cool. She has her own musical tastes. Her musical tastes are actually a bit more extreme than mine. She likes suicidal depressive black metal. It’s her favorite genre (laughs).

Is she like, ‘your shit is weak!’?

But she also loves My Bloody Valentine. I think she just likes that rough, grinded-down music that’s overwhelmingly loud, like a blanket. She just digs that stuff.

My other daughter is still in high school. She just started her senior year today. But she thinks it’s really cool and she likes to play music too. She plays guitar, bass, keyboards, harmonica. She can grab any instrument and play it. She’s one of those kids. That’s much different than I am. I could never really do that. So she’s already kind of on her own musical journey. But she grew up seeing shows. She will see me play maybe once every year, or every other year. It wasn’t like a big event for her to go see me. But when she would go and see me it would be like playing at the record store she goes to all the time, like a free in-store, or something. Or going to see the last Botch show ever. She was there and left before Botch played. She watched my band and then left. I was like, ‘You should stay for them! This is it! Forever!’ But she wanted to go hang out with her friends instead. But I did the same thing at the final Big Black show. I didn’t see that because I decided to go skateboarding instead.

But it’s cool. This new record we just released has a lot of themes around myself and my relationship to her. The last record is a lot about my relationship to my wife. This one is more about my relationship to my daughter and my relationship to my father, and how trauma is passed on. And she knows I write songs about things that pertain to her. But she doesn’t really get into the lyrics. I’d be happy to talk to her about them.

It’s all very heavy topical matter, especially on “Objects Without Pain”, which was like an entire story, where I was thinking, ‘hey man, are you OK?’

A lot of that record was true, but not entirely true. I will embellish things just for the sake of the feeling that I’m trying to get across as opposed to the facts. One of the reasons I say my name often on our records is almost as a way to psyche out the fact that I’m not telling the 100% truth. It’s truth in the way of how I feel. I can’t yell out, ‘it’s hard to explain this perspective!’ Sometimes you have to paint with a little bit more of a broader brush when you’re screaming.

I hate having to sing. I really hate having to sing on records. I hate it so much. I like that I have done it. I like to listen to it. I like the process of writing the lyrics and pairing them. But when it comes time to do it in the studio I find the whole process to be very unpleasant. It’s not any engineer, or studio, or anything. I just don’t enjoy it. It’s too much like I have to get into the vibe so I can deliver it the way I want to deliver it, and I have to stay in that vibe for like nine hours. It’s just unpleasant.

And you’re in a very sterile environment of a studio which is very polished and dialed in versus just being on a stage, sweating it out.

I’ll have to stop and do a line like ten times, and I’m just like, ‘I don’t care anymore’. I took singing lessons before the last record from this woman who was really great. She taught me a bunch of stuff about how to scream, so I was able to get most of the entire record done without having any issues with my voice at all. But after about three days of doing vocals I just can’t help but have some wear and tear. By the time the record was done I was just completely out of gas. The first single for this record is the last song I did vocals for and you can hear that I’m exhausted on it and I think it actually sounds kind of awesome. I’m like, ‘oh fuck, I can’t do this anymore, please let me go home!’ (laughs)

As far as being in character, or whatever it’s called, some of those situations in recording I find unpleasant, but I’ll do it because it’s worth it for the whole project.

Your band has always been pretty prolific too in regards to recording. I know it’s been a couple years, but “Objects Without Pain” still seems pretty recent and maybe that’s because there was a lot of continued momentum with it, and now this follow up LP seems like a sort of quick follow up. But in regards to touring you haven’t been able to do a whole lot up until recently. What changed in regards to making it easier to tour more?

I think it’s been less of a gamble now. We can sort of budget for it. We still don’t tour a lot. We have to tour around our work and family schedules. You’ve got three grown men with families, children, and things we got to do every day. Finding time to do a week or two can be tough. So we still only do a month a year if you add it all up. It’s not a ton, but it’s something that we can sort of plan for. We don’t really make money on tour. We just kind of know at this point what it’s going to cost, what it’s going to take, and how much we will likely lose. We’re pretty much going to lose money on everything we do. Our aim is ‘how do we lose as little as possible?’ So we try to make good choices now. In the past we just went off of vibes. We would say, ‘it’s been awhile since we toured, let’s do that.’

But we’re losing a little less money these days, and we’ve had some really cool opportunities, which is really nice. Doing that European tour with Botch was really incredible. That was nearly three weeks. We hit a lot of places I had been to before, but also a lot of places I’d never been to before. It wasn’t even that much later where we went back to Europe again with Glassing and did Roadburn Festival.

It’s probably because we’re on Neurot Records more than anything, but we have some more eyeballs on us and we’ll get offers to do some festivals and stuff, so we just kind of build things around those.

It seems like before all this you all did play regularly, but it was pretty much just the Northwest and touring was very few and far between. But I’m seeing more and more you’re getting these fly-out shows.

Yeah. I’d guess that’s the only real big difference is having Neurot behind us, which just gives us more of an audience. There’s a curated nature to that label. There’s a lot of people who just check in on them because they respect what they have going on. I think people are very open to stuff they do.

It’s also got to be a little strange at this point to have been a band for well over 15 years and now just sort of hitting your stride in terms of recognition. Is that an odd place to be in?

Photo by J Donovan Malley

No, it’s good. I think everything was going to happen the way it was going to happen. I’m totally cool with that adventure. Before that the most popular thing I’d done was when I was 17 with Undertow. So I’ve always been in this sort of downward trajectory of people caring about my art. I came out of high school playing all these huge shows, and getting offered to do tours and stuff and I was like, ‘oh my god, being in a band is so easy, why doesn’t everyone do this?!’ (laughs)

And then I just never stopped being in bands, but I was never in a band again that had that sort of attention. Straight edge in the 90’s was this weird little micro-genre in every city. People probably wouldn’t know this, but even if you were in like San Francisco there would be maybe 15 straight edge guys there. In Seattle the scene was like 10 or 12 people who were straight edge kids. There were other kids who would come to the shows who weren’t straight edge or anything. But it was this small, little group of weirdos who would go to Denny’s every night and talk about who wasn’t edge anymore. And then you’d go to another town and find that same group of weirdos and go to the Denny’s late at night and talk about who wasn’t edge anymore! I’d just kind of travel around the country doing that. It was fun! It was a silly cult to be in of really well-meaning people!

That leads me into growing up. So I’m assuming a lot of what you got into came out of skateboarding?

Yeah! I went from playing with toys, and Legos, and GI Joes, to all of a sudden getting into music. Metal and hip-hop started creeping into my life. I thought it was really cool and dangerous. Around the same time I would start seeing kids around my junior high skating during free days. That was a time when you could come to school and do whatever you wanted, so these kids would bring their skateboards and run off a jump ramp. I thought that was so cool! So I got into skating, and the music was right there with it. There wasn’t internet back then so you just had to accidentally find stuff.

So I got into skating, and through skating I met some hardcore kids, and through that I started going to some different shows that I maybe wouldn’t have gone to. I found that little subculture, and went from there.

How did you end up joining Undertow then?

I had always been playing bass. I was in some really bad punk bands that didn’t do anything. It was the type of band to practice in someone’s parents house for a month every weekend and that was it. But upon meeting all those hardcore kids in Seattle it was such a tiny scene that when they found out I played bass some people who had been in Undertow previously had a band called Saidchild. They needed a bass player so they asked if I wanted to play. They said, ‘we have a show in a day, do you want to learn all the songs and play the show?’ I said sure. So I joined this band. They were more of a post-hardcore, Morrisey-flavored rock band. They were kind of trying to be like Statue, or Rites Of Spring, a little bit of crappy Morrisey rockabilly rock moments. We did one EP of our crappiest songs on Overkill Records. It was one of those things where we were like, ‘we should record our first songs first, not our best ones that we just wrote recently’. Why would we do that? We’re not documenting our journey, we’re giving people the best music that we have. Anyway, we did that.

So that band was going on at the same time that Undertow needed a bass player. So they asked me if I wanted to join Undertow. And I loved Undertow, so I thought that was great, knowing that both bands hated each other’s guts! So growing up and being a child of divorce I was thinking, ‘now that I’m older I should become a band member of divorce!’ (laughs)

So I joined two bands where half of one band went one way and half the band went the other way, and they all hated each other. They probably still do to this day. And I was the bass player to both bands, and it was super awkward for me. But apparently I craved that because I did that for about a year.

Going to dad’s house this weekend, going to mom’s house next weekend.

“I’m so sorry, I can’t play that show. That other band that you hate me being in is playing a show.”

Well, one of them did eventually win out, so…

Yeah, Undertow did win out. I think those other guys in Saidchild knew that I really cared about straight edge at the time, and those guys decided not to be. And that was fine, honestly. And now I don’t give a shit anymore, obviously. But at the time I was like, ‘I don’t even know you guys anymore!’ I wrote this dramatic letter to them, basically breaking up the band. I didn’t just go and tell them, I wrote a letter. It was so lame.

This is a very early-to-mid-90’s thing to do.

Yeah, this would have been 1993. I was 17 years old at this time. Cut me some slack. So I wrote this letter. But I still stayed friends with them and we would hang out. So I went over to their house this one time to hang out, and one of them worked at Kinkos- Seth Linstrum- awesome guy. I had written in the letter that Seth was my idol and that he broke my heart when he started drinking. So I go into his house and he had blown that part of the letter up enormous so that it was covering the entire wall behind his bed. And I was like, ‘you son of a bitch!’ (laughs)

But honestly, it was a lesson in humility that I did not mind learning. And, also, I did choose the right band. I had a million adventures and met a zillion people through Undertow.

And Undertow was the first hardcore band I ever saw, some 3000 miles away from Seattle. I decided I was going to go to a show finally, and I walk in, and Undertow was the first band playing, and I just thought it was awesome. And I have to say, even though it’s over 30 years old “At Both Ends” still sounds amazing, especially for the time. The recording is incredibly loud and heavy, and the songs are still great.

The revelatory show as described

I think having Clint, the guitar player for Seaweed, recording that record helped a lot. He was super into it. He wasn’t the world’s greatest engineer, but he knew what he wanted things to sound like and he just got it. Going back I would have maybe changed some things about my bass sound knowing what I know now. But, I agree, it sounds great.

Speaking of that, when Undertow ended was that when you started to learn how to play guitar?

Yeah. I had written a couple of riffs for Undertow on guitar. I had started to play guitar at home, just because it was fun. I sort of trained on playing classic hardcore riffs on an acoustic guitar and going from there. But I kind of did want to play guitar too and I had access to one through a friend who loaned me theirs. I had been playing bass for awhile, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. And I was playing hardcore, so again, not too much of a stretch.

So right when Undertow ended I was going right into Nineironspitfire, and Dempsey, and Nothing Left. I think I was doing all those bands at the same time. There wasn’t much spillover from Undertow and those projects, but there was some.

So I was leading to how when Nineiron started that seems to be where the style of guitar playing you have began really. It was such a big change, and I wanted to see where you felt you were taking influence from, or if you had a set sound you were aiming for?

People who kind of came to Undertow at the very end wouldn’t really know how the scene was before that. If you think of pre-“Scratch the Surface” by Sick Of It All for reference a lot of straight edge bands existed in a sort of different scene. That’s where Undertow was anyway. We were mixed in more with Ebullition Records and even K Records. We would play shows with riot grrl bands and stuff. It was very different. There wasn’t any sort of tough guy New York moshing thing happening anywhere in the Northwest. There was the Ebullition stuff coming from down south and then the indie labels coming out of Olympia. So we were playing a lot of shows with more political, left-wing Communist bands. We were doing a lot more of that stuff.

We were the one straight edge band at the crust punk show. We lived in a sort of different world. And then when hardcore sort of blew up, even just a little bump in the underground, that’s when there started to be 30, 40, or 50 straight edge kids in every town. And we started to see that all these little towns that had no straight edge kids now had straight edge kids. That’s cool. But then you’d occasionally see things like ‘oh now these kids have turned into Courage Crew, oh no! I guess it doesn’t always go right!’ (laughs)

Sometimes a little mutation happens in the moral code, whatever. So, things kind of blew up a little and we got pushed more into that kind of Sick Of It All- Revelation Records- hardcore sort of world. But we grew up in the punk rock world. So because of that I got exposed to tons of stuff that I may not have gotten exposed to if I had just been in the tough guy hardcore world. I keep saying that, and it’s really reductive, I don’t mean to do that. There’s good stuff in there.

I call it meat-and-potatoes hardcore.

Yeah. I don’t mean to sound elitist, or reductive, about those bands. I still listen to all those records. I still enjoy Sick Of It All, or Negative Approach. But I was just exposed to a lot of pretty stuff, or stuff like Slint. I may not have come to that as young as I did from a hardcore world if it had been a few years later. The time I came in the same kids who liked Green Day and Crimpshrine would go to shows with kids who liked Slayer. I was just exposed to so much stuff.

So by the time I left Undertow I thought I’d try some of this other stuff I’d heard. I really loved Craw, I was really into Today Is the Day. I thought Unsane was really cool. I checked out a bunch of stuff on AmRep. The whole city of Chicago had some crazy shit going on. I had seen Jesus Lizard even before I was in Undertow so I was aware of that kind of stuff. I always had this noise rock-arty punk stuff that I also loved. So Nineiron wanted to just do something a bit more abstract. We weren’t super great at our instruments, so didn’t always land what we wanted, but we certainly tried very hard.

Photo by John Oakes

So, bringing it up to now, with Great Falls, where do you feel most comfortable playing, or with, seeing as you have this vast background of varied influences?

That does change a lot because I’m getting exposed to a lot of different things. Nick (Parks, drums) pointed out that Mass Of the Fermenting Dregs is playing out here soon and said we ought to try and get on those shows. They’re a Japanese post-punk rock band. It’s closer to maybe Dinosaur Jr. I suppose? They’re like a power trio, noisey, edgy pop from Japan. I saw them when I was in England and it was really great. We had a day off from the Botch tour and just went to a random club, and a guy there said there was a show, they were playing, and it was great. So we wanted to play with them.

We were excited to play with Blind Girls. We seem to feel pretty comfortable playing in the screamo world, maybe from playing those Orchid shows. I never fully understood what ‘screamo’ means. When it’s been described as bands like Orchid, or Jerome’s Dream, I can understand that. I know what those bands sound like, and I know they’re different than Mohinder. But not that different. And I know Mohinder is not a screamo band. So I’m trying to find the edges. I can feel the trunk, I can feel the tail, but I can’t quite feel the whole elephant if you know what I mean.

But I felt we have gotten a good reception from those crowds. We do well in metal scenes, even though we’re not really a metal band. We’re just a noisy, weird band. I think they just like the little ball of chaos we do.

I’m honestly pretty comfortable anywhere as far as shows go. I will say that since I started doing more weird time signatures if I play a show that’s all straight-forward hardcore bands I feel like people are the least receptive. But not really. Especially nowadays. I feel like hardcore kids are more open-minded now than they were in maybe the year 2000.

It seems like people are willing to just be into cool shit regardless of what it sounds like. I feel optimistic about the kids. They’re the ones who have to fight off the AI robots after all. I have faith in them.

How about illustration and design? You work in several different mediums. Is that something you’ve always worked at, or did it just sort of happen?

I just like making stuff. I just always made stuff. I like drawing. I’m not particularly great at it and I have a lot of holes in my knowledge that I’d like to fill. But it’s a process and I’m happy just showing the process that goes into it. I’ll never feel like I’ve gotten to the point that I need to get to and I’ve accepted that. That’s just the way my brain works.

But it’s just something I always did, even as a kid. I would draw all through life, and not a whole lot. I didn’t put a ton of time into it. I tried making comics for awhile, but then I realized I like reading them a lot more than trying to draw them. My art has had a sort of cartoon-ish vibe, and I still dip into that a little bit because I do love comics and graphic art so much. But I just like making stuff.

I guess that’s how I got into letterpress. I went to a class to learn about typography and I ended up learning about typography, but I also learned to love making prints, setting type, making blocks. I love process, I love making a tape, making the case. I know you know!

Yes. I realize that as I’m getting older I’m working backwards. I’m not making life easier for myself. I’m making it more difficult, or less convenient. When I layout design for a zine I’m using a computer, but if I want a logo to look a certain way I’m not looking for a particular font or something. I just make it with actual physical materials. But letterpress type is so heavy, and it takes up a lot of room, and it’s not convenient. I’m sure you deal with the same thing- art that is not convenient.

No, definitely not. If I could do everything on a computer it would be nice because there would be no clean up, no mess, I wouldn’t need to buy 1,000 pens every time. But since I don’t, and I draw at home, that’s a thing I deal with. I do use a computer to refine and clean things up, and sample my own art, a lot.

But it is my job to be on photoshop all day, so I just kind of keep going.

So are you all self-taught?

Pretty much. I had a mentor for about six months who is a good friend, and a really good designer. He’s one of those guys who decided to learn about every single part of one thing, and he gets good at it. First it was graphic design, and then it was motorcycle repair. He gets into something and then just learns everything about it. So he got me started, and then I started taking classes at the School Of Visual Concepts in Seattle. I’m not sure if you would call it a trade school, but it’s definitely continuing education. In a class there will be 10 people who just got out of high school and 20 people who, like, worked in marketing and now want a new career or something.

It was one of those classes where a lot of the people there were closer to my age and you go once a week for three hours and you learn to use Photoshop, or Illustrator, or typography. One of the classes they offered was letterpress and I took that, and I just never stopped taking the letterpress classes. After taking three or four classes they asked me to be an assistant, which means I could do all that shit for free, have all the access, and not pay for the classes anymore. And then after a couple years they just hired me as a teacher and I did that for a few years. So I was getting paid to be there.

So I’ve taken a lot of classes, but I think you learn the most when you teach. Teaching all these young designers how to do letterpress I would learn things about the way they were designing because these people were designing stuff for Amazon, or whatever, and it’s soulless and they want to do something with their life. So I would see some of their techniques, or things they wanted to accomplish with type, and I would say, ‘I’ve never considered that before! let’s try it!’ I learned so much cool shit just from teaching people.

Photo by J Donovan Malley

Speaking of this new album, how has the process of writing it been, now that I guess you’re quite comfortable writing with Nick at this point? Were you going off the momentum of the last record and jumping right into it?

The last record came out about a year and a half after we recorded it. So by the time it came out we were already writing new shit. So we’re in the same position now. This record is about to come out and we’re already working on new stuff. I have a new tuning. We’re working on all new things. But the process was weird because we did not get to practice with Nick that many times. It was probably, start to finish, about a year and a half between getting the writing down and recording. It was not a long time, but it was long-ish. In that time Shane (bass) and I would meet twice a week and work on parts. Then we would record it all and Shane would take those recordings and remix them, or cut them up a bit and say ‘what if we did this, or what if we did this?’ So we would try that and when we would get to a point where we have a structure in mind that we like that’s when we would bring it to Nick. We would meet up with him about every six weeks and spend an entire weekend with him- all day Saturday, half a day Sunday, and then drive home, since he’s in Portland and we’re in Seattle. So we would come to him with four, or five things, and ask him what he thought of them. He’s really good at just picking up and playing. It wouldn’t matter if the parts were in 13, or 9, or whatever. He doesn’t really think that way, he just hears the part and is like ‘got it!’. He can count, he’s not some savant, he can do his job. He just feels it first and then locks it in. It’s great.

But he would also come at the parts in a different way that’s really cool, so we would record that and then mix it up, or cut it, or trim it, or play too long, whatever. So there was a lot of coming up with ideas, having a couple really dirty days of tracking and recording, and locking things in, and then sitting on those ideas for six weeks. Then we would come back and practice those things with Nick, and perfecting the ideas from last time, and do a bunch of new recordings. So we would sort of tip-toe and then run, run, run; and tip-toe, and then run, run, run. It was hard to get a real strong groove of writing in the way that we did for “Objects Without Pain”. Most of that record was already written by the time Nick joined. But we ended up writing around five extra songs just out of sheer enthusiasm to be playing with Nick because he’s so fun to play with. Those became those extra splits and EPs.

This time was a bit different. We would try and record a bunch of stuff and then sit on it and repeat. Everything was built on these small bunches of creativity, and I think I was worried early on that because we were having so much time between playing as a band that whatever we came up with was not going to feel cohesive. We like the whole record to also be a song, to have a shape to it. You want a good pattern. I was certain we weren’t going to have that, but I was very surprised by the time we got done recording. We made something that worked, this is great!

You said before there was more of an ongoing theme too, right? You didn’t switch gears mid-album and start going into politics and Communism.

I think this next record is going to sort of be as close to a political record that I would be able to write? Clearly, anyone who is annoyed by my Instagram story sharing, which is absurd I am aware… it won’t be that. But Instagram sucks and if I’m going to use it for anything it’s to throw my wildly left-wing propaganda at you. The point of Great Falls art has always been, once Shane and I figured out what we wanted the band to be about lyrically, is that I’ve always been hesitant to bring politics into the band. Because that is something Shane and I tend to disagree about the most. But the point of the band, artistically, has always been Demian’s inside anxiety. It’s my anxiety of the personal and trying to make it universal. So I take my personal, specific anxieties that fuck with me, and try to present them in a way that is very specific so that other people can hear those very specific details and say, ‘yeah, that’s not exactly me, but that’s kind of something I understand’. It’s a way to communicate.

I have no problem with being a political band, and I can write endless amounts about Gaza, and Sudan, and capitalism, and what to do with AI data centers, and what sort of poison to put in tech bro’s drinks. I’ll just get crazier and crazier as I go. But that’s not really the point of the band. That’s not what I want to use it for. But I have kind of figured out a way to talk about some of the political things in a way that is authentic to the way that I like to communicate. It’s not the way that Dylan from Struggle would write it, and it’s not the way that Manliftingbanner would talk about it, or even Martin from Los Crudos. They were able to talk about politics in a way that is very personal and very interesting to me. I don’t think me talking about the Labor Theory of Value, is interesting. No one wants to hear me talk about that.

The last thing I wanted to ask is if Shane has ever hit you with his bass?

Yeah. It’s happened. A few times. The worst time was we were playing with Spaceboy at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco in the early 2000’s. He swung and hit his bass on the bottom of my chin when I was trying to sing. I slammed my teeth together so hard that a chunk of one of my teeth shattered in my mouth. So I’m standing there singing with pieces of my tooth falling out and bleeding everywhere. It doesn’t look that bad now, you can’t really tell now. But this chunk just ripped off and started bleeding everywhere. It looked really cool, but it did not feel very good.

I imagine he’s gotten better at avoiding you over the years?

He busted out Andrew (Gormley, drummer of Playing Enemy) tooth really bad at a show. He dove over the drum set at a Playing Enemy show. Andrew did not see that coming. He did not expect that to happen and he hit him right in the mouth and chipped two of his front teeth. He was pretty mad.

Shane’s still pretty crazy, but even he has mellowed out a little bit. We’re all getting older. He did dive into the crowd at a show we played over this last weekend. He dove over these two guys. He made eye contact with them and basically was like, ‘I’m gonna get ya!’ and they moved right out of the way, and this girl was standing behind them and he just hit her right in the head with his bass. It started to bleed. But she was in one of the bands that played, and she was very nice, and was like, ‘that was awesome, you guys ruled!’

Photo by J Donovan Malley

You could have received a very different reaction.

We all apologized to her. I said, ‘I’m so sorry that Shane is the way he is’. And then Nick says, ‘I’m so sorry that Shane is the way he is!’ And then Shane comes over is like, ‘did I hurt you?’ But he was also very apologetic.

You have a solid 25 years of apologizing on the resume.

He has apologized a lot. He’s given away a lot of free shirts after breaking someone’s nose or skull.

And that’s the real reason you lose money on the road.

We have to give away all our merch.

I don’t know about any of you reading this, but when you come across people in every day life- work colleagues, civilians, family, whatever- and you get on the topic of music, and you got nothing to relate with them on. I’m quick to usually state that I listen to a ton of music, so they start listing off all sorts of bands, but like pop music, or something really popular and I have absolutely no idea of what they’re talking about. And then I start to think that maybe my musical interests are not actually that wide. But take a gander at this month’s batch of reviews and perhaps that self-assessment is inaccurate. Yeah, it’s pretty much all guitar music, yet the variety is all over the map from grindy hardcore to slow-drip sludge rock, to avant-garde saxophone punk. Life is a rich tapestry folks, and if you’re only paying attention to the big patterns and not the beauty of the smaller threads then you’re missing out.

IRON LININGS, “Urban Abyss”

It may be known as the Gateway To the West, or some other such name, but I’m petitioning St. Louis to consider re-branding as ‘Riff City’ solely because Iron Linings exists within it’s boundaries and has delivered us their latest album “Urban Abyss”. The first few songs on this album ought to attest to this prowess with their ham-fisted take on post-hardcore and non-stop pulverizing of chunky dirges. But it’s not like one heavy part consistently followed by even heavier parts, and constantly upping the ante. They make room for melody via adroit bass runs laying out some variation to the bangover-inducing riffing. “Sequencer” being a perfect example of this, and it’s mid-song break into an atmospheric and melodic palette cleanser. The majority of it though- think contemporaries like Ils, Tosser, big dudes with beards, lumberjacks, and for older heads reppin’ the Midwest, Suicide Note. This is a pretty damn solid follow up to their other exceptional records, so I highly recommend it as well.

CONSTANT LOVERS, “Troposhere” EP

If this is your first foray into Seattle’s Constant Lovers I’d advise you to stop and go back to their last LP, “Manifesting Now” for a more well-rounded idea of their sound. Because I’ll let you know right now the lyrics for the first track on this new EP are kinda hokey. It’s a decent song, but… uh… I’m not sure I can roll with repeated decrees of ‘bounce on me, bounce me to the moon.’ So don’t let that stop you from exploring the rest. The second song, “Cold Like Space”, has a thick rhythm and odd percussion akin to drummer Ben Verellen’s other band Helms Alee (where he’s not the drummer). In fact, not to be dismissive of how unique Constant Lovers are on their own, because they really are their own thing, but most of these songs have some big Helms Alee vibes going on. From the plodding drums and thunderous bass to the soaring vocals and overall gigantic sound maybe it’s just influence through osmosis, sharing members and being in the same town. This definitely sounds heavier than their excellent last full length where they were more experimental and shifting gears from song to song with varied, yet cohesive, ideas. While the opening track is lyrically a bit too silly for me the music feels more consistent with what I would describe as Constant Lovers ‘sound’. In addition to duelling vocals there’s a lot of saxophone, and am I hearing a flute here and there? It’s heaviness mixed with sassiness and horns and nothing sounds quite like them overall.

DUMB WAITER, “Change”

This is my first time hearing this Virginia band, but apparently they have a fairly deep catalog of releases. The big difference between this and their bevy of other material is this record has vocals while their previous material is instrumental. But hearing how strange and off-kilter this band is I think the vocals are preferred. Dumb Waiter write weird, heavy music rife with saxophone and unsettling darkness. It’s similar to the avant-garde sax-metal of Yakuza/Bruce Lamont mixed with the creative genre-bending of Constant Lovers (who you may recall from the review above this one). Growling noise rock styled bass lunges and groans before blast beats eviscerate the mood, followed by glass-shattering affected skronky guitar that shred any leftover semblance of a form into ribbons. On top of it all are the vocals that fluctuate between shouted barks and morose, almost spoken commands. What a weird album! But it’s all very alluring because they’re doing something wildly different and unique. Avant-garde noise rock/metal/saxophone mood-building sludge rock? I have no clue. Throw it all in a blender and somehow you get this awesome smoothie of mystery ingredients.

SPIT VISION, “The Morning Has Gold In It’s Mouth”

The economy of having a two-person band must be great- easy decision making, less gear to haul, you can potentially tour in a small vehicle and save money, random people being more amenable to putting up a duo on tour rather than an entire van of smelly bums. I’ve heard my share of duos playing heavy music who are awesome- Big Business, Liquid Limbs, Austerity Program. They rise to the challenge of filling out an entire band’s sound with just two people. And there are plenty of bands who also try going the duo route and are unable to accomplish this, and thus, don’t end up sounding all that great, like something is (obviously) missing. Spit Vision do not have this problem. If anything you look at the band photo and think three other members slept in for the shoot that day. That is to say, as a duo they fill out a massive sound, and then some, for just a couple dudes. Comprised of primarily bass and drums at their fastest/heaviest they evoke Cursed and Trap Them, though at times there’s some more technical flourishes akin to the members other (full) band Sunflo’er too. It’s a 10 song ride through dirty and sometimes chaotic, down-tuned crushing hardcore that impressively says plenty with just two people.

THOUSANDAIRE, “Cowards”

Thousandaire are not a super active band. They don’t play a lot of shows. They barely exist on social media, god forbid. But man oh man, are they good. If you’re into the slowcore thing (or as us old people used to affectionately call ‘slacker rock’) this is a band to really give it up for, but not too enthusiastically. You gotta keep in character with the lackadaisical nature of the music. If stuff like Codeine or Seam, or maybe even Dinosaur Jr slowed waaaay down, sounds like your idea of a good time then definitely consider adding Thousandaire to your listening rotation. This new collection of songs (with one of them being an alternate version of “Coward” from their last record) is consistent with their previous material- songs that manage to be both gentle and grating in an emotionally gratifying sort of way. They can lean into the most easy-going melody, but add in so much fuzzy distortion it sounds like your speaker is being ripped apart. Or they pick up the pace a bit on a song like “Treehouse”, which may as well be dudes just jamming in their basement and recording it as is. They don’t really do the loud-quiet-loud thing so much as they splice them together consistently. It’s a simultaneous anomaly that I find really intriguing with this group and it keeps me coming back to their sound.

LOCKSTEP, “I Know What I Saw”

At this point so many bands fall under the description of ‘heavy shoegaze’ that I’m starting to lose faith in their ability to excite me. I really do enjoy bands that are shoehorned into that sort of category (for better or for worse), but if you’re all going to be using those flat, breathy vocals like they all do you gotta bring some other highlights to even it out- if those guitars are supposed to be ‘shimmering’ then they better be lit up like a sky full of shooting stars. If that bass is going to be bringing the ‘heavy’ part it better sound like Eyehategod where the player looks like he just left the set of “Apocalypse Now” wearing a necklace of severed ears. Many bands of this ilk are starting to dull out all the edges and sound just plain. Lockstep may not be checking off every item on my wishlist (and why should they?), but I’ll give them credit for leaning into that sound enough. If anything, they’re bringing an element of slow, precise tension-building like Kowloon Walled City at times and that seems like enough of a deviation from the standard to raise an eyebrow. And I feel like I’m also hearing some of the polished sheen of groups like Shiner popping up here and there. So I feel like this group’s influences (whether intentional or accidental) are a bit out of the norm for most bands of this particular ilk, yet shouldn’t be at all, and I wholeheartedly appreciate that. Do the thing well, and take cues from outside sources that still fit in a way and make something unique.

DRY WEDDING, “The Back Of Beyond”

It should come as no surprise that goth-y rock exists here in Portland. The rainy gloominess that permeates a solid half of the year (or more) is the perfect backdrop for sullen, moody misanthropes to excise their inner sad sack into song. But Dry Wedding input a degree of swampy heaviness, like it’s humidity hanging on each note the way that a band like Wailin’ Storms absolutely buries their own goth-y tunes in (they’re from the south, totally allowed) and a bit of dusty spaghetti western twang that makes this band geographically befuddling, sound-wise. Are they from the desert, you might ask yourself? Do they reside in a river boat, lit only by gas lantern on the banks of Cape Fear River? No, they’re right here in the land of quirky weirdos sipping oat lattes in curated house plant shops… and The Wipers. So give it up for these rain-soaked murder ballad songwriters who just happen to also enjoy that southern gothic heat and sun-baked skulls in the sagebrush. This is their third record and most of these songs err a bit on the longer side. It takes a bit of patience, but it’s rewarded with a weird, emerging inner desire to draw blood and howl at the moon.

NATURE UNVEILED, “So Much For Progress” EP

I know my highly refined taste is the envy of reviewers everywhere (note, sarcasm) but I can’t help, every once in awhile, to give it up for some primordial caveman shit. Especially when some hometown pride is involved. I like to keep up with what folks are up to in my old stomping grounds and Nature Unveiled carry on a tradition of bitter, socio-politically conscious mean-ass crunchy metallic hardcore. What separates this from a lot of the stuff I grew up on in the area is how their songs are frequently brief and throw in a considerable dose of crossover and grind to their beefy hardcore. It sounds raw and, at times, evokes more recent Napalm Death, and I’m all for it. They could just as easily fit in on a bill opening for Nausea, as they could warming up for Merauder (if time travel were no issue). You get seven tracks here in about the time it would take to permanently ruin several Flock cameras in your town.

Nikki Post from In Lieu, 2026, photo John Oakes

In Lieu may not be a band that’s on the tips of everyone’s tongues, but one of the things I like to do here from time to time is shine a light on the lesser-known, or hyper-local groups so that people outside their immediate region can discover something new. In Lieu came to my attention as a surprise highlight of Minneapolis’ Caterwaul Fest in 2024. I’m pretty sure they were slotted as the second band on a Sunday…. not the best placement for getting new fans to find out about you. While most attendees local or otherwise were nursing hangovers from the night before I was in attendance bright and early because…. well, I’m a nerd who doesn’t drink and prefers coffee and an early morning run to hugging the toilet, barfing out the previous nights over-indulgences, or mistakes. So there I was, killing time in the sunny courtyard where a handful of others arrived with no other plans. I truly do enjoy checking out the locals when I’m in another town though because chances are that’s the only place you will catch them. In Lieu were definitely locals and as I watched them get set up with no idea of what they would sound like I thought ‘maybe rockabilly’ based entirely on band leader Nikki Post’s large semi-hollow body Ibenez guitar. And then they proceeded to pulverize me with shouted and screamed grunge-y punk and chaotic noise rock. They were just great.

As I later discovered this was right when they were really starting to gel as a band after a number of lineup shifts over the years. Yet through it all the vocalist/guitarist has kept the band rolling and can now boast a solid, consistent lineup for some time now. That has resulted in their most recent LP, “Hooligan”, released on Minneapolis mainstay label Learning Curve last year, being a high water mark of their catalog.

I’ve been wanting to spread the word about this band as much as I can since their absolutely blistering follow up set at last year’s Caterwaul event (at a much better time slot I might add) and the release of their album and I’m finally getting around to it.

Plus, it always makes for an interesting conversation when discussing origins with those much younger than myself and realizing no matter how or where you get in there are always parallels between generations. What follows is a well-rounded idea of what In Lieu bring to the table and primary songwriter/ front person Nikki Post’s tenacity to keep it going, often brushing off her own hard work and instead thanking her bandmates. It’s a modest gesture, but I guarantee their music is anything but.

In Lieu, Caterwaul, Minneapolis 2024

I think by and large people outside of Minneapolis probably know who your band is due to your most recent record. But In Lieu has been a band, with a number of releases, for awhile now. It’s been around 7 or 8 years?

Yeah. I think next year will be the decade mark because we put out our first album in 2017.

The first time I heard of the band was a couple years ago at Caterwaul in Minneapolis. It seems like there’s been this big jump from the first six years or so to now. Where do you see the band at this point?

I think this was always where I wanted it to go and I had no idea how to do it! Me and my original drummer that I started with, out of my first band in high school, had played at The Garage in Bloomington (MN), where a lot of earlier bands had started out. I met a lot of people through there. The first iteration of the band, our first album was called “Failing In the Right Direction” because it just a crash-test idea, ya know? I started a lot of those songs just playing by myself acoustically, either at coffee shops or The Garage. I knew at some point I wanted to switch to something heavier. But I didn’t end up doing that until I met a lot of the people in those bands in high school. Then I moved up to the city at 18 and I was just going to shows all the time. That was a big influence to me.

I also heard about some of my favorite bands while I would be out on tour with bands from my local scene in the earlier days. I think there was a lot of exposure all at once.

We’ve also been through a lot of lineup changes as well that obviously changed the songs. I write most of them, and have written most of them, up until this point. And now Kyle, our other guitarist, writes as well. So that also changed things a lot. Kyle and I have complimentary tastes in writing style, so I think that was something that locked in this last album. We had a lot of fun writing together.

So that leads to a couple questions, first off- is Bloomington part of the Minneapolis area?

It’s a suburb right outside. That’s where I saw some of my first shows, in Burnsville and Bloomington. I didn’t really even make it up to shows in the city until I was 18 or older. And then I was at a lot of venues where you get exposed to more bands, I’d read posters and flyers up on the wall and think, ‘who’s that?’

A big band for me that I found while on my first tour was Melvins. We were staying with some people who were playing “Stoner Witch” and I really took to it, and they’re my favorite band now, and I think they’re super influential on how we sound now.

When you say your first tour is this with In Lieu?

Yeah, first In Lieu.

OK, I had thought In Lieu hadn’t toured much at all, or were unable to.

We don’t go out as much as I would like to. You have to find a good mix of people who are willing to take a lot of time off of their job. And life being the way it is, especially now, it’s harder and harder to get away. But we also wanted to focus and get to the sound that we’re at now. I think we finally feel really engaged with it. We’re excited enough about our material now to try and take it places. We plan on getting out to NY pretty soon actually. We’re trying to make some moves.

Having played with a bunch of folks over the years in different versions of the band the lineup that exists now has been going for two or three years at this point?

Mano, our drummer, has been with me the longest. He’s been in the band for about six years now. Kyle has been here for around four years. Sam, our bassist, is our newest member, and he’s been around for awhile too. But the next record we’re writing will be his first time writing with us.

I guess I would say in regards to old stuff versus newer stuff, those older recordings aren’t too far afield from “Hooligan” (the latest LP). But I think “Kettle”, which came out a bit before “Hooligan”, is the one that sounds the most different because it sounds like it was recorded a bit differently. But I was curious if that was the first time writing and recording with some of the folks who are in the band now?

We had a different bassist at the time who recorded “Kettle”. But it was the first time we figured out what noise rock was and we hadn’t heard of it before. Because prior to that we were just trying to write our fast little punk, two minute songs. We were just focused on being fast and angry. But we then figured out fast, angry, and weird and that opened a whole new door!

But I feel like on “Just Devastated” (EP just before “Hooligan”) we started absorbing better influences and from there, into “Hooligan” feels right.

It definitely feels like, at this point, a band that has been playing together for awhile and knows what they want to do. However, I wanted to go farther back if we can. You had mentioned Melvins being a big gateway band for you even though you’d already been playing music for awhile by then. But what would you say was your entry point to DIY, or punk, or heavy music initially?

So I went to my very first house show, probably around 2015 or 2016. We walked downstairs to the basement and there was this big poster on the wall behind the drum kit of this girl with a mohawk looking over her shoulder. And I thought, ‘who is that? That’s probably the coolest girl in the world’. Someone said it was Brody Dalle of the Distillers and I went right down the rabbit hole. “Coral Fang” was my favorite record. I actually started out playing bass in my first band, so when I was first learning bass that was the record I tried to learn all the way through and teach myself. So I love that record. I think I can safely attribute her to the type of musician, especially vocally, that I wanted to be.

I think The Distillers are a big entry point for a lot of people of a certain age. We’re probably very far apart in age so I have completely different entry points, and I think there’s a tendency for older people who see the entry points for those 10 years or more younger than them and find them to be unrelatable. But my age group also has to take into account that when we were teenagers people older than us definitely thought our entry points weren’t legitimate, or not authentic. I’m not super familiar with The Distillers, but I know they were a big deal for a lot of people at a certain time. So, upon checking that out you went straight to ‘I have to do this, I have to play music now’?

photo by John Oakes

Yeah. I got my first acoustic guitar when I was around 13. But I didn’t take it too seriously at first. I figured I’d just learn the five or six basic chords. Then I played bass for awhile in my first band, and then I switched back to guitar because I like writing too much. Then I guess I was just lucky enough to pick up some people that were willing to try and translate my silly acoustic songs into rock songs. But then I had to figure out how to write rock songs. I wanted to figure out how to do that. I wanted to figure out how to scream and not sound like a young lady.

When people talk about the first albums that we put out I always feel a bit cringe-y about them. I guess it’s because I didn’t have the vocal capacity I wanted back then.

I’d like to go into a bit about Minneapolis on the whole as well. That town has such a massive lineage of important bands and influences. Being from there, are there any particular musical influences you are particularly proud of, or take influence from?

Probably The Replacements. They deserve that spot for me. I actually live not super far from the house they all had. That’s kind of cool. There’s also an event every year that Turf Club does where a bunch of local front people will do one song each of whatever record they’re commemorating that year, so I’ve done that a couple times where I got to sing a Replacements song. So I would probably credit them.

I feel pretty proud to come from the town they’re from. And Prince too, obviously. We’re always proud of Prince.

As the de facto band leader how many tasks are you taking on that you did not expect to do?

I don’t think I am a good social media person. And I know, in this day and age that seems to be very important. A lot of promoting is expected to be done through you. There are also small things, like the band always wants to stay intense during a set. We think a lot about transitions between songs, and the order of the songs, and how to keep energy going. And I hate to think about putting a tuning time in our set, or a talk break. I feel like I have to say something funny, or important, or the stress of forgetting to thank somebody, or the venue, or one of the bands. It’s just little things I take on that I don’t think about. Planning tours is always really hard because there’s so much back and forth communication. Being on the phone stresses me out a lot.

You do have to treat it like a business at times, and you have to run it well. There’s a point where it’s not just about the fun anymore. You love it, but you have to prove you love it with some work. That’s a lot.

I don’t know if I’ve ever come across someone who mentioned having to think about what they’re going to say between songs as being a stressor, but it makes sense. The art of the between song banter is a tough field to navigate.

It’s like I have to be a musician and a comedian! I’m not good at that part at all. I even have trouble when we have to make an online post and I feel like I have to say something eye-catching to announce that we put something out, or we’re playing a show. I think a lot of that is maybe having a good social presence. But we’re sort of quiet, sweet folk, and I think it’s hard for us to have that sort of ‘band personality’.

It is a strange thing to have to consider all the time now. ‘How are we putting ourselves out to the world? How do they perceive us?’ In some ways it’s very natural, because you’re the people from around town, and you go to shows, and your friends come out so they know you. But in other ways I think most bands would rather just focus on playing and not worry about all the other shit.

We’re definitely that way. But I also like the idea of a band that can just come up and play and not have to say anything. But I think we’re too nice to do that. We want to say hi and thank others.

It certainly takes a degree of confidence to be able to it and not say a thing. Melvins are a perfect example. I think I’ve seen them five or six times and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard them utter a word between songs.

They’ve earned it.

I saw them once when Big Business was a part of the Melvins and they were on tour together. Big Business was finishing their set, like on their last song, and before they were finished Buzz Osborne walks through the crowd and gets right up on stage and plugs in as they’re still finishing and seemed like he was waiting for them to stop so they could just roll right into the Melvins set. And I’m not sure if that was rude or not, but that’s maybe the epitome of no between song banter.

That man is my hero. I get to see them again tomorrow. With Tomahawk. And Tomahawk was a big band for me in high school. I’m crazy excited about it.

But I guess that is the dilemma of being the band leader, where you have to decide what to say, or not to say, and how you do it.

I do also have fantastic bandmates. We’ve all kind of settled into our roles. I do a lot of the administrative stuff. I still write a lot. I still book shows. But, for instance, Kyle is great at graphic design and editing. So we will often make our own merch. We like to keep things in-house. We’ve made our own music videos. we all have roles. Mano is our certified sunshine bringer. He makes sure we’re not too hard on ourselves. Sam is just a work horse. We love Sam.

That sounds like a good situation. It sounds as if perhaps before this lineup took shape you were doing the vast majority of all these things?

I think I feel like I had to because I started it. And I’ve been through a lot of lineups before and working with different people in my local scene. But as they started getting more busy with their other bands I had to find people who were a little more available. That happened a lot and I did end up having to take on the majority of band tasks. I think I take pride in that too. We kept it going long enough and people have been interested enough in what we’re writing to continue to fill the gaps. I’ve been able to work with a lot of cool people and make a lot of great friends. But these are kind of my forever guys, and that feels really cool too because that really opens up the door for the creative end of it. We have a lot of fun writing together, and we have fun recording. Things become way more enjoyable when you have people you can just really lock in with creatively.

photo by John Oakes

That does sound like an ideal situation. But as things got more comfortable with the current band was it difficult to maybe give up a little of that control?

The more lineups I went through, and the more changes the band had to go through I would take it more personally when it wasn’t doing well. So it mattered a lot more to me to have the right people, and with writing it was a big deal to me to work with Kyle. Kyle is fantastic. Kyle moved here from Alabama randomly and came to a show I was playing opening for New Primals at Palmers, and I just saw him in the crowd and I thought, ‘this kid has got to be cool’. We hit it off and he joined the band shortly afterwards. He happened to be an incredible guitarist and he has made a huge difference in our sound. And from the experience of him being in the band he’s kind of my best buddy now.

But I think it was easier once I met somebody like that who I could trust and had the same kind of taste about where we wanted to go. I knew we wanted to make this new thing and it was pretty easy to open it up and have another vocal. So we both do vocals now. It’s another instrument to play with and I write most of the vocal stuff. But he just comes in and he does it, and he’s good spirited about it. It’s a very comfortable environment that we have with each other.

Well, and now if something goes wrong you can just pass the blame around.

I’ll keep going regardless!

By mid-summer is anyone thinking about sitting down and examining music? No, people just want something they can take with them outside and do outside stuff. So summer can be a lull for new stuff sometimes. But yours truly says, ‘why not both things?’ There’s room for it all. And this summer has led to some very anticipated listens for me, as well as a couple things I did not expect to be as moved by as I was. So I’ll keep it short and encourage you to give these varied releases a shot and see what you think of them all.

REGULATOR WATTS, “kWh”

I’ve got to say, the over/under rate of reunion records not sucking over the last ten years or so has yielded a good return. It used to be a far more dicey outlook when your favorite band from 20 years back up and got the itch to get the gang back together for a nostalgia trip and 50/50 they would end up embarrassing themselves and their legacy. However, perhaps with the advent of file sharing making it easier for full-grown adults with responsibilities to properly hash out good from bad ideas, I often feel confident in broken up bands giving it another go. Another thing I have noticed during this last decade is also bands that are barely remembered making their return in a ‘never would have guessed that one’ move. Those ones tend to have the best reunion records. Maybe it’s because they’re not under as much public pressure? Either way, Regulator Watts, the short-lived DC band from the later 90’s reconvened for a few sessions and came up with this record and it’s every bit ‘them’ as you would ever expect- howling, churning guitars, adroit and flexible bass runs, cleverly pummelling drums; all with a deep moodiness and texture so thick you need a hedge trimmer just to chew into the surface. Opening track “It’s Gonna Happen” is everything anyone who ever enjoyed this band would want rolled into a song- the chaotic crash and bang on full volume, echo-y guitars and haunting vocals serving as a quick break, and a strained, exhaustive denouement that drags to a close to end things. From there each song on this 5-track record takes those individual aspects the band is known for and emphasizes one of those aspects- the mysterious instrumental, the slow and lurching heft with explosive chorus, the dub-centric pulse with feedback drone. It’s all there and it’s wonderfully exciting to hear Regulator Watts making something again, whether it’s a flash in the pan, or it continues into something longer lasting.

HIRS/ FED ASH, “I Am Body Horror”

This one has been in the cooker for quite awhile and I’m happy to see it’s finally seeing the light of day. I believe it was recorded last summer? Anyway, as far as collaborations go, both HIRS Collective and Fed Ash approach extreme music from a very similar angle. Both rely on just vocals, guitars, and drums (in HIRS case, a drum machine typically) playing grindcore and powerviolence type music. In fact, both bands share members as well (at least in a touring capacity). So when both bands join up to form a Voltron-like megalith of grinding prowess, when each band sort of sounds similar, how do the results vary and make for something unique? Listen, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, OK? They can just slay. It’s alright. There’s little differences though- HIRS are really good at adding essentially metallic hardcore breakdowns here and there (and not the shitty, played out boring kind) to their speed; Fed Ash excel at including off-center, out there dynamics to their grind (think Discordance Axis worship done legit). Lyrically, I’ve generally seen Jenna from HIRS approach topics more bluntly and direct while Allie from Fed Ash has penned more esoteric diatribes. But the overall theme, or topic here, seems to be around body dysmorphia and existence within one’s skin across the 10 tracks in it’s roughly 20 minutes. “God Defied” might be the best example on here of where those little differences shine the most as you can hear where (I think) each band is bringing their individualistic personality to the table. But the whole thing is one blasting screed after another that I find quite enjoyable. Most people by now know HIRS Collective, but if you haven’t heard the Fed Ash LP from last year (“Rotting Exuberance”) and you dig insane, technically deft grind I highly suggest giving it a shot.

QUICKSAND, “Bring On the Psychics”

It sounds wild to say, but at this point Quicksand has now released more new music since their reformation than when they were originally a band. So where are they at, some 13 years or so into being a fully functional band on their second go-around? I’d say, like I’ve said about their other post-reunion records, we’re never going to get OG Quicksand. People grow, they get older, and as two of the three members (last I checked) have been full time career musicians for probably 30 years now you don’t want to write the same thing over and over. However, there’s no mistaking that Walter is Walter. No one sounds quite like him, no one plays quite like him (many have tried). No one plays quite like Alan Cage either. There’s only one Sergio. So it’s always going to be Quicksand. So even though the bulk of Quicksand’s music (like over their entire span as a band) has been written as a three-piece this is really the first time where it sounds like they wrote an album intended to be played as a three-piece. And I think that’s the thing that throws me off here because there’s nothing quite like hearing Quicksand with two guitars. It sounds amazing. Of all their reunion material “Bring On the Psychics” may be their most riffy/groove-oriented album, as well as most direct musically and lyrically. But it’s missing some of that background noise, texture, and fills that truly separate them from the rest, and it’s a defining element (ya know, in the details) that is not nearly as present here as on other records. At times they sound closer to bands they greatly influenced (namely Snapcase and Refused) than they do to the untouchable sound they fostered. I’m enjoying this record the more I listen to it- “Agency” and “Supercollider” (as previously heard on their split with Hot Water Music) are a couple of the better songs the band has written in a long time. But I truly feel the move is to bring on the second guitar player!

FIDDLEHEAD, “Baby, I’ll Change” EP

Fiddlehead has gone from a band that I was skeptical of their intentions for whatever dumb reason was floating around in my brain to a band that I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to hearing whatever new material they release. Often, when a band does a single, or short EP between albums it’s more of a placeholder or lead up to a new album. You’ll get one banger that ends up on the next LP and maybe a halfway decent cover, or some throwaway track. The release exists simply to remind fans of proof of life. I’d like to put any thought of Fiddlehead committing to this playbook to rest in that they have released a three song EP where each song on it is pretty great. Not a dud in the bunch. Whether or not they aim to re-release any of these songs on their next album remains to be seen. Regardless of what the future holds this has all the elements you’ve likely grown to love about this group- heartfelt sung/shouted vocals, exceptionally well-played and constructed songs that are basically melodic rock n’ roll with the mindset of hardcore kids in middle age. Mortgage-paying hardcore that speaks to the whimsical at heart. Does that sound lame? I assure you, it’s not. It’s good stuff.

TOTAL MELTDOWN, EP 2

Upon the first few bars of this new EP by New York’s Total Meltdown will have you thinking they’re some beatdown tough guy hardcore band, but just give it a minute. Soon you will realize they’re pulling way more from the Gavin Van Vlack school of heavy-but-off-kilter post-hardcore than they are from say, Madball or Bulldoze. In fact, half the songs on this record could be a variation on Burn’s slower/heavier emotive juggernaut “The Bait”, save for fourth track “Syntax” (a perfect stand-in for the greatly missed Stillsuit) and closer “Far Gone” (mixing some Rollins Band sludge and Deadguy mania). The songs are at once menacing and lurching, but filled with groove and dense rhythm. The added question mark of the art deco/noir-style artwork will further throw off listeners thinking they’re in for a punch to the side of the head at a CB’s matinee. Going back to the Van Vlack worship they’re not quite as melodic as Burn, or as off-the-rails and chaotic as Die 116, but fall somewhere in the heavier end of that niche. OK, so they got a bit of NYHC going on as well. What are you going to do? They’re lifelong NY/LI heads, it’s going to seep in one way or another. But rather than being simple and direct (nothing wrong with that) they add some layers and texture to great effect. This is one for those who love NYHC but are looking for something a bit deeper and more inventive, which I’ve always loved. This is a step up from their last EP, which also rips by the way. That one felt a bit more Crown Of Thornz-ish to me. This is just a bit more developed with more clarity of purpose it feels.

UNLETTERED, “Devil’s Bowl”

As far as I am aware Unlettered exists as a project of primarily one person, though there’s hints at some additional collaboration and the occasional female vocal coming in here and there. I explored their last album on a lark and was pleasantly entertained by it. I feel as if this new one does operate within the same framework, but feels a little more geared towards the electronics/digital side, especially in the first half of the record. If you’re at all familiar with how Beauty Pill has wonderfully melded various electronic elements and still sounds kind of like a melodic DC indie band (think post-2000s Dischord) this kind of echoes that and then then throws in a lot of Unwound influence. As noted, things begin to pick up more for me by the time the more rocking post-punk vibe of “Slide Bite” rolls around and then into the more angular and disjointed (but equally as quick with the tempo) “Fraction Anthem”. Things take a turn once we hit “Saudade”, a sort of dark and spooky piano-driven upbeat song with a strong and pulsing bass line. “Green Blood” is a languid and sanguine psychedelic stroll entering almost Lungfish territory, save for fractured digital effects punctuating the chorus. The album closes with “The Ormolu Gaze”, a love letter to Unwound’s melancholy and melodic bass runs and anxiety-inducing jittery guitar work. It’s an enjoyable listen overall with varied influences that have connecting threads that work well together.

ARSON, s/t

I’m pretty certain this is dudes from Colonial Wound. Which would also make it part of a family tree of other fairly short lived projects out of the Jacksonville, FL area including Drag Pattern and Suntouch House, who all have a similar sort of thing happening. Also, this is obviously the only band ever to be named Arson. I can’t believe no one else ever thought of using that. All kidding aside, if you have any familiarity with the aforementioned bands you’ll pick up on a variation of a sound that has a through line consisting of that strain of heavy hardcore that possesses a metallic tendency, but done in a way that is noisier, uglier, and thus it’s own kind of harsh. They recorded a bunch of short songs that have all the chunky heaviness of off-kilter bruisers like Groundwork with some of the speed you’d find on any Converge record. You have no reason not to check this out.

WAILIN’ STORMS, “The Arsonist”

I was caught by surprise at this new offering from the wonderful, yet black-hearted purveyors of sweltering southern goth rock, Wailin’ Storms. They have been a consistent source of quality for as long as I have been aware of them, yet they always seem to fly a bit under the radar for most. But let me tell you- they are a force on the live front. You could have them play in a meat locker and just from the sheer volume they play at, the bluesy-but-harsh nature of their sound, and the conviction of their intent the walls would be sweating feverishly. To paint a sort of picture of their sound, think Samhain but less relegated to the world of metal mixed with Young Widows without as much stomp and noise rock. It’s addition through subtraction I guess? On this new record they’re more soulful than ever, and yet once you get past the midway point “Never Rest” breaks into an anti-war hardcore sing-along gallop (think more Final Gasp and less Sick Of It All for clarification), followed by the slow and sludgy creepy-crawl of “Saved” . The album closes with the piano-driven “It’s All Dark Where Your Eyes Used To Be”, a slow, sung, sad affair. You can really dip in at any of Wailin’ Storms releases (I think this is album number five?) and you’ll find a similar thing happening for the most part and it’s all good. Fun fact: this was recorded entirely analog by Matt Talbott from Hum and it sounds quite excellent I must say!

We got some good news and some bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news.

As many of you probably know by now, several weeks ago the world lost a wonderful person we know as Rebecca Burchette, the phenomenal bassist of Baltimore’s own Multicult (amongst other bands and projects over the years), after a long back-and-forth battle with cancer. Her sound and playing was singular and forceful. Rebecca was also an incredible talent with electronics and wiring and was known for her business Robo Pedals where she hand-made custom guitar pedals for others. I had the great fortune to be able to release a record for Multicult and got to book shows for them on many occasions.

There will be a memorial held for her on July 24th in Maryland. See the following info:

“On Friday July 24th, 2026 at 2 PM, we gather in remembrance and celebration of Rebecca Burchette. Please join us on the Pavilion at the Carderock Recreation Area, in Carderock, Maryland, overlooking the Potomac River.

This can be found on Google Maps by searching the ‘Carderock Recreation Area’. The official address is 9500 MacArthur Blvd. Bethesda, MD 20817, though the Pavilion itself is just around the corner from that physical address.

All questions and comments can be addressed to moldycolt@yahoo.com - To all her friends and loved ones, we look forward to gathering with you and sharing photos, videos, stories and everything else wonderful about her and the life she shared with us all.”

Edging in the hospital bed

OK, other bad news: our pals in Edging had to cancel their West/West Coast summer tour as vocalist Faith Callaway sustained a pretty serious fracture in their foot right before the tour was to start. Bummer. The good side is that their tour plans for later this year (the dates you can find below) are still on and Faith has just had surgery to repair the injury. But they’re sidelined for awhile from playing shows, as well as their day-to-day business. That all being said, there’s a Gofundme in place to help Faith get through this mess just a bit easier. Check the link. And then go see them when they’re back playing shows again! Heck, go get their new LP while you’re at it.

Faith from Edging GoFundMe

https://gofund.me/f25f580c7

Alright, on to some good news now. Very briefly, if you have enjoyed this substack you know I print a lot of the content from this site (as well as some that doesn’t make it onto this site) as bi-annual physical zines right? Well, maybe do some catching up and get a couple issues. You can get issues 2 and 3 now for a discounted price if you buy them together. Here’s the link: Hex 2 and 3 combo

And if you missed it last week, Portland’s own HISS have debuted the second single from their forthcoming LP, “A Cheapened Crown”. Take a listen to “Buried In Current”, a true ripper of a song. They got a couple local shows coming up and the LP will be out officially on August 21st. Get yr orders in now.

SHOWS

HISS

8.9.26- Portland, OR at Polaris Hall w/ Porcelain

9.4.26- Portland, OR at Alchemy Cider (1 year anniversary) w/ Helms Alee, Lord Dying, Ils, Hog, Kinghorn, more

10.2.26- official record release show (details to follow)

EDGING

w/ Amyl & the Sniffers and Hunx and His Punx

10/4- Atlanta, GA @ Coca-Cola Roxy

10/5- Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Ampitheater

10/6- Nashville, TN @ The Truth

10/8- New Orleans, LA at The Fillmore

Fall Euro tour:

FACET

8.12.26- Oakland, CA at Stork Club w/ Porcelain

WIPES

7.24.26- Bethlehem, PA at Sokols w/ King Slender

GAYTHEIST

9.18.26- Portland, OR at Mississippi Studios w/ Unsane

NAW

7.26.26- Atlanta, GA at Boggs Social w/ La Armada

10.6.26- Atlanta, GA at The Earl w/ Unsane, Vincas

COMING DOWN

7.31.26- Rochester, NY at Bar Bad Ending

Regulator Watts, circa 1996. Photo Pat Graham

I’ve always had my ears open for all sorts of different sounds and musical styles. Yet when I got into hardcore and punk music it was so direct and forceful, and made such an immediate impression upon me I wanted to dive into whatever the heaviest, most chaotic, meanest-sounding stuff I could. Though once I entered college (OK, community college) I started connecting with all the punk and hardcore kids who were going there, who I very much looked up to. They all must have been maybe one or two years older than me, but they seemed to have it all figured out already. Either way, some of them started introducing me to other bands that existed within that punk/hardcore realm, but in different nuanced ways, or just up and decided to do their own thing altogether. Which is also very punk. So I dove into all that as well. I was already well aware of Dischord Records, but really only knew of the more well-established bands of that scene- Fugazi, Minor Threat, Rites Of Spring, Embrace, Jawbox. When I started to dig in a bit more I discovered an entire world of inter-related bands, and original sounds that I became obsessed with/. They were the lesser known, but equally as influential bands of the 90’s DC scene like Nation Of Ulysses, Kerosene 454, Bluetip, Swiz, Lungfish (close enough to DC), and Hoover. Any time I’d see a record of a band from DC I’d snatch it up. One such record that I picked up completely based off just cover art was “The Aesthetics Of No-Drag”, the lone full length album from the rather short-lived Regulator Watts. I checked the credits- Jason from Bluetip/Swiz designed it, Slowdime Records- a DC based label- released it, members had been in Hoover. OK, good enough, let’s go. I put it on. It was loud, abrasive, guitars wailed and howled, yet the whole thing was incredibly moody and filled with textured passages and dub influence. I hadn’t heard anything like it. That record stuck with me ever since. It remains one of my favorite releases out of that entire DC scene. But it felt like as soon as the band emerged they vanished. Off doing other things, other bands, living in other cities. A collection of singles and lost tracks- “The Mercury CD” came out later on and was also excellent. But I never got to witness them live. Very little proof of their existence, whether in pictures or video exists. I figured another one lost to time.

Then late last year I see some studio pictures of the band and hear some rumblings of recording new music. How could this be? A band separated for well over 25 years just suddenly doing things again? It had to be a joke.

Well, it was no joke. They recorded new music and it sounds just as exciting, loud, moody, all those things as any of their other output. They just turned it on again like nothing had happened. They’re not the band that’s on the tips of everyone’s tongues. But all your favorite bands (if you happen to like a lot of the same bands I do) know these players and are influenced by them in some way. They remain a bit elusive so it is my great fortune, and great pleasure, of having been able to corral guitarist/vocalist Alex Dunham, drummer Arief Sless-Kitain, and bassist/vocalist Cret Wilson from their various locations in the US to sit in on a call to talk about Regulator Watts, a band I hope everyone takes some time to listen to. Their new record “kWh” arrives in August and having heard it, I can assure you it delivers.

This is odd because Regulator Watts is a band that is very niche’ to me.

ALEX: I think we were missed. Not in an , ‘oh, I long for them!’ kind of way. It’s like they missed us.

That’s probably a good way of putting it. Plus, the band was brief, it did not last long. So this is a very strange situation to be in where, suddenly, 30 years later my initial thought was, ‘them?’ So what gave you all the idea to make some music again?

ALEX: Who’s going to go? I guess I will because I think it’s my wife’s fault. In February a couple years ago we were in the area where we now live. We were looking at properties and she broke it to me that she was taking this trip to Croatia and Austria with her dad. Her dad is getting up there in age. He’s still doing well, but he hasn’t been back in a long time, and they haven’t been back together in a long time so she wanted to do this trip. It coincided over a birthday of mine and she felt really bad because she was going to miss my birthday, gallivanting around Europe or whatever. So she said, ‘why don’t I fly Cret out on some miles I have and you all can hang’. So that happened, and then the lead up to Cret coming out he started a group chat with the three of us. And then Areif says, ‘I got a room. We should play’. And that’s kind of how this whole thing fell together.

The thing is I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that. Thirty years not playing together and all of a sudden we’re in a room, jamming? Asking, ‘what do you got’ and someone saying, ‘I got this fuckin’ funk, and I got this jazz. I got this singer-songwriter crybaby crap’ (laughs)

But I said that if we were going to do it I wanted to re-learn two songs that we never recorded and had written way back in the day. That way you put yourself in the mindset and if it works out we could maybe record it. That’s how the whole thing started and it grew into, ‘oh shit, we’re writing some new music.’

But it was really happenstance. I blame Areif and my wife.

But I was looking at it and I was thinking about all these other fuckin’ bands getting back together and I just see the dollar signs. (laughter)

AREIF: Filling in a couple of details, at the time Alex was still in Chicago. He has since moved to Minnesota. I’m in Chicago and we would see each other from time to time. Alex was probably in touch more with Cret than I was, just due to the nature of busy lives and such. Cret and I would talk maybe every other year.

I saw Alex, it was probably around December 2023 and at the time I was dealing with some health stuff. Alex shared that with Cret and it lead us to be in touch, like having a group thread and communicating with each other more. That, combined with the birthday trip Alex mentioned, made this come together pretty naturally. There was not much expectation or intention, and it definitely helped that Cret had a recording of our last show where we played these two songs that Alex mentioned. Because without that recording I’m not sure if we would have been able to re-learn them accurately from memory. But they were two tunes that we wrote near the end of being a band and never had the opportunity to document them. But we liked them and the songs stayed in our heads.

ALEX: They’re better now than they were.

Why did the band part ways initially?

AREIF: It was more logistically than anything else. At the time Alex was moving to Chicago to be with his partner.

CRET: We were all moving to Chicago at one point!

AREIF: At one point we all were. At one point we had talked about relocating the band to Chicago and then some circumstances changed and it went a different way. We didn’t want to break up the band, we wanted to keep up the momentum, but at the time it logistically didn’t happen. We never considered doing a long-distance thing for whatever reason.

ALEX: I think it was out of the question. When you’re young like that you just think, ‘well, this band’s ending, I’ll just pick up on the next one.’

AREIF: There was also no file trading like there is now. This is pre-cell phones and dawn of the internet. I also feel that everything we had done as a band was very much us in a room, writing, and then performing for other people often in basements. It was a very grassroots thing that was very organic. People being together is essential to it.

Even with how easy that stuff can be now I imagine you ran into quite a bit of difficulty with writing new material and getting together over the last year or two in order to make this new album?

AREIF: We had a limited time. We kind of mapped it out. When Cret visited for a few days we re-learned the two tunes, and I think we naturally just started working on some new stuff. We hashed out a plan for the next year where we would have a recording date and ahead of that bring Cret out twice to write and rehearse. So we had a limited time of around two weekends? So we booked the studio time well ahead of time, and worked it out with Solid Brass, the label. I was sort of project-managing it with Jason, the label guy.

So we brought Cret out for a weekend in January and wrote some new songs, and then Cret came out again for almost a week I think, leading up to the recording session, which was only two days over at Electrical Audio.

So we were on a clock that was ticking and we had the pressure of a deadline to finish. We were attempting to write two new songs as as well as two old songs. We ended up writing three. So I think that helped focus everybody.

Regulator Watts in the here and now times

Despite being all over the place now do you feel a strong connection to DC, where the band first emerged from?

ALEX: No. (laughs)

Honestly, I don’t know. I moved to Chicago in ’98. That’s half my life ago, ya know? When you get older time goes quick. I have a kid who is 21. It’s insane. DC is way in the rearview mirror. I’ll go back to saying that when we were tooling around in Areif’s space, because he’s got a bunch of bands in Chicago, and wrasling up some gear for Cret to use, that’s fun and all. But if we’re going to do that we have no frame of reference unless we learn these old songs. And that put us right back in. My biggest concern with anything like this is you have something to live up to. Even if it sucks. If you’re going to use that name at least throw yourself to that. I’m not saying you have to write a 1996 hardcore song or whatever, but at least have some identity. And I felt by doing those two songs from before, and figuring out how to play together again, I have been very fortunate to play with a bunch of wonderful musicians through a bunch of bands, especially these two guys. It came back almost immediately. I struggled a little bit because I had to figure out what fucking tuning I was in on some of these songs. But other than that, after that first day of playing together we knew we were doing justice to it. It’s a special thing.

CRET: I’ll say that first trip, when I first came out, these guys have both been in a lot of bands, or played longer in bands than I have over the last twenty years or so. But plugging in with these guys after the first 10 minutes it all came back to why we did it in the first place. We dropped in like no time had passed, to me. Sure, I was a little rusty and hadn’t played bass in awhile so I had to practice a bit before going out there. It was immediately palpable to me. It was amazing to tap into this again. It was so important at the time.

I will say we left some light guardrails on that first visit. We said we were just going to see how it goes, see how it feels, I don’t even know how long we stayed but we were jamming all four days that I was there.

Promo photo from Slowdime Records

I suppose I see Regulator Watts as a band with a sound not tied entirely to a place, but I think from my outsider perspective of when I began getting into other bands from DC, which was probably right around when the band was active, and I discovered so much. Up to that point I’d been very into Minor Threat and Fugazi for a few years already, but not much else from DC. And then I dropped in and found all this stuff like Kerosene 454, and Jawbox, and Ulysses, and different Jason Farrell bands, and it all came at me at once really. So that mid-90’s era of DC music was super influential to me as an impressionable young person, and Regulator Watts fell in there as well. So even though I later realized that a lot of the people in bands from that era, in that place, were not actually originally from DC, they just ended up there. And many of them have moved elsewhere, like you all. I guess that’s why I ask about any DC connection you might still have.

AREIF: We were all drawn there. It was probably the second generation of what had been happening there in the 80s. And I think because of that first generation that’s what drew many people there for creative reasons. I guess to answer your question, I may not feel a connection to DC the place, but to DC the scene and community. There are a few people still there, but most have left, that were friends of ours and we played shows with at the time. So I think that while maybe not the physical place, we have connections to all those people that were in our world back then. I’m regularly in touch with several of them. Some of them are here in Chicago, Jason (Farrell) is out in LA. I’ll see him whenever I go out there.

And in the last few years some of those people and bands have been more active so it has allowed us to reconnect. If some band was touring through town we would always go and see them. If Jawbox was coming through, or whatever, go see them and say hi, and reminisce. So I think there’s something to that. It was such a fertile scene when we were all there. I think there was such a healthy, competitive quality to it where we’re all driven to create something and express whatever, but also to inspire each other within the groups that you’re playing with. It makes you want to play. It’s like a flywheel.

Even so the band did not last that long, but I think left a mark, or influence, on other people. For example last year I interviewed Brian Case from Facs and he went on about how influential Regulator Watts was upon Facs. And I can see it in some ways. So I think, as Alex said, your mark was sort of ‘missed’ but it’s there in the background of other bands.

AREIF: I don’t think it was missed by people like Brian. He lives in Chicago. But we played with him before. We played with 90 Day Men at the Empty Bottle in Chicago back in the day. I do agree with Alex’s assessment of us as a ‘if you know, you know’ kind of band, but otherwise we were a bit hidden, or more obscured, by better known bands including Hoover, whose music is more widely known, and for good reason.

I wanted to ask a bit about artwork used for the band. The “Aesthetics Of No-Drag” record was one I bought based entirely off the cover art and just taking a chance on it. So I was curious about Jason Farrell’s artwork for that because nothing really looked like that at the time. It was kind of art deco.

ALEX: Has anything looked like that since?

I’ll have to get back to you on that.

ALEX: So me and him sat in this room and I brought a bunch of books with old propaganda, Soviet-style posters and imagery from the 30’s and 40s. He drew it all in Illustrator, or Photoshop-

AREIF: Quark.

ALEX: (laughs). Quark. He’s definitely the mechanic and a huge amount of influence on how it all came together. Compared to the way I used to make flyers, which was clipping the shit out of everything and pasting it all together, and photocopying it like zines, he was a computer guy.

AREIF: But that whole copy and paste style was a bit like what our EP cover was like. But I want to give Alex more credit than he gets because it was his concept and he art-directed the whole thing. It was this whole idea and it would not have happened without his concept. You can see that concept in the “Mercury” EP with the streamlined design, and so he created a world and Jason brought it to life having the tools and ability. He used computers before the rest of us figured it out.

As I understand it between the time that Hoover ended and Regulator Watts began there was a sort of pre-Regulator Watts band called Mercurochrome, which one of the Regulator Watts songs shares the same name. Did any of those songs become Regulator Watts songs?

CRET: I think I have a practice cassette or two around. What about “Los Angeles”? Alex, I think you would have been like, ‘no, we can’t carry over anything’. I think we played one show as Mercurochrome. It was a benefit and it was everyone who was working at Food For Thought at that time. If there was some connection you could play on the show and there were like 11 bands or something crazy like that. We played just like a three song set, but that was it.

AREIF: I remember there being a tape of that show actually because I heard part of it. It’s lost to time I guess.

ALEX: Erika Casebolt, she was rocking.

Circus Lupus was a really good band. I never got to see them, but they were excellent. In my bit of research into this interview one of you had mentioned that Circus Lupus was your reason for playing this kind of music. Am I on to something there?

CRET: Yes, that’s accurate. I started as a drummer when I was in 7th grade and then I picked up my sister’s acoustic guitar and got more into melody and stuff. But when I was in college a good friend of mine turned me onto “Super Genius” and it was just one of those moments. And another friend of mine was studying abroad and he had a bass. But it was a fretless Fender Mustang. This was Alexi from Stinking Lizaveta. So I’m out here trying to learn Circus Lupus songs on a fretless bass and not having much luck. Maybe it improved my playing overall? I don’t know. But I do credit that as being a huge influence. I spent that whole semester with headphones on trying to figure out what they were doing.

So not to dwell too much in the past, I wanted to ask about how you arrived at asking Kurt Ballou to record your new album?

ALEX: I called him up. I had been talking to him a bunch over the last year or two prior to this. We just sort of connected through a guy who made custom amps in Chicago. He was just talking about Kurt one day and I was making head cases for his amps through my furniture shop, and we just started talking. We really made a connection because we were both really into BMX when we were younger. So we geeked out on that. And then I asked him, ‘did I ever really meet you?’ because we had never played a show with Converge or anything like that. We couldn’t really place anything.

Very different worlds.

ALEX: Yeah, but he would come through town and we would hang. My favorite recording that I’ve ever been on is “The Aesthetics Of No-Drag” and I think that’s the one record that I feel is closest to what my guitar sound is. But I thought, ‘shit, I haven’t made a record in a long time so I want this one to rip. I want it to sound like my guitar sound’. And I thought, Kurt’s going to do a good job. He can do it. He’s just a good guy. My thought is what’s the point of making a record after this long if it’s not going to sound any good?

It’s not like it’s got to be this super expensive recording or anything. We’re not making any money. We just want to be represented well. For so many years you hear bands saying, ‘I want this live sound!’ But I never totally agreed with that approach because the studio is the studio. Live is a different thing. The bass and the club hitting you in the chest and the sweat pouring off your brow, and the guy bouncing off you while you’re off looking at something, and the strings breaking, feedback screamin’, your ears bleeding, all that. You don’t get that on a record.

So the next natural question would be, ‘are you going to play out?’ Do you have any shows planned?

ALEX: There’s stuff planned, but as far as the States, we don’t have anything planned. I don’t know what else to add to that.

AREIF: A lot of people have been asking about shows, naturally, in response to the album. We were saying before about how the new record came together very organically. It felt right. There was no intention to play shows again. But we love music together, our music together, and it’s very challenging to do that. We’re all in different places and have families and busy lives. It is challenging. So I think any time we can make music together it’s special and sacred and we would like to do something in the States. The right thing hasn’t presented itself and we haven’t been able to figure out the timing. But we have talked about it. There is a desire to do it. It’s being considered and hopefully it will happen at some point. But nothing planned right now.

The last question I have is Alex, do you still have the Comet?

ALEX: No, I don’t. I sold that. Then I bought it back. Then I sold it again. I sold it to good guy and he had it for a long time, and then he said he needed to get rid of it and he sold it back to me. But honestly, it was a six-banger four-door. Now I have a ’53 Ford that’s an actual dream car for me, and it only has two doors.

Maybe it can make an appearance on the next record.

ALEX: Yeah, we will all just get our flannels on and record that fucker.

The Comet in question, photo Pat Graham, 1996

I’ll be honest, this month there weren’t a lot of big names dropping records that I thought to write about. Yes, I know Converge released their second album this year. But if you already know that than why do you need me to tell you about it? As per usual, I prefer to talk up releases that may have gone under the radar, aren’t as well known, or that you flat out just never heard of and THAT’S why you read this. Featured is an almost (I had forgot it was coming out) surprise return of Genghis Tron, some vicious grind and hardcore from both coasts, as well as not one, but two very different bands from Australia. How’s that for variety?

POISE, “Iron Foot” 7”

I think I’d heard this band awhile ago and kind of forgot about them. They also started out as a trio. And then they got a bit more serious, turned into a 5-piece, and I witnessed them live a few months back and holy shit, they were awesome. I’m not sure just how many people you can find in Spokane who fit the bill for this sort of band, but Pose got ‘em all I think. This is another example of when you mention to someone that this is a hardcore band this is exactly the kind of music you ought to be imagining when the term ‘hardcore’ is used- super fast, raw, simple, and made by people who are considered legally insane, or at the very least have borderline personality disorder. You don’t have to be a music theory student to play it, you just have to play fast and loud (I will say, though, there is some expert-level guitar shredding happening here), and being pissed off helps too. I vouch for Poise. Give it a listen, especially if a band has a song called “Toxic Pi$$”. What are you gonna do, call the cops? They don’t give a heck.

SNAILGUN, “Glass Walls”

Is a ’snailgun’ supposed to be a really slow weapon? It’s worth asking. But it’s a better use of your time to just listen to them I think. I’m not entirely sure where to place this Australian band but they definitely have a love for jangly guitars and a post-punk approach to writing upbeat and wire-y tunes that often carry on and stretch out for long periods of time. There’s a few short tracks here, but mostly they’re going pretty long. It doesn’t make the music boring, or slow, or dragging the listener along at all. It’s all pretty mid-tempo/faster paced, and maintains a sort of sweetness and jagged feel throughout despite a sort of somber tone to the vocals. That permeating saxophone dominating “Labryrinth” really spices things up too. They’re dreamy with a serrated roughness, and morose yet full of vigor. Is that descriptive enough for you? Maybe you just got to listen for yourself and decide.

HALLUCINATION REALIZED, “Developing Reality”

Central and Western New York is killing it these days with some truly impressive grindcore. Not exactly where I thought it would take root, but given the bleak rustbelt history of the area it’s a surprise it wasn’t skulking around more. Hallucination Realized is just the latest to throw their weight around and after a couple offerings they have released their first proper LP that appears to have been a long time in the making. They dish out some truly ugly, raw, and vicious grind mania where nearly every song is bookended by bits of harsh noise and samples and frequently will toss in some utterly ignorant, fist-dragging breakdowns that would not be out of place on an Obituary record (except you get like 15 seconds of breakdown here compared to the Florida titans…. I don’t know, entire song/album) betwixt the blasting fury. And this isn’t any throwaway grind, like inserting a dozen 10-second tracks just to fill out an album. Yes, most of these songs are short, but they each have direction, craft, and parts. They may try to fool you otherwise that it’s a big mess of going totally apeshit, but they know what they’re doing and I appreciate it. The only semi out of place track here is the longer (OK, 3 minutes), right-in-the-middle song “Collapsing Floor”, which sounds like it could have been a lost track by Bloodlet, circa 1993. I’m not complaining, I’ll take it.

TOSSER, “Mechanism” EP

I jumped in with both feet upon coming across DC’s Tosser a couple years back and their excellent full length album “Sheer Humanity”. I’ve been waiting for new stuff since and while it’s just a quick 4-song EP I’ll take it…. for now (but so help me, they better keep writing!). “Mechanism” picks up right where that record left off with it’s big dense post-hardcore rock that takes equal parts Hum’s slacker vocals and big riffs with some of the more aggressive (but not metal) elements of Helmet’s heaviness (“Hell On Earth” may show this the most), plus lots of interesting tempos, part changes, and time shifts. They make it all flow into a natural-sounding homage to the best of heavy 90’s alt rock. Except they’re existing in the here and now, and sound very here and now, and not just doing a nostalgia trip. For more current reference points one can look to groups like Narrow Head, or Big Garden, or Superheaven.

THE FREQS, “No God On the Gold Coast”

There’s some variety going on within the new album from Salem-based band The Freqs where they kick off the record with some heavy reverb and echo-soaked heaviness reminiscent of Young Widows. But then on the next track, “Chainsawman” and closer “Nite Hag” they evoke the sludgiest elements of later-era Unsane to great effect. Yet everything tucked between those tracks is a little harder to pin down, despite being overall consistent in approach. Is it Converge with less metal and more sass? Does it subconsciously call back to fellow Mass old school hardcore riffers Cast Iron Hike? All signs point to, ‘yeah, possibly’. Just like Pilgrim State contemporaries like Miracle Blood and Bedtimemagic there’s no specific, precise reference point to assign to The Freqs, which is a good thing. They certainly make use of influences (whether intentional or unconsciously), but in a way that they bend to their will. And that’s a good thing. Keep ‘em guessing where to place them in the heavy-music pantheon, The Freqs will likely keep dodging simple categorization.

SWING JAW, s/t

Play hardcore. Tune down a bit. Play fast and write short songs. It’s a winning combination. The Aussies have the right idea. They opt for the Left For Dead style of keeping it menacing, mean, and pretty much off the rails and still maintain a degree of musicianship amongst it all. Not a track breaking the 90 second mark, save for “Atrophied”s epic length at over three minutes. It’s warranted though. You write a slower riff that good it bears repeating ad nauseam until it just breaks in half. That beautiful sunset beach scene on the cover? It’s not a postcard inviting you to the gold coast, it’s a nuclear sunset on humanity.

GENGHIS TRON, “Signal Fire”

This nearly slipped by me and I think, overall, went fairly unnoticed by many? But maybe for context I should note that when Genhis Tron first came around some twenty years ago now and toured a bunch they were incredibly popular. It helped that they were mashing up disparate genres of electronic music and metal that no one would really think of combining in those ways and that was exciting to many people. Now it’s not such a huge deal. Plus Genghis Tron took a lengthy break (10 years maybe?) between their most active era and their third record, which allowed time for the rest of the world to catch up. Now onto their fourth record they appear to still want to push the edges of creativity and genre-bending, but as far as I can tell they’re not really playing out live. A couple members are also now playing with The Armed (seriously, who isn’t in that band?), another extreme genre-bending act, so I’m sure they remain busy with that. With all that time passed, and popular culture adapting more to the sorts of things Genghis Tron were initially doing, it makes their current output not feel quite so extreme or outlandish. They have also pivoted in some ways and adopted other elements into their sound (like a lot more singing, which doesn’t necessarily excite me), and it makes for an overall more cohesive delivery despite continually mixing it up. Whereas in their early career it was all chaos and experimentation this is a band that now knows how to fuse all those elements together into working songs. They often come off sounding similar to Nine Inch Nails, Dillinger Escape Plan in their less chaotic moments, or even members current collaboration as part of the aforementioned The Armed. On their heavier and more epic moments this LP absolutely rules. When the focus is more on the electronic, or synth-driven singing parts I’m not really on board. But that’s probably because most stuff like that has never totally swayed me.

PRIMITIVE BROADCAST SERVICE, “Monsters”

I caught a glimpse of this band a couple years ago, but my memory is foggy so I’m happy this arrived to my inbox so I could mentally refresh just what exactly this band was about. PBS has a very peculiar sound rooted in longer, slow-burn songs. There’s a strong sense of DC/Dischord sound (think Jawbox played slow, the cinematic expanse of Canyon, Most Secret Method without the basement show energy), complete with solid bass and jangly guitars, but an overall morose and bummed-out disposition. Add to that some of the twinkly chaos found on dusty Sonic Youth records and that begins to form a shape Primitive Broadcast Service exit within. I’m not sure if I’m completely sold as the slow churn/slow burn of it all requires patience and time to sort out. Put this on in the middle of winter when I’m already feeling kind of bleak and you’ll get me pining for a meteor to come and destroy us all. But it’s basically summer and I’m all about the get up and go and PBS is trying to drag me into the swamp like that sad horse in “The Neverending Story”. You want some jangly bummer rock? This could be your soundtrack, sourpuss.

I think it may have been inevitable that eventually Chris X and I crossed paths. We both run record labels that deal in grimey, often ugly music. We both know plenty of the same people. We both have an insatiable need to comb through the depths to find new music. He just got started on all of it well before I did. But when we eventually did meet, I can’t recall. It was either in Philly on one of my many trips to go see a show, or it was Texas during No Coast Fest. Whatever the case, we hit it off because weirdos gravitate towards other weirdos I guess.

But it’s a strange thing because Chris X has a track record a mile long and it was well established by the time we met. He’s got stories for days and has had the honor of releasing early material far and wide for the likes of Dwarves, Mastodon, Pig Destroyer, Pg. 99, Easy Action, the Cutthroats 9, as well as great stuff for current bands like Salvation, Mirakler, Prayer Group, Cronies, and Birth (Defects). He had a cool record store back in the 90’s and I used to see Reptilian ads in every zine, and would always come across various releases of theirs I didn’t know existed while digging through record bins. So it’s like that bit of intimidation being around a person whose been around the block more times than I can imagine, yet I’m fully aware he’s just a dude doing his thing too. I’m just stoked we know one another because there’s such a wealth of awesome stuff Reptilian has done over the years and I find that inspiring. So I got some words in with the man and the lore. And yeah, some of those awesome stories as well from a fella who will, in all likelihood, never quit.

Are you originally a Baltimore person? Is that where you’re from?

No, I’m from Philadelphia. I moved to Baltimore with the express purpose of opening a record store there because there were like five really cool record stores in Philly. I spent all my time hanging out at this one called Chaos Records. It was a punk rock store in the 1980’s in Philly. I worked for a record distributor called Universal, which was the biggest East Coast record distributor.

CDs were a hot new commodity when I was working there (laughs). This was the mid to late 80’s. The Cure was coming out on CD, and The Beatles were releasing their albums two at a time over a year-long period. It was a crazy job to have then. So hanging out at that store it lead me to think, ‘this is what I want to do, I want to run a record store. Or I want to run a punk rock record label.’

So I hung out at Chaos Records and learned a lot from them. My friend Brubaker, who ran the store, said, ‘I’ll teach you all this, but you can’t open a store in Philadelphia (laughs). I’m not going to train the competition. I’ll teach you all this as long as you don’t open a store in Philly.’

I moved away and opened a store. So I was visiting a girl I was dating who was in Baltimore. She was going to MICA- the Maryland Institute College of Art. I let her know I was in town for the weekend and asked her to take me to the cool record stores. She said, ‘there aren’t any’ (laughs). So we went to a little festival that was called Fells Point and while we were walking around this festival I saw an empty little storefront. There were people in there painting the walls, getting it cleaned it. I asked them what was happening and they mentioned the place was for rent. And that’s pretty much all it took.

So I take it the store came first and then the record label?

Yeah. A label is really what I wanted to do, but I really had no idea how. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know any bands, I had zero connections. But I already had been hanging out in record stores, I worked at a record distributor, and I had two buddies who owned a comic book store, and I asked about them partnering up and opening a comic and record store. So half the store was records, half the store was comic books. Those guys were partners with me on the comic half. After about five years in business I slowly bought them out until it was just me. So I stopped carrying comic books because I needed more room for more music.

I think my first and only time that I went into the store was probably 1998. I think it was my first time in Baltimore as well. I knew it was there, I knew it existed, but I’m not sure how I found it. But I think I recall there still being some comic-type books, or underground books and weird books. But I recall the music selection there was great. However, I was on tour and very poor. It was my only time there but I feel like the store either moved to another area because I remember that neighborhood being pretty sketchy and then a few years later it was totally re-developed. Is that accurate?

Yes, when I first opened the shop down there it was very much the wild west. Slowly a bit of gentrification happened, but not much. Only a bit and only in a very concentrated area. The very tourist-y area. But if you walked two or three blocks away from there you were in the ghetto. People had guns pointed at them and people got shot. I have friends who got shot. And it happened just blocks away. So Broadway was generally pretty safe. There were cops who walked the beat, but that was just to protect the businesses and tourists because a couple blocks away was lawless.

The other thing I associate Reptilian with early on, whether it was through observation or osmosis, was a strong connection with Amphetamine Reptile Records because you did have some sort of relationship with them?

Yeah, I’d say so. I was a 1980’s punk rocker. I went from punk rock to hardcore, and then I really felt like I found my music and my people in music like Steel Pole Bathtub, the Unsane, and Halo Of Flies. I liked weird, ugly music and this was around 1988-89. Plus the grunge thing was happening at the same time with Sub Pop, which was also a big deal. But the AmRep stuff just clicked with me on a serious level.

I quickly became friends with any touring band that came through Baltimore and who came by the shop. I went to shows all the time. That was my life. The record store would close and my hours were designed so that I could make it to DC in time for a show at the 9:30 Club. I had to close at 7 so I could drive to DC and get there in time for the show. I would always invite the bands to stay at my place. So I became real close, real quick with a lot of the AmRep bands, and a couple of the Sub Pop bands, the Supersuckers especially.

Is that how you got some of the early stuff going with the record label?

Yeah. Once I had been in business for a few years and I met all these bands. I dealt direct with labels a lot. I don’t know how much that happens anymore. There were some great distributors, of course, like Lumberjack, Mordam, and Choke. But I tried to deal direct with as many labels as I could. That way you get the inside scoop and it was a big deal about colored vinyl and things like that. I’d let the bands know, when you come to Baltimore come to Reptilian and we will buy some t-shirts and some records off you to help you on tour.

Eventually I would ask bands coming through if they wanted to do a 7” with me. It started out with just helping my local friends and local bands, just to learn the process. The first couple singles I did were unknown Baltimore bands who are still unknown, didn’t last long. But that’s how I learned about mastering and pressing, and all that kind of stuff. Eventually, Buzzov*en and Dwarves both stayed with me a couple times and I asked them if they wanted to do a 7” and they were like ‘sure’. So that’s really the origins of it.

I was pretty much just a 7” label for the first couple of years before I started doing full lengths.

I think it’s a kind of lost practice where many labels, especially in the 60’s with soul and early rock n’ roll, started as record shops that later began record labels. It’s an interesting concept, but you don’t see it much anymore. And Reptilian is kind of an example of that.

That’s where I wanted to be- I wanted to do a record label more than a store. But there was a bit of back and forth over the years of doing it where the store was definitely supporting the label financially. And there were times, especially towards the end, where the store was not doing very well, but the label was doing good. So it’s always been a little give and take, back and forth. But it seems like a logical thing. I’m dealing with these distributors all the time. I would say, ‘hey, I just ordered $300 of records from you, how about you carry some of my records?’

Sure, that makes sense. Was there a particular reason that lead to the store closing?

It was a combination of things, as well as the times. That was when digital was really taking off, with streaming, Napster, and all that crap. It really hurt the store’s business. Business was declining for several years, and it was definitely a struggle keeping the store open towards the end. To be complete honest, I was getting a bit burnt out on it. I was a little burnt out on Baltimore, a little bit burnt out on retail work, the day-to-day of dealing with people coming and going. There was a lot of things. When we moved locations to up near the Ottobar for the last year or so that we were open I wasn’t really present so much. I sat upstairs in my office all the time and Chad, and Tony, and my brother Noel were running the store downstairs. So it was just time to not do that anymore. So then I could concentrate more on the label, and right about the time that I closed the store was around when the Hatebeak record came out, and then I started doing bigger things with the Supersuckers and things like that.

You alluded to a bit to the original shop location being just a couple blocks away from a pretty tough neighborhood, did you encounter any of that spilling over to the store?

There was a lot of stuff like that (laughs)! I built a reputation early in the neighborhood for being the cop of my block, basically. When I would see homeless dudes- and it was always the same dudes that were always out there- harassing people on my block, or harassing the county kids who came in just to go to Reptilian, I’d be outside on the sidewalk telling them to get off my block. That kind of stuff. There were some confrontations that came from that.

We were held up at gunpoint once. They were watching, and as soon as I went to get lunch, and my co-worker was by himself a dude came in and pointed a gun at him and emptied the register.

Some more comical things happened too, though. A little old lady hopped the curb and ran her car into the front of the store! (laughs). It did a little bit of structural damage, which, of course, was never repaired.

There were some fights with locals, but nothing real serious except for the robbery at gunpoint.

There is an infamous story of Danzig threatening you. Was that at the store, or elsewhere?

Yeah, yeah. That was pretty early on, in the first year or two that were were open actually. I guess it was the tour for his first solo album. He had played at Merriweather Post, or something like that and he came to the store the day after the show. We’re looking out the window and we see a little red sports car, and out of it gets this gigantic dude, looks like Thor- long, blond ponytail. And then this little dude with dark hair. And someone goes, ‘oh my god, that’s Glen Danzig!’ (laughs)

And I’m just thinking, ‘oh, here we go’ because, for a little bit of background, growing up in Philly and Jersey area, I was a huge Misfits fan. Huge. I had almost every single thing on vinyl. I didn’t have “Cough/Cool” obviously. But I had almost everything else. I had probably a dozen Misfits t-shirts, so I had one for every day of the week, with spares. I had a devil lock, all of it. So I was a huge fan. I saw Samhain on Halloween of ’85 in Philly before moving down to Baltimore, it was a big part of my life.

But he had a reputation for how he treated record stores and record fans, and anybody who had a bootleg. And hanging on the wall, behind the counter, was a collection I had just bought maybe four days before this happened, and there was a bunch of Misfits stuff in there, including a couple of bootleg singles. So that’s all hanging up on the wall, and he comes in the store, marching in with a scowl on his face.

So I go, ‘hey, you’re Glen Danzig, aren’t ya!’ (laughs) and he says, ‘Yeah! Why are you selling bootlegs?!’

That’s the first thing he says, leaning on the counter, yelling at me. It went on for awhile. There were a couple kids in the store who just stood there with their mouths open, they couldn’t believe what was happening. It was a ridiculous argument where he kept telling me to take the records down and give them to him. I said, ‘absolutely not, I know you’re going to break them, I’m not going to do that.’ And he kept saying, ‘why do you sell bootlegs?’ and I said, ‘well because people want to buy them’. I told him, ‘look, this is a collection I bought off somebody. I didn’t make these records. I didn’t order them from somewhere, it’s somebody’s used collection of records.’ He kept hammering me about where I got them from. Eventually I just gave up on being sensible with him and I made it in a comedy and told him I made them in the back room on my own press, would you like to go in back and see my operation? (laughs)

I also made sure not to look at the bodyguard guy because he was huge and very intimidating. But Danzig was a foot shorter than I was, he’s just built that way, and I wasn’t really intimidated. I was really just sad because he was ruining my childhood, you know what I mean? He was just destroying my fan boy side.

So the argument just went on until eventually I just said, ‘look, I’m going to take them down, I’ll take them off the wall. I bought these with my money, it’s my store, so I will just take them home, and put them in my collection. I won’t sell them. Is that good enough? Will you leave now?’ And he leaned over the counter, and he went, ‘what time do you get out of here tonight?’

Oh geez…

I said, ‘7 o’clock’. He went, ‘I’ll be waiting. Your ass is grass!’

(laughing)

That was exactly my reaction. I busted up laughing. No one has ever said that to me. Not even in grade school. So I’m just laughing and he left. Immediately, the kids who are in the store are asking to use my phone, and they’re calling all their friends telling them Danzig was going to fight me at 7 o’clock.

So by 7 o’clock there’s a huge crowd of people at my store. We ordered pizzas and got a case of beer. We’re all hanging out and I’m like, ‘he’s not going to come back and fight me, it’s not going to happen’. And, of course, it never did. But there were kids who showed up with stacks of their records to try to get Danzig to sign them! I’m thinking, ‘this dude threatened to kick my ass and you want him to sign your records!?’

The only thing that came of it was that maybe two weeks later I got a letter in the mail from a lawyer that was a cease and desist from selling any and all non-licensed Misfits, or Danzig products. So I put it in a picture frame, and hung it on the wall next to where the bootlegs were. We made a little plaque, or cardboard sign, that was on the floor next to the cash register that said, ‘Glen Danzig stood here. No spitting please.’

So it became a legend for awhile.

It’s funny how, a- the old idiom of ‘don’t meet your heroes’ is sometimes very correct and b- when these people do things like this they’re hoping to instill fear and all they end up doing is increasing business.

Well, the sad part is, for the day when I hung that picture next to where the bootlegs on the wall were it’s because I sold my entire personal Misfits collection. I was done. It was seriously like five years before I could listen to them again. I don’t think it was until that crazy coffin-shaped box set came out. I was listening to that in the store, and was like, ‘goddamnit, I fucking love this shit.’ I ended up buying back most of it. But yeah….

It definitely does leave a sour taste.

Yeah.

But it makes for a good story.

Yes it does.

So earlier you mentioned a few names of bands you had done stuff for and as I look through the Reptilian discography, and I have a bunch of this stuff, it’s always surprising at how much of a variety of bands that have done records with your label. Your label tends to get associated with noise rock and punk, but there’s a surprising degree of variety of what you do making it pretty tough to put you into a particular lane.

Yes. That’s somewhat by design, and somewhat just the way I am. Having a record store was to feed a certain hunger in me of always needing new music. All through school, high school, whatever I was the kid in class who turned people on to new music all the time. I was always searching for new music. I was the first person in my friend group to listen to punk and new wave stuff. I just love music. I grew up on rock n’ roll. My parents were young, they were hippies, sort of. They were violent hippies, not peace hippies.

The Raymond Pettibon - Black Flag- cover kind of hippies.

Yeah! And they had a huge record collection. So I grew up playing all kinds of records all the time. So I don’t like just one kind of music. Of course my favorite stuff really is the post-punk noise rock kind of stuff. That’s my favorite. But I still love normal rock n’ roll, and I love ’77 style punk rock, and I listen to all kinds of stuff. My record collection is extremely diverse.

So I didn’t want to only put out one kind of music. And, as I said, at the beginning there was a lot of just supporting my friends, it didn’t really matter what kind of band they were, just that they were in a band. So there’s some emo, there’s some metal, there’s some rock, there’s some noise rock. And in the future it’s even more diverse. Through working with the Supersuckers a lot I have begun working with Nashville Pussy, and because I’ve been working with them, now I’m working with Nine Pound Hammer. So I’m not just sticking to one kind of music. I just like all forms of rock- noise rock, punk rock, classic rock!

Have you taken breaks from the label at times?

The only real break was right around the closing of Reptilian and me moving because it was such a flux. It was a big major change in my life closing the store and moving away. So there was a little bit of a break, but it was not very long because once I had gotten myself settled in Philly after closing the shop I immediately started going to shows and finding out about these bands like Ape, and Faking, and Psychic Teens, and started putting out singles again. I started doing the Keystone Noise thing, and was all about it. There was a great music scene there, with Tile and Ladder Devils too.

I think that’s exactly what I was alluding to because there was a period where I hadn’t thought of the label in awhile and it was probably due to what you were describing. And then, all of a sudden I see you’re putting out all these releases by awesome Philly bands and I come to find out you had moved to Philly. So I know you said you were originally from Philly, but moving back and re-integrating into that scene, and then releasing these records, from my end it felt like a re-birth of your label because I was a big fan of all those bands you were doing for that Keystone series of singles. What’s your thoughts on that time?

Yeah, like I said, towards the end of the store I had gotten really burnt out on it. I wasn’t burnt out on putting out records really, just burnt out on the store. And I hadn’t done too much with the label in a year or two leading up to the closing of the store because I couldn’t really afford to. We did a Gunna Vahm EP and this band Dactyl from Baltimore. Those were the last releases we did before shutting down. But then when I moved to Philly and started seeing these bands I got really excited again about music and at that point I didn’t have the store so I could actually concentrate on the label. That’s when I started the whole Keystone thing. I thought it was great because it personally revitalized my interest. I got all excited again. But yeah, it was sort of rebirth time for the label and myself.

And from there you moved to Texas?

Yes. That was predicated on the fact my wife at the time was from Texas and her family lived down here. Her father had a couple of strokes and she said she needed to be there for her folks. I said that was cool. Not having the store I wasn’t tied to any geographical place anymore. I kind of wanted to get out of city life after being in Baltimore and Philly for decades. So the label had another break upon moving to Texas, but it was a short break. During the move was when the UXO record came out. I didn’t even have a house yet and the UXO record was shipping to me. And again, that record was born out of my relationships with Unsane and Today Is the Day and knowing Chris (Spencer, Unsane) and Steve (Austin, Today Is the Day) for years.

I remember going down to Philly and seeing the release show for that record. That was a great show and it’s a great record. Seeing those two guys together on stage.. these are two dangerous men, this is wonderful!

So now being in a rural place do you find it more difficult to operate not having that direct connection to easily being at venues, or around what’s happening?

Not really. Everything is online. I don’t feel that I’m cut off from the world anymore by being out here, at least not any more than I want to. I want to be cut off somewhat from the world, which is why I live out where I do. But I can still get to shows in under an hour if I want to. I still do. I don’t really find it to be a problem.

It’s actually a bit easier doing all the mailorder that I do. When I go to the post office in the country there’s no line and they’re very happy to see me with a huge armload of packages to ship. Where as when I lived in the city I’d be standing in line for quite some time and they would always give me such an attitude because I had more than three pieces of mail, ya know? They’d be like, ‘oh, it’s this guy again’ and in the country they’re like, ‘hey, it’s our best customer!’ (laughs)

So what does the future hold for Reptilian at this point?

I don’t know how to stop. There have definitely been a few times over the past few years where I had to borrow money and things like that to keep the label running. I feel like I ought to just take a break, or stop putting out records for a year. Or, why don’t I just stop doing this? And then some great thing will just end up in my inbox. Or, some band from the past, like Cavity, will get in touch and ask if I’m interested in reissuing some of their stuff and I’m just like, ‘oh my god, yes’.

So I won’t be stopping any time soon. In terms of new stuff we just did the final record from the Baltimore band Birth (Defects) and that is selling out quickly. The other label we did the record with, Expert Work, their copies are gone already. And it’s brand new, it just came out. And the Cavity record, I just reissued their first record in time for them to play a big fest out in London. I have a deal with them to do at least one, if not more, reissues of their other records. I told them I’d be glad to this for them under one condition- that I get to release “Supercollider” on vinyl. That’s one of my absolute favorites from that era. It’s probably my favorite Man’s Ruin (Records) release. Probably my favorite Cavity release.

I’m doing a record for a New York project called EXP, another three letter initial band. It’s (Jack) Natz from Cop Shoot Cop and he’ teamed up with a bunch of dudes from other bands. Stu Spasm from Lubricated Goat plays on a couple of songs, it’s an interesting project. It’s very different throughout the record. It’s got keyboards and violins on a couple songs, it’s pretty weird.

I’m doing an Australian band called Super-X, who I recommend people find on bandcamp. They have a couple previous records out there. They’re very much in the vein of The Scientists, or the Stooges first couple of records. It’s like groovy swamp blues kind of stuff.

There’s a Virginia band from the 90’s called Hose. Got. Cable. They’re a great band that I got to see a bunch of times and I really wanted to work with them, but they broke up right before we could do something together. But they went on to do other bands like Mens Recovery Project and stuff like that.

Is it a reissue of their catalog?

Yeah, I’m going to do a double LP. It’s not every single song, but it’s almost every single song, including a couple that haven’t been released on vinyl. That ought to be up before the end of the year.

Salvation. Rock band from Chicago. I have another record from them coming out. Nine Pound Hammer, cow-punk, 10” picture disc coming out in July.

Who makes picture discs anymore?! You’re the only one!

That’s right! Who does 10”s and who does picture discs? People like me who don’t care if you buy my records or not! I’ve done a couple 10”s recently and store are like, ‘ugh, they’re hard to display’ and I’m like, ‘c’mon, it’s your job, figure it out. I did!’

But it was only six songs. We could have done it as a 12”. We could have done it with a regular cover. But they handed me cover art that was a circular shape anyway so I figured, ‘let’s make it special somehow. How about a 10” picture disc?’ It’s going to piss off all kinds of people. So I might also reissue some stuff from their back catalog. The Nashville Pussy reissue I did is going into it’s third pressing already. So I’ll be doing more of their back catalog as well.

Next year Supersuckers, Nashville Pussy, and Nine Pound Hammer together are all going to tour Australia. So I’m trying to have some cool new stuff out in time for that and I’m actually going to try to be their merch guy, so we will see how that plays out.

There’s more coming out from the God Bullies and a new Midiron Blast Shaft record.

That’s all good to hear. As another person doing a label it’s cool to see what others are doing and think to myself, ‘yeah, I can keep doing this too.’

Yes. You should because I appreciate your label quite a bit.

I think the take away here is that we never learn.

Yeah, if you and me, and our other label friends can just make sure to never learn our lessons we can continue to put out some great stuff.

The future is ignorant.

——————————

I felt it worthwhile to get some additional input from others who have worked with, or worked for, or otherwise patronized, or were inspired by Reptilian Records. Here’s some testimony from those who have been there:

Cole Crick- Swarm Of the Lotus, Passage Between

“Reptilian was what any respectable “alternative” person would want in a record shop: Snarky owner/employees; dank, dark sorta grimy (in a good way) browsing/shopping environment. Rare records behind the counter. They were great at helping you find stuff you may not have been exposed to yet - and gently chiding you for poor selections.”

Chadd Heath, former employee

“Talking to Crispen Glover on the shop phone when he called to talk to Chris about using a song of Anton Lavey’s for a movie he was working on, that Reptilian I guess had the rights to. I answered the phone and heard this voice asking to speak to Chris and I instantly knew it was Crispen Glover, because… who wouldn’t recognize that voice. He said “hi… this is Crispen Glover” and I said “I know”, haha. He just said very Crispen Glover things after that.

Disfear came by the Howard St. spot while they were in the country to play MDF. We had a bbq and offered bands that had a chance to come by, some free food and place to chill. They were unbelievable cool and signed a bunch of Disfear stuff for me. I got all their signatures on a poster. A few years later their bassist passed away and I’m happy he signed it for me.

The crappy cash registers Chris would buy would inevitably act up and stop working completely. They usually got the baseball bat, which was always behind the counter, taken to them. Don’t know how many had been ended in such a matter over the years. One of the times, I was using one and it ceased to work, so Chris smashed the top of it with the aluminum bat. This all while teen customers are shopping. I then picked up the bottle of lighter fluid sitting on the counter, which was used to sell Zippos that we sold. I doused the smashed register with lighter fluid and picked up a lighter. I looked at Chris and he had an excited look on his face. One that said “yeah…man…do that. So, I lit that cheap, plastic register on fire and its rank smoke spilled out of it, dropping burning bits of plastic everywhere.

Customers are in the store as this all went down and some walked in as it was burning. I think Chris may have hit it with the bat again while on fire, but can’t remember. We eventually put the fire out.

Bad behavior was encouraged, haha. Tony Pence and I one night decided to fill the entire S. Broadway store up with fog from the shops’ fog machine. We did. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and fog was spilling out of all the cracks and uneven parts of the front wall, from when an old lady nearly drove her car into the store. It was thick in there. The fog got me sick for a few days from breathing it in.”

Nick Skrobisz, Multicult, Overcalc, The Wayward

“Once Jake of Multicult was riding with Chris in his infamous Hearse that he used as his primary vehicle. Stopped at an intersection in downtown Baltimore, his window was approached by a random guy in the street, haranguing him about giving him a ride, to which he replied, “I can take you to the graveyard”. The guy, not understanding the joking comment referencing the Hearse he was driving, immediately became hostile, and Jake had to implore Chris to run the red light, in order to avoid ‘escalating’ the gross misunderstanding.”

Tony Pence, Celebrated Summer Records, Deep Sleep, War X Games

When I was about 18 or 19 we heard about Reptilian but it was really hard to get there from Baltimore County, when one of us finally got a drivers license we started shopping there and I have to say it was a pretty intimidating and scary experience, Chris was never mean to any of us and he always tried to guide us to the coolest music but both him and the store had such a wild vibe that was beyond our imagining that we couldn’t help but feel out of our “coolness” depth and by a lot haha.

In 1996 My father died and while I had been a somewhat regular shopper at Reptilian up to that point I felt particularly and understandably listless and depressed around then so I basically just started going to the store every single day until Chris eventually hired me! Essentially I was (and am) a super straight-edge nerd that listened to Pop-Punk and like, Spazz and Charles Bronson, Chris brought me into a very wild world filled with excess, completely insane characters and situations I never could have imagined myself being involved in or with!

Towards the end of the Fells Point location the physical store had deteriorated quite a bit, there were holes in the walls from where Chris had put some shoplifters heads, the door was off the hinges, the ceiling leaked and everything was covered in a kind of soot like residue and while it was certainly Punk as Fuck it was really hard for Chris to keep going at that location, He had a deal with the Landlord that the rent would never increase but the landlord would never fix anything so that is how it ended up the way it did, When Chris decided he was going to move locations to next to the Ottobar that was when I decided to strike out on my own to the County and open Celebrated Summer in Towson, I could never have done it without Chris’s help and encouragement and the ten years that I worked there prepared me for what the next 20 was going to bring me with my own shop. 

A while back Hex Records released our 25th anniversary LP compilation, which was a bunch of bands we have worked with (or just really like) doing covers that I chose that I have found particularly influential upon my music tastes and big factors on why I do this label in the first place.

These covers were released one by one each month throughout 2024, c…

Read more

Coming soon

It’s been quite some time since I did a news update, but there’ enough to talk about to grouse about.

First and foremost, consider this the pre-order launch for Hex zine #3 (the physical media version).

Like previous issues, this collects the interviews I’ve done so far this year, including one that has yet to publish online, as well as a bunch of content you won’t find online. It’s all put together with fancy layouts/design (at least I think so) packed into 48 pages with a color cover. For fans of holding paper with text and images printed on to it.

You can pre-order it now and copies should be getting shipped out by the second week of June. Go here:

https://hexrecords.bandcamp.com/merch/hex-zine-vol-2-3

That leads me to another thing I’m going to do. A collab if you will. Some might even call it a mash-up. If you live in the Portland area you will undoubtedly be aware of Bike Summer. Throughout the summer, every summer, there are dozens of planned community bike rides all over the city, all with themes. Some are really fun and wacky, some are endurance activities, some have a dozen people, some have several thousand. It’s a great city for biking honestly. I’ve organized a few rides myself over the years and this year I’m organizing a zine ride! We will start with a zine swap where I’ll have a special side-zine for trade that contains a comic that is also printed in the newest Hex zine. It will also be the release for the new Hex zine! And then we will ride to several zine-specific locations in Portland known for supporting, creating, and distributing zines! So bring a bag, swap some zines (or buy some), and go on a wonderful ride through our excellent town. You can find the details here: https://www.shift2bikes.org/calendar/event-24124

On to records and stuff. Edging, “Unload Your Shame” is still in pre-order mode. They just wrapped up an East Coast/Midwest jaunt and will be headed to the West Coast in early July. Tune in next week as they will be debuting another single from the record before it’s official release on June 5th! Order here:

Soft announcement, but you heard it here first: we will be releasing the debut (sort of) of Portland’s own HISS. This is a co-release with Dipterid Records. HISS is essentially Still/Form (who we released an excellent LP for a few years back) under a new name. Same sludgy heaviness, same brooding discomfort, same awesome but a new name. Be on the lookout for an official announcement next month.

Hiss in Portland

Here’s a few shows worth going to if you live in these places:

NAW

Oct. 6th- The Earl, Atlanta, GA w/ Unsane

GAYTHEIST

June 13th- Quilcene Lantern Live Loud Fest w/ Coffin Break

Sept. 18th- Mississippi Stuios, Portland, OR w/ Unsane

That’s it for now! Soak it up, take it in, and check out what we have going on outside of this little subby-stack.

Mind me if I’m distracted from heavily delving into tons of new music, but it’s goshdanged beautiful out lately where I live. Flowers are in bloom, love is in the air, birds and bees are screwing each other’s brains out, if I understand the euphemism correctly. I’ve spent more time on my bike and less time in a car, thankfully. I just had family in town and they’ve never been here so they got to see all the sights and the best we got to offer out here. But behind the scenes I’ve been cooking up the next print version of this zine, as well as a couple records I’m working on you’ll know more about soon. So I’ve been distracted/busy. But that don’t mean this month was a slump for exceptional new music. Take a gander at these birds if you will.

BARATRO, “No Comply”

The American can duck out in Italy and low-key start a band out there, but they still cast a long shadow. There’s really no escaping the songwriting style and sound that vocalist/bassist Dave Curran has exhibited for years. His rumbling bass tone is unmatched and his scathing vocal attack is one-of-a-kind as he played a crucial role in the bulk of Unsane’s existence, and then the similar-sounding (yet shorter lived) Pigs. Now, with Baratro, on their third album, they…. wait, what’s that? They went and changed it up. OK, so I need to re-think this. Yes, Curran’s vocals and bass sound remain the same. The songwriting style is rather consistent. But they went and added a cello to most of the songs. There’s guests a plenty offering noise samples, cigar box guitar, and Eugene Robinson being Eugene Robinson on one track. There’s also a much more somber attitude throughout “No Comply”, a bit different than the steamroller riff machine present on previous efforts. Everyone’s got to change it up once in awhile and I guess this is Baratro giving some space to new ideas. The effort is appreciated, but the Cro-Magnon in me wants those reckless, crushing rhythms. You’ll find all that here, but it’s done more subtly, with added instrumentation, and an overall feel of morose throughout.

MOON PUSSY, “At the Pace Of Outrage”

I’ll be honest- Denver’s Moon Pussy’s previous albums, while enjoyable, were not visually anything to write home about. In fact, they looked super dull. But one gander at the colorful art that adorns their third album, “At the Pace Of Outrage” is enough to instantly get the eyeballs of curious crate diggers. Maybe cover art is an afterthought for a lot of musicians, but in my mind it’s an important aspect and I’m glad Moon Pussy, a band I like, has a sweet-looking new album that could possibly draw in some new listeners to their strange and heavy music. That being said, this is also the best-sounding/recorded album of theirs thus far. It comes off more clear, less lo-fi sounding, and pushes the volume in a way I enjoy. “Traffick” has a slow and brooding, heaving thing going on with lots of skittering guitar noise atop it while “Mail Knife” starts out like it was accidentally left off Sonic Youth’s, “Sister” before slowing down into a sort of hardcore breakdown kind of second half. “Leech” might be Moon Pussy testing the limits of curious new listeners with screeching guitar noise filtered through an oscillating/tremolo effect for most of the song. A catchy bass line keeps it all together though. But the overall modus operandi of the band remains the same- lots of strange guitar effects and unsettling bass runs filtered into bizarro punk. Shellac on poppers and launched into space. All the pretty parts removed from Sonic Youth and turned into three-minute screeds. The Skin Graft Records catalog if they stopped living in their car and got an apartment and a part time job they hated. The band is called Moon Pussy. Did you expect radio pop hits? Well, somehow they keep you humming and that’s a pretty big feat.

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT, “Beginning Of the End

You got to hand it to Portrayal Of Guilt- they never really go for the same trick twice. They bounce through various subgenres with no hesitation, or concern for how their fanbase reacts to it, they just go for it. It doesn’t always land, but they get kudos for giving it a go and in the process, coming up with something generally wholly unique. Whereas contemporaries, and like-minded shapeshifters, such as Full Of Hell can also try their hand at various extreme subgenres they somehow can blend simultaneously driving in every lane while still staying in their own lane if that makes sense. Portrayal Of Guilt is intentionally driving on the shoulder, the sidewalk, through construction zones, on the wrong side of the goddamned road. In that respect from song to song they might not always sound like the same band, which can be disorienting. Seeing as the band started as, more or less, a homage to Majority Rule with some black metal parts has become a band that does whatever the heck they like from album to album. They have been wildly prolific and experimental throughout their tenure and I’ve grown to appreciate that quite a bit. Songs like “Total Black” and “Human Terror” may be more closely aligned with the Portrayal Of Guilt long time fans are familiar with. But on this record they’re giving a try at ethereal shoegaze elements with female accompaniment on one song, a track featuring rapping, and a few songs that have elements of creepy industrial and… er… nu-metal mixed in. Like I said, the group is unafraid to give most anything a go. By and large they pull it off because they’re Portrayal Of Guilt. You’re signing up for an extreme band taking extreme chances just by hitting ‘play’. So anything less than a dive into the unknown would be dull for this trio.

BIRTH (DEFECTS), “Fictional Days”

Baltimore grunge-y feedback aficionados Birth (Defects) seem to have had an on-again/off-again thing going for their fractured existence, but when they announced this album (shortly after announcing a live record that just came out recently) it was with the disclaimer that this was it. They were wrapping up as a band. So you get a half record of alternate takes of songs from their discography, as well as a second half of covers…. which is an interesting way to go out. May as well cite your influences as you’re headed out the door right? Why not? What have you got to lose? While some of the covers are known and quite obvious (a popular Nirvana b-side, and a later-era left field cut from Sonic Youth), others I have no clue about (The New Flesh, The Comsat Angels). They also opt for the slowest SSD song out there (“How Much Art”). All of it is very befitting for a band who spent their time sounding like catchy-nuggets-wrapped-within-the filthiest-sounding early Nirvana mixed with the most grating of Sonic Youth feedback mantras, and a dose of raw-ass hardcore. So if you are unfamiliar with this group this should totally inform you about the originals presented here, which are more of a sampling than anything for you to explore their other material. I, for one, suggest their excellent full length from a couple years back, “Deceiver/Mirror”. But you can be the judge.

GREAT FALLS, “Conscription” 12”

Listening to Great Falls it’s mind-boggling how they can create such complex and chaotic music and make so many goddamned songs. And they’re not like throwaways either. It’s all good stuff. Super chaotic and lots of wild part changes, lots of epic moments, songs that go from under two minutes to ones that stretch out to over 14, and they release tons of stuff, a lot of it in DIY small run batches of tapes, lathe cuts, CDRs, whatever. I’m waiting for a limited release on microfiche, packaged in screenprinted twigs, and delivered to you via carrier pigeon, limited edition of 12 only to residents of unincorporated Pierce County. Anywho, the point of all this is to say with numerous B-sides spread over various releases it helps to collect them all in one place right? Here’s where “Conscription” comes in. It’s 8 tracks, across a couple recording sessions. About half of these were from the sessions from their last LP and the rest from soon after that was released. IN that time they appeared on three splits, released a lathe cut, and even had a bonus track unheard until this release. This isn’t even the first time Great Falls has released a collection of B-sides and singles. I told you they were prolific. Why is this worth getting? Because this is also a one-sided 12” with an amazing looking etched B-side by guitarist/vocalist and all around exceptional artist/designer Demian Johnston. The collection focuses on Great Falls overall faster/shorter songs for the most part, which I happen to enjoy very much. They write some very wonderful long songs as well, but you won’t find those here. It’s kind of a non-stop brutal headfuck from start to finish- lots of gut-wrenching screaming, complex but strange, fucked up, and noisy non-stop riffing, absolutely bananas drumming, and heavy as all get out. There’s no way you read anything I write about and not know who this band is so I’ll just stop at this point.

FACS / CHIMERS split 7”

It’s wild to think anyone makes a split 7” in 2026. What used to be a cheap way for a couple bands to introduce themselves has become an economical nightmare where all parties involved (consumers included) have to wonder if it’s worth charging $6 per song…. and there’s only two songs. I’m a huge fan of Facs so price is not really an issue for me when it comes to that group. However, as the split 7” used to be a way to discover new bands at a cheap price (it was called ‘taking a chance’), I’m not sure how well this is going to go over for people who otherwise wouldn’t know either of these groups. Physical media notwithstanding, you can just hear this online anywhere, so maybe it’s all a moot point. So Facs dropping a new track is always going to be interesting to me and this is no disappointment. It remains consistent with their slow-motion sprawling post-punk beginning with a rather minimalist rhythm that eventually breaks into huge tidal waves of guitar and then a sort of upbeat proggy third act. They give you your money’s worth. Chimers, from Australia, is new to me and their brief contribution left me needing to explore their other material to get an idea of how this stacks up. If you catch their last LP they have this wonderful Mission Of Burma meets post-hardcore thing going on. Their song here, “Red Chair” is a bit faster and more spontaneous, and doesn’t quite offer the range of dynamics other material has. But it’s a good track nonetheless and hopefully leads listeners to scope out what else they have to offer.

PLOT, “Food Chain”

This group caught some ‘how did anyone miss this opportunity?’ energy and grabbed this moniker in an age where most bands can’t be bothered to do a basic search and use some name that has already been taken a dozen times over, or go with the stupidest name imaginable. It’s so simple, but pretty brilliant all the same. Plot. That’s it. It’s good. Catchy name aside, I caught this trio at Caterwaul last year and was really feeling what they were doing, having literally nothing to go on, I just took a chance on them (and they had that cool name). I could sort of place the sound, but not quite. However, on their third LP, now I feel I got it: think the futuristic synth punk of noisy voyeurs Milemarker and The VSS meets up with a small dose of proggy spaciness. It’s a big sound that is achieved through just heavily distorted bass (and occasional guitar), drums, and a colorful palette of varying synths. They often lean in on dense, pulsing, low-end scuzzy-sounding synths, but will switch it up where you pick up those more spacey sounds as well. I’d say Haunted Horses could be in the conversation as well, even though they lean more into the grating industrial side of things. They’re kindred spirits if anything. Nevertheless, Plot offer an interesting follow up to their other exceptional material with a focused LP that goes through ebbs and flows of slower, spacey futurism and frantic, noisy density that whips right by. Great stuff to ruin a dance party to, or cause some property damage at said dance party.

JOHNBOY, “Anthology” 2xLP

As a disclaimer I don’t make a habit of reviewing Record Store Day releases (most all of it is useless garbage). Additionally, I’m generally reluctant to review reissues of any sort because there is more than enough new music being made that is worthy of attention. But I’ll make the case for Johnboy because a) barely anyone ever heard of them and b) Southern Lord Records has a great track record for unearthing rare and obscure gems and doing them justice. So Johnboy existed in Austin in the early to mid-90’s and their sound certainly has a combination of some unlikely elements from that era that I like quite a bit. Aside from their name popping up every now and again I had never heard a lick of their music. So it’s cool it was brought back into the discussion of things heavy, strange, off-kilter, and largely unknown. While based out of the fertile Austin scene the music feels like it drew heavily from the math-y workmanlike sturdiness of Chicago bands aligned with labels like Divot, Mud, or Southern, mixed with the anti-social clattering noisiness of early Unsane’s in-the-gutter NYC scumminess. While back then Austin was known for it’s bevy of mind-melting harsh noisy bands, they often seemed to be primarily influenced by lots of weird drugs. I’m not casting any assumptions upon the membership of Johnboy, maybe they really dug into the jazz cabbage or LSD. But something about their approach makes me think they spent more time in a library, or factories, than zoinked out on 3-day acid trips. Their music doesn’t have a lot of vocals and when they do start shouting it’s buried a bit in the mix, so it’s a bit tough to know what they’re going on about. This is a pretty dense discography with 20 tracks, lots of visuals, and a 20 page booklet to go along with it. And like most Southern Lord releases they keep prices pretty low while keeping quality exceptionally high. I say take a chance and roll the dice.

Video still by Tape Swap Radio

I don’t know exactly how I first heard Tile, but immediately upon hearing them I was blown away. I could tell exactly what they were going for (read on and you will find out) right away and I was all in. I can’t entirely recall the timeline of what came next, but I reached out to their singer/bassist Ray Gurz about them maybe coming up my way to play a show. Eventually I went down their way to see them play a small show instead in a record store and it was quite possibly one of the worst sets I’d ever seen. Two songs in Ray’s bass just broke- like it fell apart- and no one would loan him theirs so they just gave up.

On future visits to Bethlehem I’d always make a point to stop at Vegan Treats and Double Decker Records (usually on my way to Philly), and Ray was working at Double Decker at the time.

So any time I stopped in I’d always chat with him for a bit and we would keep in touch. Tile never did make it up my way to play a show, but after awhile we did talk about doing a record together.

Well, that didn’t happen either. Tile kind of quietly ended, but the idea behind the band, and the overall approach remained the same when Ray mentioned he was going to be playing music under the name Wipes instead. Once again, I was in immediately.

What has transpired since is a band that is prolific in their output (a 7”, a split, 2 LPs, several comp appearances, a couple other EPs, and another 10” EP on the way imminently), and focused in their mission. I’ve had the good fortune of bringing them out to the Northwest for some shows, and seeing them in different cities, and all the while maintaining a friendship with them.

Plus, Ray’s an interesting guy with an interesting life- playing music, running a small skateboard company, and even making children’s books every now and again. Why haven’t I interviewed him earlier? I can’t say. But here we are now, so let’s get to it.

If you bring up Bethlehem, Pennsylvania most people have no idea where that is. But it’s actually got a pretty storied punk rock history to it.

Yeah it does. Absolutely.

You’ve been a part of that for a pretty long time so can you speak to that a bit, or share some history?

I know in the 90’s the band Weston was gigantic for Bethlehem. For local history you have The Ick. But then you have Weston, which was the band from Bethlehem. But also in the last 26 years you have Secret Cutter, probably one of the biggest and loudest bands that came out of here. There were really good shows, really good venues. For venues there was this place called Scarlet O’Haras in Bethlehem that used to hold shows in the early 90’s for any local, and non-local, act. For us we would always see, like every other weekend, Mouthpiece, Flagman, Lifetime, and maybe Resurrection. And it became so regular to have the same bill. But they were all from New Jersey, so they would just come over and play Bethlehem.

My friends were in Blindside, so I would just tag along. That was probably around ’92 when all that was happening. So the scene’s been really cool for all these years.

And even way later with Secret Art Space in Bethlehem, pretty close to Home Base Skate Shop, that was a killer venue too. It was all ages and they would have the wildest shows on Fridays and Saturdays.

Photo by Adam Novicki

I think my introduction to Bethlehem came from hearing of Home Base, because they have been around forever, seeing ads for Double Decker Records in every fanzine and they were around forever too. But more personally, and much later on, hearing about and seeing Secret Art Space when friends bands started playing down there more often. And that’s also when I got to know people from down there.

It was a cool DIY venue that literally brought everyone in. Tile played there a bunch. Another band I was doing for awhile- Bad American- that was like our home spot. After awhile everyone started coming through and the sickest bands would play there. It was basically a small basement of a random building in south side Bethlehem. Stuff was happening. It was cool.

I guess the next closest city is Philadelphia. So when you were younger did that feel like basically another planet, or some level of disconnection from it? Or was there more of an attitude like, ‘everything within an hour is Philly’?

I don’t know if anyone will remember, but in Allentown (next to Bethlehem) there was a venue called The Pirates Cove and I think bands from all over, when Philly wasn’t hopping for shows, would play there. Because there was a time when Philly wasn’t doing a lot. So bands on tour would go from New York and play Pirates Cove in Allentown instead of Philly. I’m talking big bands like Municipal Waste, Phobia, endless amounts of bands. Seein’ Red, all the way from Europe, were playing there. So the disconnect was this idea of some big magical spot to play and it’s actually just the basement of some ranch home. (laughs) That’s all it was!

These bands would have no idea what’s going on. But it was madness! There’s circle pits happening, it was just a punk house in the middle of an industrial area where everything shut down at 5. It would turn into the punk block. You’d walk to the WaWa and come right back to the show and hang out in the yard. I can’t even tell ya.

One of the biggest shows my band ever played there, when I was in Carpenter Ant, was that we were supposed to play at a VFW and it got moved to the house because it got shut down after the first noise act. So we moved it there. I played with Drop Dead and Mastodon right when Mastodon had “Leviathan” coming out and it was insane. They were playing on full stacks. I thought the house was just going to give out because it was so loud. It was super cool.

But the disconnection is however you want to take it. I think a lot of people just gave up on this struggle of trying to book shows in Philly, how about we just go check out Allentown instead? Plus, everyone wants to go get Vegan Treats. And everyone would want to go to Double Decker. So they would do the routine.

They would all go to Vegan Treats, then Double Decker, and then over to the Pirates Cove for a show. So that was pretty much a given for a time.

I see the allure. I’ve done that as well, except I never went to Pirates Cove. But Allentown and Bethlehem are the types of towns where if they’re close to a big city everyone eventually moves to that big city. So I imagine there’s been quite the diaspora over the years of people you knew that traded Bethlehem for Philly.

Yeah, for sure.

So what has kept you there? Why have you stayed?

I stayed for jobs. So I learned that when I came home from the military I had to find something consistent that was going to be good. Or good paying. So I would get these offers, like, ‘hey do you want to come work for my mom’s business?’ So I’d do that. You can find good stuff that’s seasonal, but you can still make a good living, and I can still be a part of the scene. So I just arranged it like that. I’ve now been at UPS for 19 years. I’ve always stayed in this area but I like places with seasons that change. It’s pretty convenient for going to certain places. New York is like an hour and forty-five away. Philly is a little over an hour. It’s not super expensive to live here. But also, if you make something cool everyone will come out.

The wave of music always changes, but right now the scene is pretty cool. I’m glad I’m still here. It’s why I haven’t really gone anywhere. My family is here too.

Some of your earlier bands were unquestionably very fast, hardcore-punk bands. And some of the people in those bands went on to do bigger, more established bands kind of still in that world. So what was it that made you want to shift from that into whatever it is that Tile, and now Wipes, became? Because it’s quite the shift.

It’s a huge shift. I’ve been in charge of most of the bands I’ve been in almost all of the time. It’s like doing five schedules. It’s so hard to coordinate that stuff. And I hate to say it, but after like five years a lot of people do move on because life moves on. You get married. You have kids. When I was doing those earlier bands I was already in my late 20’s. Even then my wife and I decided we weren’t going to have kids. That’s the way we were able to focus on scheduling stuff.

But the shift from the punk bands to Tile and now Wipes was that I just wanted to play meaner stuff. I love heavier stuff. My friend Micah was playing me stuff like Iron Monkey. He was like, ‘do you know this?’ and I said ‘no’. And then he asks if I know the band Floor. And I’m like, ‘I’ve never heard it, but I’m so excited’. I mean, Tile came from Floor, ya know? A lot of people don’t know that. They’ll ask how I came up with the name ’Tile’ for a band. I’ll tell them one of the best bands I was into was called Floor. Especially those early 7”s, because I was collecting them from Double Decker Records, going there looking for them because everything was mailorder. You know when you’re behind? Like, you’re behind and you’re trying to catch up? Everyone’s out there using EBay and I just relied on going to the record store, talking to the owner, and getting schooled on this stuff… not in a mean way, but in a ‘you’re into heavy stuff? You should check this out’ way.

So I just became obsessed with Floor. I think there’s one 7”, I think it’s called “Loanin’”. But it’s super gross and mean sounding. And I thought, ‘I want to do a band like that!’ I just wanted to do something new and interesting. I didn’t go to school or anything, I’m a self-taught bassist. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know what tuning was. But someone sold me a bass, they needed money to go on tour. So I got this bass, and I can just plug into a PA system, and I literally just ran home and got it. I went to the practice space where a couple friends were working on this other band, and I showed them a couple things I thought of. I figured, ‘can’t we just make noise and play some really heavy riffs?’ So yeah. That’s how it all started.

Carpenter Ant was your band before all that right?

I just did vocals in that band. And I threw a lot of skateboard wheels at people. (laughs). I was the dude with the helmet and the skateboard-mic. That was it.

And you started that band when you were already in your late 20s?

Yeah, late 20’s. That band started in 2000.

Was that your first band?

No, I had a band in high school called Grow. It was really bad hardcore. Lots of chug-chug breakdowns. We had no idea what we were doing. I think we released a demo cassette. Then I came home from boot camp and we recorded some more songs in the studio. This was all pre-internet. So we were literally writing letters to each other trying to coordinate when I was coming home from boot camp so we could go into the studio so I can record these songs before I got shipped out to Japan. It was a different route for sure.

So Tile was the first band where you were playing an instrument.

Yes. Tile started in 2006.

Most people get started on those things when they’re in their late teens and by their late 20’s it fizzles out. But you were just getting started.

Exactly. I literally had no idea what I was doing. It’s just how you do anything though. You get so obsessed. And then you see stuff start to come together. You see riffs fitting together, and making a pattern. And then I would think, ‘oh, this is how I write a song’. If anything people laugh because I was telling them I was learning to play bass by making up my own alphabet on the back of the neck of the bass and hunching over so I could see it. I didn’t know the dots on the neck meant odd numbers.

I remember Mike from Tile was like, ‘why are you hunched over all the time? Is this a thing?’ And I would tell him I wrote my own alphabet on the back of the neck. He says, ‘turn your bass up. The dots are odd numbers’. I was so surprised. I was like, ‘I’ve been doing this for months!’ They thought I was doing some thing where I was intentionally trying to look really odd while I was playing. But I just had no idea what I was doing!

But you become obsessed because you play a few rough tracks for people and next thing you know they’re inspiring friends. A lot of people don’t have that. Most people would say it’s stupid, or ‘I don’t see you going anywhere with that’. Meanwhile, my friends in Jeff the Pigeon and Air Conditioning are supportive. And I would play stuff for Brad from Pissed Jeans because he would fill in for Carpenter Ant, and he’s a rad dude, and he would encourage me to make it into something. So I just kind of got inspired from my friends. It just took off.

Wipes, OG lineup, Bethlehem 2022

I think some of the coolest stuff comes from both isolation and trying to imitate something and doing it wrong. So something else comes out instead and it’s unique and weird. I think that’s a benefit of not learning how to do things the way you’re supposed to, or in a traditional way, and you just kind of figure it out on your own instead. And whatever comes out is kind of singular.

For me it’s just like skateboarding. You try your ass off to figure something out and then a trick just happens and you think, ‘this is amazing!’ I got so inspired and so excited to try and learn it. But then those few friends approach you and say, ‘I know you’ve only been around a couple months but do you want to play a show?’ The first Tile show was with Landed, from Providence, and Air Conditioning. We did maybe four, or five songs, we were a mess, I didn’t even use a tuner. But it just snowballed into me being stoked on doing stuff.

You mentioned skateboarding and that’s what I wanted to segue into because given our age and when we got into things skateboarding and punk used to be synonymous. I’m not so sure that’s entirely the case anymore. I know there’s still crossover there, just maybe not as much as there used to be. But skateboarding is a big part of what you do.

Yeah. I still find musicians in a lot of skateboarding stuff. But it’s not highlighted as much. Now it feels more like, ‘did you watch skateboarding in the Olympics this year?’ It’s not too often where I run into someone who feels that punk and skateboarding are synonymous. They’re on the same wavelength, but I’m really old now! A lot of people say I don’t look it, but I’m still in it. I still think about skateboarding a lot. It’s one thing that makes you free. You literally can go out your door and there’s no rules. I think with skateboarding and music you can just meet anyone whose doing it and say what’s up. I still find it relevant, but a lot of people my age might go to a cleaner skatepark. But for me I feel like I’m just going to go to that abandoned mall and skate a curb.

It got to the point where people are attracted to their environments, so if you feel safe being in this cage, with a fence, and it’s all nice and smooth, but it’s filled with people who have no idea what they’re doing I say go for it. But for me I still love wandering. I feel like if you drive around and find stuff that I can makeshift into a ramp that’s trash, because I still like to do that, and use it that’s still inspiring to me.

Sometimes I do run into someone who still skates and does music, but unfortunately I am an old head so the guys my age can’t do both. They do one or the other.

Ray skating for Lost Soul Skateboards, photo Adam Novicki

Was it punk that got you into skateboarding, or skateboarding that got you into punk?

You know what? It was skateboarding that got me into punk. For real. I was watching really old H-Street videos when they came out, and they were so advanced. I thought they were cool, but I’d keep thinking, ‘who the hell is this band on the soundtrack?’ Or I would see Matt Hensley do stuff, and it then snowballed into someone telling me about this cool radio station that would play this kind of music on Friday nights. So then I was so young, like 12, 13, 14, I was just a kid. I couldn’t really go out and do stuff, I couldn’t drive or go to shows. So I would just put on the radio in my room, go to the station, put a tape in there, and just record this radio station so I could record these tracks. I had no idea what this music was, or what was going on. That’s how I learned.

Maybe a little less important overall, but another piece of the subculture that you and I share, is that we’re both still openly straight edge people who are heavily into noise rock. And most people who are into noise rock are also generally into going to bars. Maybe at our age we’re not super adamant about it, but it’s a thing that we believe in. And I think you’re the only other person in this niche scene I know of who claims that!

It’s true! Just today I was at this vendor market selling records and stuff and I met this guy who was in the 90’s band Conviction. It was the bass player, his name is Ron. And he asked me if I was still straightedge and I said I was, I’m proud of it, not going to hide from it. So then he asked what my band sounded like, was it youth crew? And I was like, ‘Nope. Not even close’

So he asked me to describe it and I told him it sounded like a very slow and angry Melvins sometimes, up to a catchy Nirvana, “In Utero”-meets- Pennsylvania. So he asked if I had any Wipes records and he bought one!

But the thing is, whenever you tell someone you’re straightedge and in a band they assume you’re in a youth crew band, or that’s all you’re into. But I’m still super into powerviolence if it’s done well. I like noise. I like noise rock. It’s an odd thing when you tell people that. And I also like youth crew, if it’s done well. I’m down.

But when it comes to straightedge music, honestly, I just like music. I appreciate all genres.

We’re bucking the stereotype.

You can be straightedge and make heavy noise. You’re allowed.

So since Wipes started you’ve been pretty prolific. You always seem to be writing, recording, releasing a bunch of stuff in a fairly short amount of time. So I have to ask- is it tough to write a song? Does everything make the cut?

Wipes in 2025, photo by Dean Wiley

Not everything makes the cut, and I’m cool with that. The thing is I’ve been reading stuff, and listening to little speeches here and there, from the producer Rick Rubin. And when it comes down to the creative process I don’t want the band to be a Thursday night, get away from the wives or girlfriends and play, and bitch and moan about stuff thing. And then talk about how annoying the system is in America, or how the world is falling apart. So all I do is I come up with a simple riff and we just jam. I think people forget what a real band is. It’s about jamming. It’s about making music, and seeing what you can throw against a wall and what sticks.

Jared from Secret Cutter, who has recorded so many of my projects, asks how I have so many songs. And I just tell him I want to make something once a week, and brainstorm on it, and if it works, cool. If it doesn’t, or it doesn’t make an album, I’m OK with that. I’d rather have too much than not enough. So that’s kind of the formula. I also don’t force it either. I just write when I want to write. I think everyone thinks that when we started the other guys would be writing the majority of the stuff and that I’d be the weak link in writing. But it’s the opposite. I want to do a band that’s fun so if you want something to last you can’t rely on anyone else. You have to do it. That’s how I do Wipes. I’m obsessed with making something cool and not wasting my time. That’s how we come up with so much material.

The streak of audio overload continues with so much stuff dropping I feel like there’s an embarrassment of riches in my little pocket of musical interest right now. This month may not have some of the more well-established bands, or hyped up releases. But it’s the new bands, the smaller ones you may not have heard of, the ones making an impact regionally that get lost in any other area that are dominating what I’ve been excited about. And there’s plenty of killer hardcore coming from a few different angles. But don’t worry, there’s some less aggressive, but equally as powerful, stuff popping up too. So read on and listen to some new jams.

DRY SOCKET, “Self-Defense Techniques”

It’s been a wildly prolific and busy last couple years for Portland’s own hardcore champions Dry Socket. They released their debut album, released two more excellent split records and now are already on LP number two. They’ve done multiple tours across the US and Europe and more short tour runs than I can count. It’s just a nice feeling when you see people/bands that you witnessed from the get-go getting on so well in other places and always being well-received in town. That all being said, on this new LP the band lean into a few different gears to deliver a furious sound- quick and ultra-fast to-the-point rippers (“Clenched Fist”, “Leglock”), slower, riff-centric crowd movers (“Rigged Survival”), heavier, slightly more metallic tirades (“95%”), and opening the record with just repeated screeched vocals before a mid-tempo beat kicks in and elevates what could essentially be an intro into something far more memorable and a good way to kick things off. While their first LP tackled an overall theme around personal grief and loss “Self Defense Techniques” centers around different ways of protecting oneself (mentally and perhaps physically) in the aftermath of personal and social turmoil it would seem. It’s a short record (just a few minutes past being able to fit on a 7”), but it’s crammed with the kind of hardcore that maintains a unique originality while also excelling at the things that unquestionably make them a hardcore band through and through.

STUCK, “Optimizer”

I keep thinking that something feels different about Chicago post-punk group Stuck’s third proper LP, as compared to the almost minimalist feel of the first LP “Change Is Bad”, or even the more upbeat second LP, “Freak Frequency”. But in all honesty, Stuck have remained true (you thought I was going to say ’stuck’ again, didn’t you?) to their original sound. I’d say they filled it out a bit more with some more apparent second guitar parts, adding some distorted/fuzzy effects to the bass and guitar at times, the occasional electronic-sounding drum parts, and some exercises in variation of a sound (the 46 second ass-tearing, blink-and-you-miss-it punk of “Less Is More” and the Wall Of Voodoo-esque weirdo pop of “Instakill”). Vocalist/guitarist Greg Obis has expanded his vocal range a bit, as well as a shift in lyrics that feel a little less directly socio-political and hit upon what feels like more personalized stories. OK, I think I got it- here’s what’s different about this compared to their other records: more layers. What stood out to me about Stuck initially was how much they did with so little: clean guitars, tight bass lines, clear and clever lyrics. Succinct and practical, yet clever. “Optimizer” adds not only layers to the depth of their songs, but also adding more guitars, background sounds, guitar distortion, and the like. So same band with the same general sound? Yes. But do they take a step to eschew minimalism in favor of bigger, more layered music? I’d say so. It’s cool to hear what they have come up with and this is quite enjoyable. Though I will say how impressive they can be when they historically have done so much in a really simple way too.

COMMITMENT, “Fear Of”

Members of Eye Flys and Soul Glo (at least those are the bona fides I’m aware of) come together to make music that is just as hostile and volatile as you might expect. Special shout out to guitarist Jake Smith (Eye Flys, Backslider, touring guitarist for HIRS Collective) for being as versatile as they are between several extreme bands and always knowing how to lay down a mean-ass riff backed by a killer guitar tone. In Commitment these forces come together to sound legitimately threatening through wildly fast, almost powerviolence hardcore. But it fucking shreds. And they bring a unique perspective to fast hardcore, after having just seen them play (and absolutely crush it), in that I don’t believe I have ever seen the singer of a hardcore band twerk to their own band during breakdowns. So that’s new to me. It certainly beats crowd killing people. But I digress. The band get on with it and there’s only one song that breaks the two-minute mark so they waste no time. There are the socio-political angry rants you’d expect from a fast and angry hardcore band (duh), but also a handful of sex-positive/ ‘let’s get it on’ type songs (I’m not sure if I’d recommend these songs as background music to romance your partner to, but to each their own!), which is definitely not the norm for the music it’s paired with. I’m enjoying this breath of very fresh air that Commitment offer in a genre that can get stagnant in redundancy. It’s fun, a bit humorous, and absolutely vicious.

THE CROSSES, “Outlier” EP

Embodying the spirit of some true OG Midwest hardcore, Die Kreuzen, The Crosses carries that legacy through original vocalist Daniel Kubinski shredding his pipes on the mic. While he remains the sole direct connection the music certainly carries that feel with players who have that same dirty, raw, and fast hardcore approach that’s at once simple enough to just beat your ass, but a little weird too, which I like. Most notably, members of recently disbanded Big Laugh (who definitely had some of that Die Kreuzen energy in their music) are on this record, so you know it’s going to be good. Kubinski has the same approach to vocals you’d find in HR from Bad Brains, except when he growls it sounds more sadistic and when he sings (or howls) it’s maybe an octave lower and a bit more spooky too. The first half of this EP is unquestionably a hardcore record, but once they get to “Natronium” they slow it down to give the listening some breathing room, and it follows with “Man In the Trees” which has what I can only describe as a Seattle Sub Pop circa 1989 sound (think some Screaming Trees, Tad, Mother Love Bone at their most rocking). It’s an interesting little diversion, but they bring it back to breakneck pace hardcore fury on closer “I’ll Never Forget You”, which is a great way to end the record. It definitely keeps me interested and wanting more.

THE BIG THEM, “Four Colours”

OK, here’s the idea: members of Mums and Irk (both wonderful UK-based bands) team up to improvise a record full of songs. They have done this a bunch. They have a lot of recordings and most of the songs run very long. Does this sound bad? I know, it sounds bad. But these cats are such masters of making a massive, noise-drenched riff that they basically come in with an idea, hit record, and break you in half with a riff for like 10 minutes before altering it a bit. That’s their thing. It works better than you might think. This record is perhaps their most varied and interesting as they break it up into four songs and each one is different. They open with “Lick Lick Lick”, which features Billy Mason Wood from Blacklisters being the howling lunatic from Blacklisters and the song sounds very much like…. well, like a Blacklisters song- chunky, repetitive, bass heavy, and filled with dread. “Yellow” features Gareth Thomas of USA Nails on vocals and that song… well, that sounds totally like a USA Nails song- leaning into post-punk and a weird catchy riff, lots of effects, and an upbeat tempo. But between those two more or less respectful homages is kind of what Big Them generally conjure up- “Hello” is more akin to guitarist/vocalist and drummer Johnny Dickins other band Mums with it’s massive riff and sung vocals, but this song drifts and meanders a bit more amongst it’s huge swirl of feedback and rhythmic pulse. Closer “Sheets” sounds like a long, drawn out sludgy Unsane riff if they switched to a conscious-expanding mushroom tea instead of the blackest highway rest stop coffee this side of New Jersey. However, out of it’s 18 + minute length they spend the last 9 exploding in a fury of hitting every guitar pedal at once, cranking the amps to 11 and feedback some apocalyptic noise to absolutely wreck your speakers. It’s a project where spontaneity can either pay off big, or flop spectacularly. Thankfully these folks do what they do so well, and decided to go for variety, so their exercises yield really interesting results.

CONTINUALS, “Never Sleep”

It seems like this DC unit has released a lot of material in a fairly short amount of time, which tends to be irregular for a group of people who are probably far closer to getting AARP memberships than food handler cards. I don’t mean that in any ageist, derogatory way, it’s just a lot of bands and musicians I like that are older tend to have less time to dedicate to making music, releasing it, and playing shows than 20-somethings unconcerned with dumb obstacles like ‘rent’, ‘jobs’, or ‘kids’. On this release Continuals have gone and added a fourth member, Melissa Quinley (Soccer Team, backup/guest vocals on lots of great stuff) on keyboards and vocals. So now half the songs have her on the lead, while the other half feature guitarist Ryan Nelson (Most Secret Method, the guy who has packed my Dischord Records orders and adds in flyers he’s drawn). The band is rounded out by a dynamite rhythm section- Michael Honch (was apparently in Hunger Artist, a band from near where I grew up who I’m too young to have seen) and Darren Zentek (a guy who I’ve made an effort to see every band he’s been in). Continuals can best be described as taking from a DC/Dischord sort of sound level with their peers- groups like The Evens, Coriky, J Robbins stuff, Andalusians, and the like where the songs just sound fun. There’s no heady messaging, no re-inventing the wheel, but sneaking in cool drum flourishes, interesting bass parts, cool vocal styles, and an undeniable sense of knowing how to write enjoyable indie rock songs.

DUG, “Mule”

It boggles my mind that for a person who generally does not have the attention span for doom, or drone metal I can really get down with Dug. In a pretty short time they have laid out no less than four albums of face-peeling amplifier worship and big, slow drums (and a lot of noise/samples too), and I’m into it. I can’t explain it. Occasionally, a song appears with various ‘parts’, but a lot of times they’re just smashing a couple notes, screaming something over and over (slowly) and hitting those drums (slowly), pushing the decibels into the red. It all must feel very satisfying. Their newest album, “Mule” presents a stark visual accompaniment that perfectly illustrates their modus operandi, while the record itself opens up with a couple minutes of some unexpected hymnal singing (it is called “Mouth Of God” so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised) before the nastiest distortion you’ve ever heard does a stop-start riff and forms, well, it forms a song. A slow, heavy, painful song. It’s a good start to the album. “Whirr” comes next and has this killer second half that goes on for like four minutes of total guitar torture that screams and squalls and basically tears the strings off the neck while there’s a continuous beating of the bass drum and cymbals. Very end-of-the-world/hydrogen bomb going off sort of thing. Love it. “The Vessel” is like Melvins at their absolute slowest and ugliest. Lastly, “Flesh Of the Earth” gets a bit too Sunn 0))) for me as it drones on for close to 10 minutes. So it’s really the only track that loses me. The other three tracks (yes, this is a full length) more than make up for it.

OUST, “Witness” demo

Toronto trio Oust occupy an interesting space on their first foray into the public domain. Their sound is so DC in it’s approach you’d think they know more about Positive Force benefit shows than Who’s Emma basement gigs (it’s OK, I’m just old). More specifically, Oust is akin to 90’s post-hardcore punks Hoover (especially in the vocals) if the songs were more up-tempo and a little less moody. But there’s something a bit more sophisticated to their sound that I can’t exactly place. They add a healthy dose of post-punk in their jangly jams and across the five tracks demonstrated here you can tell they are also big fans of the Jehu/Hot Snakes school of musical thought; if not directly, more so in spirit. Yet on an individual level, guitarist/vocalist Adam Maida exerts a more developed approach than on his former, more punk-leaning band Like Wolves and his artistic style has developed exponentially since those days as well. I know it’s just a demo (more or less) but check their page for some cool design work for the various tracks they put up. It’s a promising start for a new band that kind of already feels like they’re fully formed.

YEAR OF THE COYOTE, “Hell Wall”

It’s been nearly eight years since the locals in Year Of the Coyote have dropped an album. But, ya know, life stuff happens, so maybe they’ve been bottling up a lot of anger and hostility during that time because this new record operates in pretty much just one mode: all hostility. Then again, that’s kind of been the mode they’ve been on for their entire existence as a band. I know I’m referencing my own catalog here, but I think a part of why I dig on what Year Of the Coyote does is that they take a heavy (and I mean heavy) influence from the likes of Engineer and Colonial Wound. At the very least, each of these bands has a very similar sound even though each comes from disparate corners of the country. But take a lot of single-note bellowing, knotty riffs, played so fucking loud your cochlea drops through the shaking floorboards, and just grinding through it all relentlessly with barely any room to breathe and you’ve got one intense listen. The seven tracks here are broken up only by strange, noisey interludes, or samples, before going right back into bone-breaking heaviness. There’s no hooks, no catchy sing-alongs, just pulverizing riff after riff. The closest thing you get to continuous long-lasting repetition is the title track, closing out the record at nearly 10 minutes in length as it slowly chugs along before it decomposes into a lone guitar strumming. While a few of these tracks are a bit lengthy for the sort of non-stop bumrush of parts and unrelenting nature of their music this whole record goes by pretty quick. It demands your attention.

BURNED UP BLED DRY, “Next Stop…. Dead Stop…”

I’d always known this name and was familiar with seeing their records out in the wild because it’s a pretty unique moniker. But I always passed them off because it looked very crust, and while I enjoy some bands of that ilk a lot of it gets really redundant. They were active in the late 90’s and then, a few years ago, they began playing together again. It seems they all found themselves back in Arkansas once more and picked up right where they left off. They didn’t have a whole lot in the back catalog so they went and wrote an entire album finally, some 25 years later. While there are a couple re-recorded tracks here (and apparently some songs they wrote before initially splitting, but never recorded?) most of this is new. And honestly, the only difference between this material and their original material is this actually has an excellent recording and sounds absolutely vicious. Over half these tracks are under a minute in length and I truly appreciate efficiency in my hardcore. BUBD tend to lay out very short, very fast hardcore with some 90’s hardcore rhythm, plenty of blast beats/powerviolence parts, and absolutely crushing- albeit brief- breakdowns, all with a sort of crusty veneer. What more could you want? How about a song where the only lyrics are “Pig trough filled with badges and egos, all cops”? Yes, that will do. That will do.

It’s been quite awhile since I had some significant news to share, but now there’s finally something very worthwhile to discuss!

We talked about them plenty before but this June Hex Records is co-releasing the new Edging album! Along with the band’s own Dick Jail Records we’re helping bring this wonderful new record into this dumb nightmare of a world. Perhaps it will brighten that bleakness just a bit.

Chicago punks Edging may not yet be on the tip of everyone’s tongues when it comes to the most exciting new bands out there, but they won’t stay that way for long. With a fiercely independent spirit they’ve carved out their own lane, doing everything on their own terms while remaining completely unique. They’ve already self-released two LPs, toured extensively both solo and alongside the likes of Lambrini Girls, Bushfire, and are gearing up for an upcoming run with Amyl & the Sniffers this October. Equal parts unhinged fun and controlled chaos, Edging balances light-hearted absurdity with a raw, confrontational energy. Beneath it all is a band of serious musicians, melding technical precision with total spontaneity, driven by lyrics that take a direct, no-filter stance against the world’s uglier sides.

On “Unload Your Shame” Edging pushes everything they’ve built into their most fully realized and explosive material yet, doubling down on their signature saxophone-drenched, anything-goes punk. They lean into the sexualized kitsch of earlier releases, while also threading the tracks together with warped video game samples and interludes that give it a strange, cohesive pulse from beginning to end. Recorded in spring of 2025 at Jam Town Studios (Philadelphia, PA), and Spring of 2026 at Palisade Studios (Chicago, IL). Engineered and Produced by Evan Bernard and mastered by the legendary Howie Weinberg the album captures a perfect balance of grit and clarity. Every chaotic layer hits with purpose. The songs are short, the music is fast, the vocals are howled, and the saxophone is absolutely wailing!

Edging has no intention of slowing down in 2026, with heavy touring plans already in motion. Catch them unload their shame and chances are, you might feel compelled to as well. The album is out everywhere June 5th and pre-orders for the LP are available now in a very limited quantity:

International: https://mvdshop.com/products/edging-unload-your-shame-lp

EDGING TOUR DATES:

4/12- Chicago, IL @ Not Not

4/16- Nashville, TN @ Springwater Super Club

4/17- Atlanta, GA @ Drunken Unicorn (w/ Naw)

4/18- Gainesville, FL @ The Ox

4/19- Jacksonville, FL @ The Walrus

4/21- Columbia, SC @ La Isla Bonita

4/22- Charlotte, NC @ The Milestone

4/23- Washington, DC @ Quarry House

4/24- Philadelphia, PA @ Khyber Pass Pub

4/25- Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool

4/26- Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe Live

MIDWEST/WEST COAST

July 7th- July 25th

w/ Amyl & the Sniffers and Hunx and His Punx

10/4- Atlanta, GA @ Coca-Cola Roxy

10/5- Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Ampitheater

10/6- Nashville, TN @ The Truth

10/8- New Orleans, LA at The Fillmore

In other news NAW are finally finishing up their upcoming LP, “Spite Life” this week!

Presently, they have one show scheduled while they prep the new LP. It’s April 17th at Drunken Unicorn with Edging (who?! Just look above!).

Gaytheist have been keeping pretty quiet (Nick also plays in Great Falls and they just finished recording a new LP!). But they are making a long trek up to Calgary on April 24th to play with Greg Norton (of Husker Du), and then waaaay off in September they will be back at local Mississippi Studios to play once again with the mighty Unsane on Sept. 18th. I’m sure they’ll have something in-between then too.

We got a couple more announcements to make soon, but you’ll just have to wait on those for a little bit.

I have a general rule where I try not to interview the same people repeatedly. But I looked back and it’s been 17 years since I interviewed Patrick Kindlon, so I’ll give myself a pass. Plus, that also seems like an extraordinary long amount of time, but I guess we have known each other for longer than that. I’ve always found Patrick to be a very interesting person, and a pleasure to be around. Some people get frustrated by his frequent tangents, or an almost seemingly default setting towards being contrarian, and on paper it may come off that way. However, I’ve always found within these conversations he does so with a great degree of self-deprecation and levity, and I always take something of value from that. His resume’, I guess first and foremost, leads with being the frontman of the band Drug Church, who have steadily risen in stature to become a well-recognized and heavily touring group. But Patrick has also been a part of Self-Defense Family (who evolved out of his earlier very prolific band End Of a Year) for well over 10 years, who have an exhaustingly vast catalog of records despite always being a very part-time band. Add to that another highlight of being a well-respected comic book writer with titles published by Image and Black Mask, and co-host of the highly entertaining hardcore-punk centered Axe To Grind podcast it’s rather daunting to imagine how he has time for so many things.

It also makes for a good conversation with a person who grew up around Albany, New York but, by all accounts, is essentially a citizen of the world at this point. So yeah, Drug Church is the header for this interview because that’s who I went to see at the show. But there’s always a lot to catch up on with Patrick and I genuinely enjoy hearing about it.

So you now live in Tasmania. That is a very interesting, very remote place. Tell me a bit about that.

So for people at home Tasmania is a state in Australia. It’s not Tanzania, which is a country in Africa. People often make that mistake. It is often forgotten about by the rest of Australia. It is, in many people’s view, not a desirable place to live because it’s quite chilly compared to the rest of Australia and it’s a little behind in healthcare, a little behind in education, it doesn’t have as many opportunities for employment as some other places. It’s a small place.

And it’s an island.

And it’s an island. You can fly for an hour and a half, or you can take a nine-hour ferry. It’s your choice. But it’s a very, very beautiful place. I like the people quite a bit. It’s a provincial, sort of locals spot. I live in a small town outside of Hobart. I personally love it. My wife is going a little stir crazy because it’s kind of slow. But I’m on tour 100 days a year so when I’m home I like the slow. Like, I walk to a general store every day. It’s that type of thing.

Well, for as long as I’ve known you you’ve always been pretty nomadic. You don’t lay your head down in the same place for very long.

When I meet people who are like, ‘I’m a New Yorker, and that’s all I’ll ever be!’ it doesn’t sound like you’re doing well. It sounds like you’re a little crazy. It’s a really big world. You gotta taste it to know how it tastes. You go to one place, you don’t have to live there for the rest of your life, particularly if your back works and you can lift things you have options.

When I met my now wife and we discussed where to live Australia was fine by me, it seemed like a totally fun adventure, and when she said ‘how do you feel about Tasmania’- because we originally lived in Perth- it’s kind of a long story but I had no leverage because I was banned from the country at the time. I’m just glad my wife was willing to stick with me, but I said ‘yes, when I can get back in that country Tasmania sounds good.’

I’m really glad for it. My wife is now having second thoughts, but I really love it. It’s a lot like the Pacific Northwest in some respects. It’s a very beautiful place. I talked to someone the other day who had never left the area. I don’t mean the island.

You mean the town.

Yeah, pretty much. You do encounter a little bit of that. And you do encounter a bit of a brain drain because once kids there turn 18 they all leave and go to Melbourne. But I find it charming as hell.

But you have been everywhere. So what are some of the best places?

The best place in the United States is San Diego. Places in Europe I’ve really enjoyed, Spain is hard to beat. Italy is great. My family is a little Greek so I like Greek stuff. South of France, perhaps.

I haven’t done a ton of Africa. Well, fake Africa, no offense to the Egyptians but they don’t even really consider themselves African. So I haven’t seen enough of Africa to comment.

South America I really, really liked Buenos Aires, it was very pretty. Santiago, Chile was also interesting.

Again, in the US, San Diego and Charleston, South Carolina are the greatest places.

In Asia I’ve only done Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Oh, that’s it?

(laughs) Well, there’s a lot to miss! Oh, I went to Japan too. Japan was totally fantastic, I don’t know if I would want to live there. I really enjoyed the chaos of Cambodia, but I thought Vietnam had a very nice energy and the Indonesian people are really, really charming. So that’s my world review.

How does Tasmania stack up against them all?

Tasmania is top 10 for sure. It’s not quite as beautiful as the Swiss Alps, or something like that. And it’s not as beautiful as Tennessee. I feel like Tennessee is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. But it’s really green. It feels like it’s alive everywhere. It has a real deep charm to it. So I would put Tasmania top 10.

But living there obviously makes everything else you do complicated.

Oh yeah. If I want to leave my house to come to the United States to play music the band starts at a deficit of $3500 just so I can get there.

That’s rough. But it says a lot about the band. I remember when Drug Church started and we were talking about it and you were kind of brushing it off that it was just a project, and you wouldn’t do much of anything with it. So now it’s the thing that probably takes up the most amount of your time.

Yeah, as crazy as it sounds you could call the band that we only intended to do a demo and break up a career.

You also seem to be a person that has always kind of just fell into a thing, or were invited into a thing, rather than being the person who starts a thing.

That’s true. At a young age I was the most verbal guy so they would say, ‘you’re the singer’. And then I became a singer for the rest of my life. I never got very good at it. It’s a weird thing they’re going to be putting on my epitaph. ‘Never truly mastered his vocation of 30 years’. (laughs)

You never really want to see yourself as a passenger, you’d rather be the commander of your own destiny, but the fact is I have fell into music quite a bit. And now, by virtue of being the singer, you’re seen as the band leader. So even if you don’t want that role people outside the band will put you in that position.

Switching things a bit, how did you get into writing comics?

That was actually Matt Rosenberg. Some people in music will actually remember that he was the guy who did Red Leader Records. He put out records by Strike Anywhere.

He did some stuff.

He put out a lot of people’s first records before they all left him for bigger labels. So he and I would talk because we were acquainted through music, and we both had an interest in comic books. We were both approaching 30 and said the right thing, which is, ‘why don’t we just try it?’ Time is slipping away from us, let’s go for it. So we did.

I’ve been reading comic books since I was two, and throughout most of my early adolescence I had wanted to do it as a career. But I didn’t even know how to approach that. So it was good to have somebody to motivate with. It put me in the position of having some structure to the thing I was trying to achieve. Having someone else to say, ‘hey, what did you do? Did you get something done?’

Matt is very good at networking. He got us in front of some people. He got us some early opportunities. Those opportunities spun into other things.

In careers, as well as in life, there’s a lot of people that have survivor’s bias. They believe that because something worked out for them that that’s how it would work out for anyone else. You find this in music a lot. Bands that are successful believe that’s how it had to be. They were just so talented and so driven that there was no other way for it to possibly go. But that’s obviously just not true. Like, the guy from OnlyFans just died….

OK, I’m waiting for you to tie this altogether. Let’s see where this goes.

Maybe at one point that dude had the same feeling of ordained success from heaven. The same thing that some people in music feel, or some people in business feel. When everything worked out for you in such an incredible way that you never worked out that your gene sequencing, your RNA, you wouldn’t develop cancer at the wrong time to achieve your dreams.

This idea that fate arrives you at success… I don’t buy that. I’ve just seen too many really talented people who, just as driven as anyone else, get in car accidents that rendered their spines not operable. It’s all luck. And anyone who thinks it’s not is suffering a case of ego.

A recent title written by Pat Kindlon

But I imagine writing comics works well for you because it’s something where you don’t have to be tied to a location in order to do. You can tour all year and still write comics.

Yeah, certainly. It’s also easy when you’re passionate about something. It’s something I’ve loved since I was a child. This sounds strange, but even things like my sexual identity are formed by sequential art. I find comics much sexier than I find pornography. Obviously pornography is arousing, but there is something psychologically very stimulating about comics. An erotic comic is more tantalizing and titilating to me, personally.

So there’s things like that you don’t even think about until you’re an adult, but when you have these interests…. like if you did ballet as a young child there’s an excellent chance it will inform the way you move for the rest of your life. That’s the way comics are for me. It became an easy thing for me to fixate on, still is. Right now, because I had a little bit of success in the last couple years there’s a lot of moving parts, and you really feel like a publisher because there’s always spinning plates. There’s always something happening. That’s not really who I am. My brain moves slow. I’m not an organized person of any sort. So for me to do something like this I have to love it, month after month. It’s a bit like music, not to be corny about things.

For example, my wife has a perfectly respectable career in administration that she’s good at. She doesn’t see what I do, necessarily, as a job, or as work because I enjoy it too much for it to be work. You can understand someone that works in administration would look at someone who gets on a stage for 45 minutes and say ‘stop with the bullshit. That’s not work’. That’s how I feel about comics. It’s a really fun thing to do.

Does going the route you’ve gone with comics make it more difficult to sell a series to a publisher versus signing up to write for a series that’s already known?

I should be honest, I have alienated myself quite a bit from the big publishers.

Image is a pretty big publisher.

They are the largest of the creator-owned companies. I’m very grateful for the relationship I have there. But I’ve been very critical of the product of Marvel and DC, and that doesn’t really ingratiate me in any way. I don’t want to say I’m blacklisted, or think I’m so self-important to be blacklisted, but I don’t get the phone calls. I’ve taken a couple of meetings at these places. I’ve been promised books, but then editors leave.

These companies put you in a weird position because if you’re critical of them people will see that as the top of the pile and that you’re bitter because you’re being critical. Respectfully to my colleagues that work for those companies I don’t think anyone is doing the best work of their careers at those companies. And if you are it’s a little alarming. It’s totally fine to work for those companies. There’s a lot of opportunities that exist, but you also have to be doing your own thing.

This is semi-related but it seems over the last few years there’s been a number of people connected in some way to punk and hardcore that have gotten into writing comics- Gerard Way, Matt Rosenberg, Becky Cloonan, Michael Conrad, yourself.

There’s also other counter-culture, maybe not punk/hardcore, but counter-culture people who are in it as well. Aubrey Sitterson is a fellow that does work. I haven’t seen him lately, but Matt Miner is a proper Earth Crisis type guy. His work often has a sort of animal rights angle to it. And also, he’s not a hardcore-punk guy as you or I would define it, but that fellow from Say Anything, Max Bemis has written comics.

People search for crossover between these two things, but the reality is I don’t see any meaningful crossover between being into punk music, and writing for Disney. Again, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I’ve watched Disney products over the last ten years, I’m not judging. I’m just saying there’s no significant overlap.

I can say this: when you are working in creator-owned comic publishing, in any capacity, whether you’re doing self-publishing or going through a company like Image, there is a healthy DIY aspect to it.

So let’s get back to music. You had this thing you would talk about sometimes regarding the way you write lyrics where you wait until you’re in the studio to write everything. Do you still operate under that principle?

Yeah, sure. I’m really struggling with the new Self Defense record because I have so much time with it. It’s done. But I still have to go into a studio and stress to actually get good lyrics.

Is that the way you prefer it?

Yes. I prefer it that way.

You don’t show up to the practice space and hash out ideas while they’re writing songs?

No. What the hell am I going to offer? I don’t know how to play an instrument. I don’t know the songs until I go into the studio to record the lyrics. I have to write to what exists.

So they don’t even send you demos.

No.

That’s an interesting way to work. Why do you prefer it that way?

It’s the stress of actually having to perform. Like the other night I didn’t know any of the lyrics on the first night of this tour. We were playing songs I didn’t know at all. I spent four hours before we took the stage listening over and over to the same songs. I was convinced I didn’t know any of them, and the second we took the stage some Pavlovian thing took over and I knew it. But I needed the stress of, ‘oh, should I go on stage in a couple hours and I don’t know these songs?’. It’s not for everybody. Stress hits some people in a certain way that they don’t respond well to.

I’ve always compared it to soccer. You go on a field and you play soccer, but you don’t get to revise the job you did in that game.

You’re in the moment.

Yeah. So that leads me to think you don’t come up with at least themes, or ‘maybe I’ll address this stuff on the next Drug Church record’. You just show up and come up with it there.

Yeah.

I had been thinking about the Drug Church lyrics for some songs recently and maybe I’m off, but it feels like compared to earlier records where it often felt like you were telling stories about other people, whether they’re fictional or real, there’s more songs recently where you’re working out something about yourself.

Specifically, I think of ”Peer Review” because I think it’s a very interesting story based on personal things.

The story part, I don’t know why that happens more with Drug Church instead of Self Defense. You’d think with Self Defense we have these repeating parts where it would be easy to sort of novelize. But for some reason the Drug Church material lends itself to these stories. It’s just what comes out.

But it’s usually a mix. And those songs where it sounds like I’m talking about someone else it’s usually some reflection on me. I don’t think I’m clever enough to completely detach myself from a story.

The very newest song we just released is, from my standards, incredibly autobiographical so there’s no story. It’s just me.

I guess it’s been a mix for awhile, but you’re probably right. It’s arcing towards immediately personal.

I also like the idea behind “Detective Lieutenant”. I’m sure a lot of people take issue with it, but I really like the way in which the topic is addressed in the song.

Here’s my attitude on this- people make it a binary between ‘can I separate the art from the artist’. You either can, or you can’t. I think those are both broken binaries because what of the idea that perhaps the person’s bad behavior, or whatever they’re being accused of, informs their work. You don’t need to separate these things because they can inform each other in such a way that you perhaps get a bigger picture of this damaged person. And not for nothing, but I think it’s genuinely depressing when somebody endeavors to separate someone from the only thing they have to offer the world.

What I mean by that is I meet a lot of musicians. For better or for worse it’s my job now. I meet a lot of people who have nothing to offer other than this music that they make. They’re damaged people, they’re not ambitious, and they’re just people. And people have their problems and their foibles. So this idea that because of behavior we don’t approve of, or is generally reprehensible, that we have to divorce somebody from the only thing that we knew them from is strange.

For example, Dave Grohl had an extramarital affair. I don’t understand how that is anybody’s business on any level. That’s between him and his wife. But let’s say you’re a person that finds extramarital affairs to be particular onerous and immoral. Maybe it broke up your family and you have a real opinion on extramarital affairs. But I’m going to assume you didn’t listen to the Foo Fighters because they’re good to their wives. I assume you listen to the Foo Fighters because you like bad music. So when you find out that somebody did not fulfill the thing that you never went to them for why is that a problem?

Nobody is able to provide an answer to me for that that sounds at all convincing. I didn’t go to these musicians for their interpersonal relationships. And if their interpersonal relationships are dogshit I don’t know how that is supposed to divorce me from the thing that I did go to them for.

I have my own feelings around the subject matter of that song, I just think it’s presented in a way that opens it to discussion.

Listen, people are very emotional about things for good reasons. If you have been mistreated in specific ways it’s no surprise that you learning about another person behaving that way is going to incite these feelings in you. It’s a very natural thing! I wouldn’t seek to take that away from anybody. But there’s a second layer of indignation you see from people that is less personally felt, and more socially-channeled. There’s a purging of people that have what I’d call ‘none of my business-isms’. Like the Dave Grohl thing: cheating on your wife is bad behavior, that’s the way I feel about it. Maybe there’s people who feel different. But what’s difficult for me to reconcile is owing the world an apology for things that are purely interpersonal. Dave Grohl feels like he needs to make a statement to the world. That’s strictly between him and his wife. This idea that he needs to apologize to strangers is not very well-balanced thinking.

So Drug Church tours with a wide variety of bands, and Self Defense is not a hardcore band in any sense of the word. So do you feel that by maybe being co-host of Axe To Grind podcast, which is a very hardcore outlet, keeps you tied to that world? In another way of asking, what keeps you tied into hardcore?

I don’t know. I thought about this the other day and I came to a realization. You can only like what you like and people that force themselves to like things that they don’t are wasting their time. We were just upstairs in the venue talking about different bands that are popping right now and I hate every single one of them. I never want to sound ignorant, like I only like one thing. But the reality is there’s only like two types of music where I will give any new thing of that type a shot. Hardcore is one of them. And I don’t know why that is, other than an interest I developed when I was 15 (laughs)

It just sticks.

It just sticks and I don’t over-examine it too much. But doing the podcast does help me keep up with the actual news of the day, which is usually pointless gossip. But the news of the day is that there’s new music, or this tour is happening, what’s bubbling, is this what people are into, whatever. It’s a bizarre thing. Self Defense was never a hardcore band, but it might as well have been because that’s all we ever play with! Sometimes you get grandfathered in to these circumstances. Drug Church is a different situation. I always want to play with hardcore bands because as a matter of personal preference I want the show, from the first band to the headliner, to be raising the energy in the room. My bandmates like to have a show where there’s peaks and valleys, and dynamism in the respect that maybe we put a slow band on, between us and another band, and I have the complete opposite take. I hate it. I really hate it. That’s no disrespect to slow bands, I’m in one.

I don’t think a show needs to tell a story, you know what I mean? ‘Let’s make the show a really mixed bill so that the third band in everyone falls asleep simultaneously’. I don’t find it to be a good fit for Drug Church because at our best moments we’re at go-go-go. That’s why I always prefer to play with hardcore bands because those are the bands with that energy.

When we’re putting a tour together I’ll be the one say to say I need something…. it doesn’t need to be a proper hardcore band, it can be hardcore-adjacent, post-hardcore, but it has to have energy. Maybe it’s laziness on my part. I don’t want to be doing twice the work to get a crowd into the mood when I could have just had some support to do the job.

So that’s part of what keeps you tied in?

That’s part of it, for sure. My bandmates are paying attention to some of the indie stuff, the post-shoegaze, whatever. For my money I want to just tour with not dyed-in-the-wool hardcore bands-

Not Drug Church and Merauder.

Merauder I could almost justify because they’re still doing occasionally interesting things. But if you’re doing a straight up demo-core, youth crew-inspired sort of thing that has no angle to it that makes it more interesting you might be a great band, but it’s hard for me to where it fits in the shows I do. You’re right though. The last couple years we have been playing with more hardcore bands. We’ve gone out with Turnstile once or twice. They’re a great band and great people, but you can’t play with the same people all the time. I love the band Soul Blind. I’d take the band Soul Blind anywhere, on any tour, but we’ve gone out with them two or three times. So just by necessity you find yourself going, ‘what else is out there?’

I also see people commenting about this as well. But for the health of your band, you can’t just go out with the same five bands all the time. You can’t. In some ways it forces you to open up your aperture a little bit and try to experience other things.

We’re on tour with White Reaper and that’s not the type of music I reach for. But in trying to find interesting bands to tour with you occasionally trip over one and say, ‘oh, that’s quite good.’ They’re not trying to marry themselves to a specific subculture at all. They’re doing the hard thing and playing rock music very loud.

Just to close out, you have been doing this a very long time. We’re getting older. Does it get harder?

Physically, no. I’d like to give a shout out to the band Engineer. You put out one of their records. I booked them several times when I lived in Albany and they’re a really good band. The thing I learned from watching them, a band that a lot of people reading this might not remember, is that you don’t have to be doing the most in order to be impactful on stage. Now that I’m slow and fat I can move in a different way to keep up my interest, and keep up other people’s interest. You don’t have to be jumping around, per se. I think I’m still entertaining, you be the judge. I’m just slightly slower.

I’ve only thrown my back out once and that was from doing work outside of music. But there are guys younger than me in hardcore bands that are really struggling with back problems. It can come for you any time, it’s really quite scary. If you just take the wrong turn on stage you can kick something up. Sorry everybody if this is old guy corner, but it will come for you someday. I promise you.

But is getting old hard? I think it’s easier in some respects. We played a venue the other day, a really fun venue to play music. A not-fun venue to not play music. What I mean is that the green room was so discouraging for a grown man to be sitting in that I was laying on a table, starring at the ceiling saying ‘I think it’s time I worked with my hands, I’m watching some guys on Instagram doing cleaning work and it looks fun. Maybe my wife and I could start a cleaning business, we can clean the Air BnB’s in the neighborhood.’ I’m in here thinking about my options because this room is so depressing that it’s trying to forcibly eject me from the thing I’ve done for 25 years! So yeah, those moments happen. But I’ve determined there is something wrong with me because those moments come very infrequently, where as for a lot of people over the age of 40 they come all the time.

And I should mention, this is just being fair in how I balance this conversation- to be paid to do something that is so remarkably fun I do have to, on occasion, stop and realize that it’s a privilege. It’s true that I think I make good music and I’m supposed to enjoy it, and you’re supposed to pay for things you enjoy. But then I pause and think there’s a whole lot of people making really good music who are not able to be doing this thing that I’m doing for whatever reason. And it is a real privilege. I had this moment, in real time, while on stage where I was really grateful for all these people. It’s such a nice thing that they still enjoy what I do. You have to have some gratitude for a rare opportunity in life. Not to be maudlin, but a lot of people get zero validation. I get emotional about it. You meet people that are inspiring not because they tell you you made a difference in their life- that’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But what’s really inspiring is when you see a kid develop an interest in a thing, you know what I mean? Maybe they will think your band is lame in two years, but you’re helping motivate someone to express themselves.

Hoo boy, if this winter felt slow and dull than this month is more than making up for it. I had to go over my own personal limit here of reviews just to fit in all the incredible stuff that has emerged, and I even have to save some of it for next month because there was so much. There’s a handful of year-end contenders here and one big surprise no one saw coming. So seriously, get into it, enjoy, and overwhelm yourself with some excellent new music.

NEUROSIS, “An Undying Love For a Burning World”

Surprise, Neurosis made an album! Keeping this a secret must have been comparable to the likes of the location of Genghis Khan’s tomb. No one knew, or talked, under threat of death. It does feel a bit strange as the members seemed to imply a sudden finality when Scott Kelly departed some seven years ago. But finding a natural fit with Aaron Turner (Isis, Sumac, Old Man Gloom, Hydrahead Records) to take up guitar and (some) vocals couldn’t be a more apropos solution towards making more music. And guess what- it sounds like a Neurosis album. I mean, it really sounds like a Neurosis album. It’s good stuff. I’m partial to the dense and sludgy “Through Silver In Blood”, as well as the incomparable heaviness and riffs of “Times Of Grace” as their high water marks for me. This errs closer to “Times Of Grace” in it’s heaviness, while incorporating the songwriting direction you knew from the last few albums. There’s also use of some new, more modern-sounding (I guess) synth sounds, as well as some very 80’s John Carpenter-esque sounding ones, that I haven’t heard in this way on other Neurosis records. It also appears as if this came together faster than previous efforts in regards to a quick recording schedule, followed by a pretty expedient release. In the past the band seemed so laser-focused on refining every aspect and minor detail to exacting, and consensus-approved, standards. For all we know they may have been meeting in secret for years and rehearsing this stuff. Your guess is as good as mine. All told, I’m really enjoying this. Nothing sounds diluted, or half-hearted. It sounds realized and complete, determined even. It sounds like Neurosis. “We’ve forgotten we are wild, so we suffer”.

PEACH, “Only Love”

In the interview I did with this band recently they discussed a love of, and influence from, the likes of desert rock-era Queens Of the Stone Age and PJ Harvey. But I’d liken the UK’s Peach more to Julie Christmas and Made Out Of Babies more than anything due to the unhinged and wild vocals, as well as the loud-quiet-loud noisy heaviness that permeates throughout. This is their second LP and it’s just as exciting and satisfying of a ride as the first one. There’s a difference (aside from a bass guitar replacing a baritone on the first LP to cover the low end) on this record in that their debut felt a little more fun with many a simplistic stompy riffs, a la fellow country folk Mums. But “Only Love” has a great deal more tension and maybe a slight sense of dread throughout in the tone of the songs. It’s a bit more lyrically dense as well I feel, but vocalist Ellie Godwin still has plenty of room to give these songs infinite character in her howled, quivering, and sweetly sung one-of-a-kind voice. Another difference I’m noticing is more songs, overall, having these big build-up’s into all-out closing crescendos that absolutely crush (“It’s Only Love”, every song on the B-side). It doesn’t feel overdone, it simply makes every song sound awesome and gets you jazzed for what’s next. So what may have been placed to the side in terms of ‘fun’-sounding songs/riffs from the first record has been replaced with the band’s more epic and tension-building elements being put front and center for much of this material and it pays off in spades. So now I’m torn on which record of theirs I like better. Will these first world problems ever cease?!

BITTER BRANCHES, “Let’s Give the Land Back To the Animals”

A couple albums in and new(ish) bassist Dan Yemin on board and boy howdy have Bitter Branches now locked into their element and then some. This feels exactly like what it seems like they have been going for since jump, previous results still being exceptional just wavering a bit from their full potential. On “Let’s Give the Land Back To the Animals” (great title by the way) the band have truly grasped that lurching and menacing Jesus Lizard kind of discomfort and splay it out across nearly every track here. Yes, a new bassist really can bring a lot to the table despite what many think. It’s not that their previous material didn’t put a lot of emphasis on dense and ropey low-end runs, it just feels more prominent on this new album. Meanwhile, Tim Singer does Tim Singer (because that’s who you’re going to get on any record he’s on). Astute fans/nerds will recognize a whole bunch of lyrics on this record as they were previewed by the automated Siri voice on “Wax Princess”, the closer on Singer’s other band Deadguy’s (you heard of them?) most recent assault on music. It’s a sort of unintentional callback (maybe), but I enjoy connecting the dots. Again, putting a bit of shine on bassist Dan Yemin, he contributes some wonderful back up vocals on a couple tracks as well, as he also has a very distinct voice and lyrics (some of those back ups read like something he would/could write) from many years of fronting his other band Paint It Black. Most noticeable of this is the slow burn of “Fine Powder” and the closing swagger/build-up of “Here Comes the Chisel”. It’s a solid album from beginning to end of a band that has now locked into their sound and letting it all out on tape.

FILTH IS ETERNAL, “Impossible World”

Throughout Filth Is Eternal’s tenure they have slowly been inching, across four albums now, from Motorhead-style stampedes with Entombed-level distortion to songs with more melody and gravitating towards an L7 kind of dirty riff-rocking. Most apparent in all this is vocalist Lis DiAngelo’s reliance on sung vocals versus simply shouting. And on “Impossible World” they’re really leaning into it as the first several tracks here aim for just that- dirty, riffy earworms. It isn’t until “Weather & Rose” where they really pick things up, tempo-wise and go full charge for the next several songs. The bulk of the record from here moves quick in the way you’d be accustomed to from this band and features a handful of guests popping up to contribute some guitar parts or vocals. I think if you were a fan of this band before you’ll be sufficiently pleased with the sort of sound they have been refining for years now. There just seems to be more emphasis placed on the vocals and DiAngelo’s range, often putting them up front, instead of the rest of the band taking center stage. It’s an album full of songs that will stick in your brain while still causing adequate brain damage.

GLADIE, “No Need To Be Lonely”

I was a big fan of Cayetana, mostly because they were (in a way) local-ish to me and I admired how it was folks who were mostly just kind of figuring out their instruments and then managed to become a really good band over a short amount of time. When that band split vocalist/guitarist Augusta Koch decided to keep making music under the name Gladie, which also started as a rather DIY- just go for it sort of project. Over time that project took shape as a solid lineup came together. And now, after several releases here they are with “No Need To Be Lonely”, which is really quite exceptional. Koch has such a distinctive voice- scrappy and strained, yet endearing, and it really shines on this album chock full of emotion. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the poignant organ-driven “Fix Her”. But if we’re being honest, the whole album drips with emotive storytelling, themes of feeling underappreciated and excluded, or adrift in situations that seem to be going nowhere. It doesn’t come off as frustration, or having a tantrum; it’s more like navigating that shit as an adult. And it’s done in a way that’s poetic and heartfelt. But then you get a jam like “Future Spring” that just explodes with hope, and promise of good days to come and all the while, for the bulk of this record, Gladie is rocking out in a very melodic indie-punk sort of way that’s very fun and energetic.

MACHINE COUNTRY, “Inbred Bastard Killer” EP

Currently one of the most engaging live bands you can see out of Portland Machine Country are back with a new EP, after releasing a full length last year. For the unfamiliar they worship at the altar of stuff like Infest, Dystopia, and Bastard Noise. There’s the low, bellowing vocals (countered by accompanying screechy vocals), plenty of short, violent blast beats, and tons of crusty, subatomic grinding groove happening across this handful of songs. The first three tracks fly by pretty quick, but then they go into a longer sort of dual track (“Incarcerated/Babylon”) before ending the EP with an 11 minute, multi-stage noise dirge combining power electronics, quiet spoken word/disjointed strumming, and shouting over various items being thrown around a room/falling down a staircase. It’s not my favorite part of the recording, although those elements work well when they’re incorporated into the songs on a smaller level. But that’s just my tolerance level. Nevertheless, go see this band if they roll through (they tour a lot) because they’re awesome to see live.

CELL PRESS, “Tabula Rasa” EP

I’d say these are some of my favorite Canadians, but pretty much any Canadian I meet usually ends up becoming one of my favorite Canadians. What can I say, they’re a friendly people and your life will be better by knowing some of them. The population is only like 75 people so it’s not tough to know them all. That being said, it makes Cell Press all the better. Like their previous recordings this follows a similar path- heavy duty riff factory with insane drumming. “Hot Rod To Gehenna” kicks things off with one of the best song titles this year, while “Last Aid Kit” gives a Norm McDonald/Burt Reynolds impression-wearing-giant-foam-cowboy-hat sized tip of the brim to Melvins “Houdini”-era. And just like other records they drop some weirdo noise track type interlude before closing out with the gigantic-sounding, and appropriately titled, “Orphan Crushing Machine”. It sounds just as heavy as you’re thinking it does, but also ends with a mighty and majestic bit that gives a little more depth to the overall ham-fisted approach of the other songs. They’re not really changing it up at all from previous efforts, just laying out more of what they do really well. So if you have been a fan previously you will continue to be a fan of our friends in the great white north.

FOTOCRIME, “Security”

Fotocrime is a very productive project, this being their fifth full length in about 8 years. It’s the sort of band that doesn’t immediately capture me because it’s big reference points- subgenres like darkwave, synth punk, EBM, 80’s goth, and early industrial music- have always remained relatively foreign to my tastes. But those touchstones all get filtered through primary songwriter Ryan Patterson’s particular style of melodic punk. And what I really have enjoyed about Fotocrime over the years is how much Patterson will get into the nitty gritty of how songs and records get made- from the various analog synths, drum machines, guitar effects, studio set up, and the revolving door of guests who contribute to projects, to the always meticulous and well-thought out artwork. He’s doing the bulk of it all and it’s really cool to follow. Musically though, on this new album, I’d say this is the closest to his old band Coliseum’s work, particularly “Anxiety’s Kiss”, their final album (before a reunion a few years back) and how that record seemed to directly segue into the genesis of Fotocrime. I don’t want to say it’s ‘heavy’ or even a throwback, but there are more live drums here, heavier bass effects, a more brooding sense of urgency and disillusion. Heck, Barney from Napalm Death and every member of Sumac are just some of the musical guests here. Fotocrime has never tried to hide from a background in angry, politicized hardcore punk; it comes out in different ways across their catalog. It just feels a little more prescient on this record and I connect with it a bit more as a result. It’s always an interesting project to see develop and regardless of my naiveté towards their primary influences I like digging into what they do.

FINAL GASP, “New Day Symptoms”

When listening to the new album from Boston death rockers Final Gasp two things become immediately apparent: this record sounds huge compared to their last record, despite recording with the same person, and vocalist Jake Murphy still sounds like David Lee Roth channeling Glen Danzig. That’s not an insult, I mean it as a compliment. I think I’d say some of the post-punk/Killing Joke influences from their last outing have faded off a bit as well, replaced with bigger hooks and crunchier riffs (a la “Gifted Shame” and “Burials Of Birth”). There’s a solid dose of 80’s metal gone darker and heavier to put it another way. It’s all in all a solid follow up, if not quite as immediate as their debut full length was at times with ripping tracks like “Blood and Sulfur”. This one, overall, takes a bit more time with each song and shows their chops off a bit more, as well as some more range. Closing track “Pale Sun” starts off with an almost acoustic, sung prelude before exploding into a plodding stomp fest, a mournful and sullen way to close out a dark and haunting album.

SUITOR, “Saw You Out With the Weeds”

So happy to finally see this out in the wild. A very localized band to the Cleveland area this may not pop up on people’s radar all that much, but the band has been working to release this record after over two years and it’s a big step up from their also stellar initial album “Communion”. Fans got a quick glimpse at the standalone single “Prize Horse” over a year ago (which does not appear on this record) that introduced giant lush, shoegaze-y elements to the taut and succinct dreamy, synth-assisted post-punk that made up the bulk of “Communion”. “Saw You Out With the Weeds” realizes that combo of elements fully (which I feel may be due, in part, to a fully functioning band versus their earlier days as more of a duo/project). But no description of this group would be complete without mentioning the haunting, ethereal, and multi-layered vocals of Emma Shepard that give so much character to their music and can transform an otherwise catchy, well-crafted, and pleasant song into a bizarre and unsettling dream filled with stories of people with problems, situations gone askew, and seedy encounters you wouldn’t be surprised to encounter in the rust belt background of Clevo proper. Nowhere is this more evident than the brooding and creeping fever dream of A-side closer “Generator”, where the bass throbs, Shepards vocals are disjointed and leering while guitars sound like a klaxon to the growing fear present. It’s definitely outside what most of the record sounds like, but it may be my favorite song on the album. It’s very weird, but it’s great. While they have grown leaps and bounds since their first record I’d highly recommend checking out all of Suitor’s material (there’s not a lot), and give this accomplishment some focus as they’ve really made something wonderful here.

MICROWAVES, “Temporal Shifter”

Pittsburgh’s Microwaves (not to be confused with Microwave, or Microwaves, or however many other bands have the same name who aren’t from Pittsburgh) strike back with their third (I think) LP that sounds more dense and plodding than I remember their previous material being. The entire affair comes off like Voivod covering the Skin Graft Records catalog and throwing in a dash of Melvins and Devo for good measure. You get lots of proggy math-metal weirdness, plenty of interesting time changes, and yet amongst all the oddities and attention-demanding shifts there’s an element of catchiness to it all. Don’t ask me to decipher it because I have a degree in psychology, not quantum physics or music theory, alright? There’s exactly one song here that probably goes on a bit too long for it’s own good, but the rest is a kick in the nuts. They throw in some wild saxophone on “Decalcomania” and I’m always a sucker for sax in weird music where you don’t think it belongs, and then they close out in a chunky and chaotic manner with the wonderfully titled “A Plane Made Of Bricks”. I also dig the Trapper Keeper-meets-True Grit Texture cover art. Looks slick, man.