My tumblr is now my main blog. Deadmetaphor.com should redirect there… this site will remain archived at deadmetaphor.com/deadmetaphor. Make sure to update your links, RSS feeds, etc.

This is just a quick note that these days I’m updating my tumblog a lot more than this here thing. If you’re on Tumblr let me know and I’ll follow you… I’m looking for more cool stuff to read on there.

I’m contemplating moving the tumblog to deadmetaphor.com and putting this version of the site out to pasture. Tumblr has a nicer, simpler interface, I can update it easily from my phone (which I do pretty often), and the lack of a comment feature is actually something I can get behind right now. If anyone has any opinion one way or another please let me know via comment or email.

Man, what a show! I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of a late-night bar show on a Tuesday, but these bands were both so great that they made it work. This was Shards’ second show… they’re a new band featuring former/current members of Crossed Eyes, Logic Problem, Street Sharks, Media Circus and a bunch of other great local bands that no one outside of Raleigh has ever heard of, but I have a feeling that people will hear about Shards. The music is very dark and mid-paced, very much like TSOL’s early stuff, but the snarling vocals are mean as fuck. I like Will’s Iggy-esque stage presence, too… man, it almost pisses me off how great these guys were at just their second show, but at least I’ll hopefully get to see them a whole lot.

Boston’s Social Circkle headlined this two-band bill, and man did they KILL it. This band’s records were growers for me… I was kind of “eh” about them when they came out, but I find myself coming back to them and noticing subtle little things that I like about them each successive time that I listen. I wondered how similar they would be live, though, because they’ve undergone some pretty significant lineup changes since they last recorded. Indeed, they sounded way different than they did on either of their two EPs, but I loved it! They were just a total bulldozer, playing every song way faster and more powerfully than on the records and stringing every single song together without stopping between. They finished with a hyper-speed version of “Static Eyes” that really ended things with a bang. Wow… I love getting blown away by bands and Social Circkle definitely did the job tonight.

Downs:

• My car stopped moving yesterday. I’m pretty sure something is wrong with the clutch since it won’t go into gear, but I’m not going to be moving far from my house until Tuesday the earliest. Previously I had been debating seeing Double Negative and Fucked Up in Charlotte or Shards’ first show in Raleigh tonight. Now I will see neither. I really hope it’s fixed by the time Social Circkle plays here Tuesday.
• I can’t really think of any more downers… my life is pretty good I guess!

Ups:

• I just found out JUDGEMENT is playing Chaos in Tejas this year! The fest is happening right around the time Logic Problem is supposed to leave for our European tour, but I think I can make it work. I must see Judgement!
• Test presses for the Cross Laws discography LP arrived today and they sound awesome! I still can’t believe someone is putting this out, but it’s starting to seem more real now.
• I’m pretty sure I’ve written 3 new Logic Problem songs in the past week and I feel really good about them.

I’ve always had mixed-feelings about year-end top ten lists. More often than not they are meant to say more about the author of the list than the music he or she is writing about, and when creating such lists I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of compiling the list based on what I think I “should” be listening to rather than what I actually am listening to. However, these lists are also very helpful as buying guides. There are tons of records that I’ve ignored upon release, only to pick them up after reading about them on multiple lists. So, in the interest of helping others’ minds be blown, here are a list of records I enjoyed in the year 2008.

I compiled the list by making a smart playlist in iTunes of all the music I acquired in the year 2008 and sorting by number of plays. This gave me a rough idea of what the list would look like, and from there I decided on 10 releases that I think are the absolute must-haves are 2008. If someone came back from a year-long trip to the moon or Antarctica these are the records I would insist that that person find post-haste:

Nightmare / Skitkids: Split 7″

I’m not kidding when I say that this may well be the best split 7″ of all time. Off the top off my head I certainly can’t think of another that rages this hard. Nightmare’s long history and substantial back catalog must be a tough thing to overcome when that band sits down to write a song, but their two tracks on this release are as good as anything on their classic Give Notice of Nightmare LP. The guitars are so noisy and out of control that I can hardly tell what’s going on, and the substantial language barrier doesn’t stop the band from writing a phenomenally catchy chorus (”No retreat! Never surrender!”). As for Skitkids… wow. This is a band that has really come into its own over its past few releases, and their tracks here may well be the best thing they’ve ever done. The little lead guitar break on “Ackliga Javlar” has quickly become one of my all-time favorite moments in music. It’s rare to find guitar playing that truly sends chills down your spine (especially in punk rock), but this is the real deal.

Reprobates: Stress 7″

This debut EP from Toronto’s Reprobates bowled me over on the first listen. This thing is such a riff monster… the guitars on this are so catchy, whether it’s the seething, mid-paced “Failure” or the barreling “Stress.” Throw in the layer of squalling feedback over top of everything and you have one of the most disturbing, claustrophic pieces of music in the hardcore canon.

Shitty Limits: Espionage 7″

For my money, “Espionage” is the best punk song written in the year 2008 (the only real contender being Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s “Which Way to Go”). The song’s main riff is so evocative of the James Bond / spy movie aesthetic without ripping off anything in particular, and the lyrics romp through that same imagery with a wit and humor that is rarely found in punk in the year 2008. My wife Kelly said it best when she predicted that “Espionage,” if there’s any justice in this world, will be on all of those “history of 2000’s punk” compilations in 25 years.

Direct Control: Farewell 12″

My favorite active hardcore band dropped this EP in a criminally limited edition of 100 copies, all of which were sold during the first 5 minutes of No Way Fest 2. Luckily I managed to snag one, because if you like fast hardcore it just doesn’t get any better than Direct Control. After slowing things down a bit on their past releases and exploring some catchier song structures, “Farewell” captures the fury of their early records like Nuclear Tomorrow, with tracks like “Lion’s Den” and “No Change” equaling and even exceeding the velocity of their earliest material. If Direct Control want to grant me 2 wishes in 2009, let them be this: 1. get this record out for real and 2. don’t make this your last record.

Parasytic: Hymn 12″

Anyone who saw this ferocious Richmond, Virginia metal/crust band live was eagerly anticipating this slab to drop. You know how a lot of 80s bands added metal to punk and came up with something that was essentially the worst parts of both? Well, Parasytic have managed to distill the best parts of both into one of the most crushing LPs in recent memory. If you’re listening to this for the first time make sure to get to the end, because the album’s best songs (”Madmen” and “Animal Sacrifice”) reside near the end of the second side.

Cola Freaks: Ingenting Set 7″

After a so-so debut EP, Denmark’s Cola Freaks reinvented themselves on this record and the results are breathtaking. While everything about this band is brilliant, their secret weapon is the haunting bass line… I can’t think of a more memorable performance on the 4-string this year. I can’t wait to hear more from this re-energized band.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: Primary Colours 12″

This one was pretty hyped this year so I imagine everyone has heard it already, but if you haven’t I encourage you to check it out. To me, this record sounds like the Stooges’ Fun House (a key influence for just about every Australian band ever it seems) if the Stooges were way into pop instead of jazz. The riffs on this thing are almost retardly simple but instantly memorable, and one could say the same thing about the vocals. In a scene where everyone is trying to be more intense than everyone else, it’s nice to hear a loose, jammy band that can still write truly memorable songs.

Double Negative: Raw Energy EP 7″

Double Negative’s debut LP was universally regarded as one of the best LPs of 2007, but they rendered it obsolete with this 3-song slab. This thing is just so dense and crushing that there is no escaping its fury. Sometimes I think about how often I get to see this band live and I just get so happy… while the rest of the world is still digesting this platter I am one of the few and the proud who are privy to “Saturation Tank…”

Socialcide: Unapproachable 12″

2008 may well be remembered as the year when the latest early 80s hardcore revival started to lose its steam. Honestly, I would have thought that no-frills hardcore had run its course, especially with bands like Double Negative and Reprobates expanding hardcore’s sonic pallette to incorporate the swirling feedback of bands like Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. However, Socialcide proved that a lot of anger and a few power chords and still go a VERY long way. 6 months later and I just can’t get over how pissed off this record sounds.

Avskum - Uppror Underifran

I’ve never really paid too much attention to Avskum before (with the exception of their classic debut, Crucified by the System), but I checked out this LP after hearing several trusted sources give this their highest recommendation. Indeed, this thing is a fucking bulldozer… there are a lot of bands in the “heavier than everything else” race, but these guys take the cake. This is absolutely no-frills hardcore, the musical equivalent of a well-cooked steak.
So, those are the records that really floated my boat this year, but here are a few more that tickled my fancy:

Chronic Seizure - Ancient Wound 12″ and Live on WHPK 7″: I loved Chronic Seizure’s previous two EPs, but I never really felt they captured the band’s live intensity. Ancient Wound rectifies that with some of the band’s catchiest riffs and a great vocal performance. Ditto for the radio session 7″, which you should track down because it is limited to 500 copies and 100% essential.

Punch in the Face - At War with Everybody: This may well have been released in 2007, but I just got it this year. Like Socialcide, PITF play no-frills hardcore that sticks to your ribs. This reminds me a lot of classic Slapshot, especially in the powerful vocals. Great stuff.

Wormeaters - Cattle Cannot Choose: 2nd 7″ from this New Jersey band and they nail the formula. Mid-paced, tough-as-nails hardcore with a unique, almost death metal-style vocalist.

Civic Progress - Disposable: 2nd EP from this St. Louis band who have some of the catchiest riffs and most unique song structures of any band in hardcore. When they played North Carolina they covered Warsaw, which should tell you how ahead of the curve they are.

Kaiboushitsu - Dokuro Dokuro Dokuro: A bunch of Japanese hardcore all-stars temporarily abandon the popular Burning Spirits and crust styles to pay homage to the early 80s scene. This definitely captures the weird vibe of a lot of the ADK Records-type bands, and is highly recommended if you can track it down.

Instängd - Konkret Och Brutal: 2nd EP by this great Swedish band… people always compare them to obscure Swedish groups like Missbrukarna, but I think they’re a dead ringer for raw US groups like Urban Waste and Mecht Mensch.

Midnight - Farewell to Hell: Sounds like Annihilation Time playing Venom covers. I don’t know if that description would appeal to me without hearing the band, but I highly suggest you check these guys out if you’re into bands like Motorhead, Inepsy and Venom.

Stupids: Feel the Suck: Reunion 7″ from this also-ran UK punk band, but the A-side surpasses just about anything they did during their original run. Killer, heavy, melodic punk in the UK tradition of bands like Snuff.

Blank Dogs - The Fields: I just picked this one up, so it hasn’t had a chance to really sink in, but I like this a lot. Though I wish the vocals were more powerful and/or memorable, the music is great… sort of like if every Joy Division song was as great as “Shadowplay.”

Rabies - Final: This SoCal punk band goes out on a high note, adding some later Black Flag-style jammy parts into their snotty, Wasted Youth-styled hardcore. It’s too bad they broke up because this band was knocking down all kinds of walls.

Daily Void - Identification Code: Eventually I read so many Rudimentary Peni comparisons that I had to pick this up. I don’t think it sounds too much like Rudi P at all, but I love the warped pop vibe. If Jay Reatard is a weirdo trying to be normal, these are normal guys trying to be weirdos. Killer.

Blowback - Living Vibration: I wish this Japanese band’s tour had made it east, because Living Vibration is classic bulldozer Japcore.

Wax Museums - LP / Magnet 7″: I really love genuine weirdness from my punk rock, but I hate when it comes off as forced or contrived. No one, and I repeat NO ONE, is going to mistake this band for anything but genuine freaks. Guard your nose holes.

PDX - Comp 7″: Wow, there are a lot of bands in Portland who really want to sound like the Wipers. This 7″ collects the best tracks from all of them.

Night Marchers: See You in Magic: John Reis returns with yet another new band and yet again they rule. What more to say?

Bukkake Boys - Splendid Thoughts: Yeah, their name bums me out too but this is first-rate hardcore in the tradition of Antidote and the Abused.

Mad Men - both tapes: Jonah from Fucked Up / Career Suicide playing all the instruments on a total homage to the catchiest early 80s hardcore… how could this not be killer? What I REALLY want to know, though, is how these guys managed to be the tightest band at No Way Fest?

Warkrime - Tighten Up: Like their fellow Californians Rabies, Warkrime’s last effort found them looser, more confident and more experimental than their early stuff. Again, like Rabies, I really wish this band hadn’t broken up.

Hjerte Stop - Vi Ses I Helvede: Everyone who has heard this band’s 7″ wants to know if the full-length delivers. It does. If you like Bad Religion’s first album and you’re not listening to this you may need to find a new life coach.

Video Disease - 7″ and Demo: Seriously tweaked hardcore from Southern California… I don’t think it’d be unfair to call them a poor man’s Sex/Vid, but I am a poor man and you don’t see Sex/Vid on this list, now do you?

Vile Nation - Self-titled 7″: I was underwhelmed by this band live and on their demo, but everything clicks on this 7″. There aren’t a lot of bands biting the Heresy / Ripcord style right now, so these guys sound really fresh.

Libyans - Welcome to the Neighborhood: The fact that I can play this song on Rock Band only makes it that much better.

Jabara - きせい CDR: Why on earth is music this great only released on CDR? Japan is a weird place.

This past Friday Logic Problem recorded the music for our upcoming EP on Grave Mistake. The session was really exciting. We had worked with the guy who recorded us, Will from Whatever Brains (whose new 7″ you should check out), before so we kind of new what to expect, but I had an even better time at this session than when he recorded our track for the upcoming No Bullshit Volume 4 7″ on No Way Records. Unlike a lot of recording sessions where everything feels very rushed, this session was loose, comfortable and creative. We were well-rehearsed, so we blew through the basic tracks in just a few minutes, recording everything live with very few takes. Then came the fun part: crazy overdubs. We wanted our recording to have a unique feel and texture, so we added a lot of weird noises into the mix… pretty much all of them were made with guitar and / or bass, but we heavily tweaked the sound with synth, delay and fuzz pedals, so the noises coming out of our amps seemed to have very little to do with traditional stringed instrumentation. Don’t worry, we haven’t made the Chinese Democracy of hardcore, but hopefully we have made something slightly more interesting than your standard 1-2 1-2 hardcore record.

Hopefully we’ll get a rough mix of the tracks in the next few days, when I’m sure I’ll obsessively listen to them over and over and over again. Then Cameron will catch back up with Will the day after Christmas to record his vocals. I got to take a peek at his lyrics and they’re really incredible. I was shocked at how good the lyrics were on our first EP, but these are even better. I also wrote the lyrics for one song, which was scary but I think I’m proud of what I came up with. With any luck we’ll finish up all the mixing and artwork around New Year’s and by late winter / early spring we’ll unleash this beast on the world. By which time, I’m sure, we’ll be totally sick of these songs because we will have written 8 more that are even better. So it goes.

Whoops, how did I end up with two of these?If you would like one of them for your own personal collection I would gladly trade for one of the following:

• Negative Approach: Self-titled EP
• SOA: No Policy EP
• Chicken Bowels: Keep Our Fire Burning EP
• Nightmare: Give Notice of Nightmare LP
• Aburadako: Flexidisc

Today I received a package of distro items from Sewercide Records in Canada. As I was opening the package I noticed that the entire thing was soaked in motor oil! The package reeks, is covered in grease, and stained that yellow-y brown color! This is a new low for the post office, though I’m not sure whether the blame rests on the US or Canadian leg of the journey. Incidentally, the contents of the package are in perfect shape because Dave Sewercide packs like a champ. This should be a lesson to you label-owners out there… shoving your records in a manilla envelope isn’t going to do the trick in a world where packages randomly get submerged in motor oil.

One of the many reasons that posts around here have been so slack is that most of my music-listening time as of late has been spent digitizing my collection of vinyl. I’ve been attempting to do this in a semi-orderly process, ripping records to high-quality mp3s in more or less the order they’re filed on my record shelf. For the past month or so I’ve been in the “punk” section (which includes everything that doesn’t qualify as “hardcore,” a term which I interpret rather broadly, or “77 punk,” which is conceived with similarly loose criteria). Most of these records come from when I was in college during the late 90s, spending most of my weekly paycheck at Plan 9 in Richmond. This was only the dawn of the ebay era so there were still plenty of great, reasonably-priced scores to be had in record stores, and I definitely racked up my fair share at Plan 9 over the years. Back then I would buy most anything that was even vaguely associated with punk, a strategy which introduced me to a ton of really great bands and also caused me to buy a lot of total crap.

Anyway, one of the bands whom I discovered through these barely-informed record-buying decision was the Lemonheads. Actually, I was very familiar with the Lemonheads from when I was really young… I remember when I got my first CD player when I was 12 or so, the only CDs I owned for the first 6 months were It’s a Shame About Ray and Master of Puppets. However, I had no idea that the Lemonheads had started as a punk band until I picked up a copy of the intriguing-looking Hate Your Friends.

Hate Your Friends - Lemonheads

If all you know about the Lemonheads is Evan Dando’s sensitive-dude-indie-folk, prepare to be bowled over. During the Hate Your Friends era the band had a clear affinity for early Husker Du as well as the great tradition of melodic, heavy punk bands from their home state of Massachussettes… Mission of Burma and Moving Targets especially. Further, Dando only sings about half the tracks. The other half are handled by Ben Deily, who shared guitar and vocal duties with Dando and wrote some staggeringly brilliant songs. Somewhat unexpectedly, it’s Dando’s songs that have the harder edge during this period… the title track “Hate Your Friends” could’ve easily come from Hüsker Dü’ s Everything Falls Apart LP, and though his voice still has that warm, melodic quality that would eventually make Dando famous, on Hate Your Friends it’s almost always tempered by some truly searing, fuzzed-out guitar work. If you don’t believe me check out “Rat Velvet,” whose opening chords could easily be mistaken for something off of Bad Religion’s How Could Hell Be Any Worse.

Rat Velvet - Lemonheads

Second Chance - Lemonheads

The Dando songs are a treat, but when I pull out these early Lemonheads LPs it’s because I want to hear the Ben Deily songs. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more earnest singer and/or songwriter in the late 80s punk scene… there’s this child-like innocence to Deily’s voice, which is only compounded by the way that he belts out his gigantic choruses without a hint of self-consciousness. The most interesting song in this style on Hate Your Friends is “Second Chance,” whose dark, Metal Circus-inspired verses lead into a gigantic chorus that could only be described as triumphant (despite the grim lyrics). “There’s no such thing as a second chance / There’s no such thing as another try.” The lyric is simple and straightforward almost to the point of awkwardness, and I think that if Deily’s songwriting didn’t have that primitive, slightly awkward quality his songs would be as obnoxious as the most overwrought emo band’s. As it is, though, they’re brilliant, reminding me of the Dead Milkmen if they didn’t hide under so many layers of irony.

By way of a post-script, I’ll note that the Deily/Dando era of the Lemonheads produced three albums: Hate Your Friends, Creator, and Lick. I own Lick, and while at this point Evan Dando the teenage punk is becoming Evan Dando the indie heartthrob (their cover of “Luka” from this album was, in many ways, the catalyst for that transformation), there are still some great moments on this album. In fact, my favorite Ben Deily song, “Ever,” closes the album, and Dando’s “Glad I Don’t Know” is the closest the Lemonheads ever got to the Dü’s New Day Rising sound. If you hate the major label era of the Lemonheads you’ll have no use for Dando’s “Mallo Cup,” but I retain a soft spot for this era of the band. I still haven’t heard the Lemonheads’ second album, Creator, but I have a feeling I’ll be spending a few of this month’s emusic downloads on that disc.

Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, probably the longest time since I started the blog. Kelly says that this is merely because I want to make sure that every single person on the planet has read my post about that awesome record score, but that’s not really the case. Though things are finally slowing down now, I’m coming off of one of the busiest few months of my entire life. Over the past 4 or 5 years I feel like I’ve been leading two parallel lives, one in which I’m a graduate student and one in which I’m a punk rock musician / writer / record label owner. Admittedly, the punk rock stuff is where my heart is, and the graduate student side of things has suffered somewhat. As I’ve sought to bring those two aspects of me back into balance, I’ve slowly realized how out of control my punk-related commitments are. The only problem is that at this point I can’t imagine not playing in both of my bands (they both rule so hard!) and my record label has real momentum, so it’s the writing, photographing and everything else I did for this blog that has fallen by the wayside. I’d love to reconfigure how I approach this blog to be something more spontaneous… shorter posts with more updates, but we’ll see if that actually happens. I’d love for this space to be something more like a representation of my stream of consciousness in prose rather than a repository for fairly well-thought-out and ambitious pieces of writing as it has been in the past. Again, we’ll see.

Just to give a quick update on the bands, both of them are going great. Logic Problem should be going into the “studio” (I use that term loosely) next weekend to record an EP for Grave Mistake Records. I’m very, very excited about that, partly because we’ll finally be committing several awesome songs to tape and partly because I feel like having an EP on Grave Mistake validates my musical endeavours in some weird way that I’ve always secretly craved. I know that it’s punk not to be worried about being on a “big” label and that self-releasing music (as I’ve done with almost everything I’ve played on in the past) is supposed to be the punkest thing you can do, but it feels good to have someone like your work enough that they want to put a large amount of their own time and money into promoting it. That we’ll be on the same label that released Wasted Time’s No Shore EP (for my money the best hardcore record of this decade) only makes it feel even better. Devour has also been chugging along. I feel like we’ve developed quite a lot as a live band over the past few months, and the comments I’ve heard from other people seem to confirm that. We’ve also written some really great songs lately and I can’t wait to put out a few more records. Though I LOVE the way our LP came out, I feel like we’ve progressed so far since that recording. Our new songs are so much more complex and dynamic, and I think we also have a better idea what we want from our playing and a recording. The next Devour record will be a beast, I assure you.

Sorry State has also been very busy, though in these tough economic times business seems to fluctuate with the news. When the first big stock market crash happened there was almost an entire week where I didn’t get a single order, which is very out of the ordinary for me. Still, I’ve been pushing things along and trying to get a bunch of vinyl out. Unfortunately, that’s been a slower and more difficult process than usual thanks to the backlog at the pressing plants. You know how Best Buy now has a vinyl section with expensive Metallica reissue box sets and shiny copies of the new Coldplay on 12″? Well, when Capitol Records decides that they want to press a bazillion copies of that Coldplay record, the pressing plant gives them priority over 500 copies of a new Shitty Limits 7″, and I get the shaft. This seems to be a problem at pretty much every pressing plant in the United States. However, while it makes getting records out a slower, more difficult, and more expensive process, the renewed interest in vinyl (and the easier availability of supplies like turntables) is ultimately a good thing for my label I think.

OK, that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll post some random thought this afternoon just to get the ball rolling. And remember, the best sort of positive reinforcement that you can give a blogger is comments, so if you want to read more that’s always the best way of getting me to post more.