Judge: What It Meant: The Complete Discography

Can anyone guess what record label recently sent me a care package? Yup, the train of posts on classic Revelation Records straight edge continues with the band who just may be on the top of the heap, Judge. I find it kind of weird that Judge (well, at least their first EP) has held up for me better than almost any of the straight edge records I used to listen to religiously when I was a teenager. Even the Gorilla Biscuits records don’t hit me the same way as Judge’s first EP, which is completely bizarre because Judge seem like the band I should like the least from that scene… their music is the most metallic, their lyrics are the most militant (except for maybe Project X) and their entire aesthetic is all but antithetical to what I want from hardcore. But the music fucking rages.

The New York Crew 7″ starts off this CD collection and I can’t stress enough that this record is an utter classic. The music isn’t super-fast, but the production is nearly perfect (the only thing I’d change is moving the vocals down ever so slightly in the mix, but that’s not a big deal) and the songwriting is pretty much perfect. What other band from this era wrote such hooky hardcore songs? (or covered such hooky songs, i.e. Blitz’s “Warriors”) From the breakdown in “In My Way” when Mike Judge screams “you’ve lost… my respect” to the chorus to “New York! (chug chug chug chug chug) CREW!” this five-song record is utterly thick with moments when you can’t help but sing along. Seriously, I could understand not liking New York Crew for political reasons, but from the standpoint of pure musical enjoyment I think that any lover of hardcore would seriously have to hold him or herself back from enjoying this record… it’s just too damn good.

From there What It Meant moves to Judge’s Bringin’ It Down LP, which starts off promising with “Take Me Away,” my favorite song on the record and probably the only new song on the LP that is on par with the brilliant songwriting on the first EP. I mean the songs are still good, but it seems like there were roughly the same amount of musical ideas on Bringin’ It Down as there were on New York Crew but they’re thinned out over the course of an entire LP rather than crammed into an ultra-exciting 7″. And the production… well, despite the fact that people are far more apt to tell the now-mythic story of the terrible recording the band got at Chung King studios, Bringin’ It Down is still a very awkward and dated-sounding record. It sounds like someone in 1988′s idea of what a big, well-produced hardcore record should sound like. The production on the Cro-Mags’ Age of Quarrel seems to have been a huge influence as Bringin’ It Down has almost the same guitar sound (i.e. a very “metal” sounding dry distortion) and Mike’s vocals even occasionally sound like John Joseph’s (which I always notice on the first lines of “Take Me Away” for some reason or another). The biggest problem, though, is the drums; I’m not an engineer so I could be wrong about what effect I’m hearing, but it sounds like there is reverb on the drums, like they were recorded in a gigantic empty room. I can see how this might have sounded cool 17 years ago (just as basic synth noises sounded cool 25 years ago), but it just sounds really stupid today. If New York Crew were produced this poorly I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be going so nuts about it, but thankfully Judge decided to mis-produce their weaker record rather than their better one.

As much as I complain about the production on Bringin’ It Down it’s hard to argue that the production on the infamous Chung King Can Suck It LP (which also appears on this CD) isn’t a hell of a lot worse. It seriously sounds like a practice tape, and not a great-sounding practice tape at that… it’s amazing that such a shitty recording could cost so much money, but I guess that’s the record business for you. This session does contain two songs that weren’t released elsewhere, though, so it’s worth hearing if you’re a fan.

In addition to that, What It Meant also contains Judge’s last 7″ There Will Be Quiet… (it has a Led Zeppelin cover, which should tell you what kind of direction Judge were headed in) and a song from the band’s 1988 demo that also appears on both Bringin’ It Down and Chung King (it’s listed with a slightly different title here, but don’t be fooled!). That’s probably Judge’s worst song, but it clearly had a big influence on early 90s tough-guy hardcore so if you like that kind of stuff (I most certainly do not) you may want to hear yet another version of it.

All in all I suppose that What It Meant is a pretty cool thing for Judge fanatics, but if you’re more a fan of early 80s-style hardcore than the late 80s New York stuff the New York Crew 7″ is all you need and despite the fact that it’s out of print you can still get later pressings of the original vinyl for pretty cheap (in fact I think I have three copies of that record if you need one). I’m not sure why Revelation decided to completely repackage Bold’s and Judge’s recorded works just for the sake of including some things that most people acknowledge aren’t that good anyway (i.e. Chung King and the Crippled Youth EP), but I guess they’ve got a captive audience with all of the completist record collectors. At least you won’t feel as ripped off as you would have if you spent all this money on a record you already own that’s simply pressed on a different color of vinyl (like the “final pressings” that Rev was peddling years ago), but for most people these discography CDs are probably overkill.

Bands I Had No Idea I liked until this evening

As per the subject

Ataque Frontal: Raw Peruvian hardcore indeed! Totally raging and the singer sounds like Choke circa the Last Rights 7″.

Braille Party: Half of their Welcome to Maryland LP is raging, 2nd-wave harDCore; the other half sounds like the Breakfast Club soundtrack… but, christ, the hardcore half!!!!!!

NoMeansNo: Holy shit, I just heard Wrong, which supposedly isn’t even their best record and I loved it! It’s like Paranoid Time-era Minutemen expanded to the length of an entire LP! Genius!

The Undead: Even despite having heard this band’s tracks on the New York Thrash tape a gajillion times I still assumed they were Bobby Steele’s cash-in on his fame as former guitarist for the Misfits. One listen to Never Say Die! later and I’m a convert! Brilliant stuff that toes the line between ’77 punk and proto-hardcore.

Dancing

Kelly just told me a great story. Today before class started two of her students were discussing how they are fulfilling UNC’s physical education requirement. One of the students was complaining about her weightlifting class, but the other was quite excited about her modern dance class. Why, you ask? Well, apparently rather than turning a handful of total novices into proper dancers over the course of the semester, this teacher decided instead to teach the entire class the dance routine at the end of Napoleon Dynamite. Picture an entire class of college kids doing that dance simultaneously… it’ll definitely put a smile on your face.

The Bomb: Indecision CD

Holy fucking shit is about the only thing that I can say about this record. I’d been waiting for Indecision for a bit over a year now, ever since a lucky confluence of events landed me in Chicago just as the Bomb was playing a sparsely-attended show at the Double Door. I went to the show exhausted from a day of touristing, hoping that maybe the show would be halfway decent and the band would throw in a Naked Raygun song or two (which they are known for doing). You see, I’d picked up the Bomb’s debut Torch Songs on my previous visit to Chicago the year before and I thought it was total crap, so I wasn’t expecting too much from the band… but when I saw them live… shit! This show was so damn great that I still had songs I heard at this show for the first and last time in my head a year later when I finally got my hands on this disc… I swear I knew all of the words to “Never Want to See You Again” as soon as my copy of Indecision hit track 6 for the very first time.

However, if, like most people who don’t live in Chicago (and I gather quite a few who do), you haven’t caught the Bomb live, you’re probably just wondering how Jeff Pezatti’s new band stacks up against Naked Raygun’s classic material. Well, my friend, I am happy to inform you that it stacks up almost impossibly well. Had Indecision been emblazoned with the Naked Raygun logo rather than the Bomb’s, I’d place it right after Throb Throb and All Rise in terms of quality, roughly on par with the almighty Jettison (that an album like Jettison could come in third fucking place among the band’s albums should tell you how great Naked Raygun really were). It seems like after Naked Raygun came out with the “Vanilla Blue” single between All Rise and Jettison they pretty much devoted their career to that sound and style (their earlier stuff was far more eclectic, incorporating elements of jazz, new wave, noise rock and heavy amounts of post-punk), never quite reaching the hights of “Vanilla Blue” again; however, I dare say that there are a good three or four songs on Indecision that rank right up there with “Vanilla Blue.”

With all this talk of Naked Raygun, though, it’s easy to imagine that the Bomb is the Jeff Pezatti show, but that’s hardly the case. Guitarist Jeff Dean actually wrote the music to most of the songs on the record, and his riffs are nothing short of amazing, definitely recalling Raygun guitarist John Haggerty’s burly sound but with a marked influence of slightly more melodic (but just as powerful) guitarists like Frankie Stubbs from Leatherface creeping in. And the rhythm section… well, they’re the same rhythm section that holds down the Methadones, and if you’ve heard their last album (also on Thick Records) you know how powerful this unit is.

As good as the musicians are, though, it really is Jeff Pezatti’s undeniable talent and charisma that gives Indecision its must-own status. The vocal melodies on this thing are just sublime, from the opening blitzkrieg “Up from the Floor” (a true classic) to more melodic songs like “Further from the Truth” and “Hardly Shed a Tear” to the downright winsome pop songs “Never Want to See You Again” (which could easily take over TRL if Pezatti were 25 years younger and willing to wear eyeliner). Also, while the subject of most of the lyrics is undoubtedly the emotional stuff that drives most pop songs, you can hear some of Pezatti’s old military/industrial metaphors creeping in again… there’s nothing as overt as “Gear,” but when Pezatti croons accusingly that “you carpet bombed, incinerated” in “Never Want to See You Again” I can’t help but crack a smile.

In short, Indecision is easily one of the best 2 or 3 punk records of 2005, and after even more listens this may well pass favorites like the Regulations LP (that suffers, if from nothing else, from a more mannered style) as the record from 2005 that means the most to me. Seriously, this is one of the records that, years from now, I can safely say that if you happened to see me riding my bike around Chapel Hill in the fall of 2005 I was almost certainly blasting this disc through my headphones. Since they don’t tour extensively and don’t play a lot of the bullshit small-time media games that it takes to get well-known in the punk scene I can’t imagine that the Bomb are going to get freaking huge, but if they don’t explode (no pun intended) it won’t be because Indecision isn’t one of the most brilliant albums to grace my ears in quite some time.

And if you need some extra prodding here is a link to the band’s web site and here is a link to their purevolume site where you can stream three songs.

Bold: The Search 1985-89

Bold were an amazing band. Not amazing in the sense of “good” or even “good at what they did…” no, what was amazing about Bold was the way that they managed to overcome what sounded like sheer incompetence and put out records that are listenable and at times even interesting despite themselves. Fans of Killed by Death-type punk are very familiar with this type of phenomenon (Tapeworm anyone?), but the only other hardcore band I can think of that can be this lose and unformed yet still listenable is DYS.

The Search collects all of Bold’s recorded works in reverse chronological order, moving from their last 7″ back toward the first 7″ they released back when they were called Crippled Youth (and all of the members of the band were between 13 and 14 years old). As you might expect, there are a load of differences between the later and earlier material, with the earlier stuff having more of a straightforward hardcore vibe a la SSD or DYS and the later stuff incorporating far more complex guitar lines and less rudimentary song structures. Despite the fact that they learned to play their instruments at least somewhat competently in the years between their first and last 7″s, amazingly Bold never really learned how to write a song, as their later material will attest. Though there are interesting parts here and there (such as the chorus to “Running Like Thieves”) the different parts of songs sound almost like they were spliced together randomly.

The kicker, though, is that I just can’t help but liking this stuff. I’ve always liked the Crippled Youth 7″; while the recording leaves a bit to be desired (though it’s not as bad as people will tell you it is, particularly on this well-mastered CD), it’s awesome to hear a bunch of little kids just diving head-first into some totally generic hardcore. The pose on their full-length, Speak Out, was more nuanced but it was still a pose, as total generica like “Nailed to the X” and “Talk Is Cheap” attest. However, listening to this stuff is, for me, like eating comfort food; you know it’s not good or good for you, but it’s so familiar and comfortable that you just lose yourself in it. You know the breakdown is coming, but you rock out to it anyway. You know how absurd it is to be singing along with a crew chant of “nailed… to… the X” but you do it anyway because you did it when you were sixteen and it still feels right.

There are a lot of not-so-good bands who get popular based almost solely on perseverence, continuing to tour and put out records until they inevitably develop a following. However, those bands are usually forgotten as soon as they’re out of the public eye; amazingly, though, by tapping into the conventions of a whole scene (and a scene that most people who are into hardcore pass through at some point in their lives) Bold have managed to leave themselves a legacy. It’s a legacy that a lot of different people will listen to in a lot of different ways (probably ranging from utter earnesty to utter irony), but it’s a legacy nonetheless, which I doubt many people above the age of 20 or so in 1988 would have predicted.

Podcast002

Here’s the playlist for your latest dose of what I like to call “Hardcore NPR:”

Strung Up: Naive Ignorant Pigfucker
Former Cell Mates: Rocky 3
Hooton 3 Car: Danny
Subhumans: Death to the Sickoids
Indigesti: Silenzio Statico

And of course a shitload more talking than most of you would probably prefer.

Download

Short Reviews

I said some time ago that Dead Metaphor wasn’t going to be in the business of writing reviews for every single promo that showed up on my doorstep, the reasoning behind this being that I wanted to use the site primarily to hype up things I am excited about rather than just dismissing things that don’t get me riled up. While I still think that’s an admirable mission, in some cases I think it’s also important to figure out why things from certain bands and labels that have moved me in the past aren’t quite doing it for me anymore, so here are a few short reviews of things that I tried really hard to like over the past few weeks but just couldn’t.

Bleeder Resistor: Sixteen

I guess that these guys are known as a hardcore band in most circles, but this sounds more like late 90s pop punk to me, i.e. metallic guitar riffs over top of doot-dat-doot-dat drumming and nasally vocals that at least pay lip service to being melodic. Honestly I have nothing against that sound; I still pop NOFX and Propagandhi records on from time to time and I wouldn’t be averse to hearing a band that did this style really well. I don’t think that Bleeder Resistor are that band, however… at least not on this release. The music is decent but there’s something amiss with the vocals on this record; I think they’re too loud for one, but they also don’t sound like they’re quite on key, making the band sound a lot less together than they really are. They have some pretty sweet parts here and there, though, like the chorus to the second track, “We Are the Ones,” which actually kind of sounds like it could be an anthemic early 80s hair metal song if the members of Bleeder Resistor were totally different dudes.

Dugong: Quick to the City

When you fancy yourself a serious record reviewer there’s a certain way that you listen to records that’s different from the way that you listen to them when you’re just listening to records for fun, and Dugong’s past releases were really good at pleasing my ears when they were in record reviewer mode. They have a lot of similarities with some of my favorite bands (Broccoli, Hooton 3 Car, etc.) and in general these similarities are more than enough to make up for the things that I don’t like (at least when I’m getting the record for free!). There’s roughly the same ratio between indie-rock-ish sounds and harder punk sounds on Quick to the City as there was on their last album, Hat Danko, but now that I pay no lip service to objectivity I have to say that that ratio skews a bit too far toward the indie rock for my tastes. The first two tracks are very hard and fast and I quite like them (except for the vocals, which have a similar high pitch and awkward cadence to the guy from the Promise Ring), but Dugong lose my attention after the next couple of numbers sound a bit too much like something you’d hear on college radio circa 1989. Admittedly there are a lot of people who like that style (and those people should probably be listening to Dugong) but I’m not one of those people.

Straitjacket: Modern Thieves

This one is a little tougher since I actually like this record a fair amount, yet I’m bugged by the fact that I think it could be a lot better. As we learned from the first LP by Texas’ the Ends, if you’re going to sound this much like the Stitches you better well have songwriting skills that match the Stitches as well as your trebly guitar sound and hoarse vocals. Unfortunately I just don’t think that Straitjacket are there yet, which is a shame because I remember their debut single really did it for me a few years back. I don’t know what exactly it is that’s lacking, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything to grab onto with this LP… all of the songs just sound really similar, moving back and forth between your standard punk power chord riffs and these ringing, slightly more melodic riffs. There aren’t any memorable vocal lines either, just your standard punk shouting. Listening to this CD a handful of times over the past few months did prompt me to pull out 12 Imaginary Inches for the first time in ages, though, reminding me what a fucking great LP that was.

Cave In: Perfect Pitch Black

For some reason or another I was convinced that this record was really going to blow me away. I actually only listened to Cave In’s last record, Antenna, once, despite the fact that I really liked all of their previous record (I think Antenna came out at the peak of my promo frenzy when I couldn’t be bothered to digest a record if it wasn’t “on the clock”). I don’t know why I thought Perfect Pitch Black would be so revelatory, but really it’s not. It’s decent… for some reason or another it reminds me a lot of Nirvana’s In Utero (maybe it’s the spacey production), but the band clearly give up about halfway through, which I suppose is permissable in a collection of odds and ends (which Perfect Pitch Black ostensibly is). So, while there’s some good stuff here I don’t think that I’ll be spinning this one regularly.

I guess I’m still here

Fuck, I’m exhausted. I think that over the next couple of months this blog have to become more than a typical liveJournal whinge-fest since I can’t seem to muster up the energy to write about music. In order to get everything done that I have to from school I have to have my nose to the grindstone around 12 hours a day, which leaves me mentally if not physically exhausted as well. The irony is, of course, that I’m listening to a ton of music; all of the trips to and from school and all of the times sitting in my office when I just can’t bear another hour of classical music mean that the ipod is switched on a good deal of the time, but when it comes time to actually sit down and form things into coherent thoughts I come up empty. Maybe that’ll change soon… it’s difficult to tell right now, as from Monday until Thursdays at 10:30 PM (when I finally get home from my last class of the week) my life feels like it’s balancing tenuously on a set of scales and it’s all I can do to keep work and school from slamming to the ground, sending my marriage and my sanity splattering all over the wall (that metaphor probably lost anyone, but I swear it makes sense in my head). Anyway, I thought I’d write something, if for no other reason than to be writing something. Oh, and just so you music junkies don’t feel totally cheated here’s a playlist:

Indigesti: Osservati Dall’Inganno LP
BGK: Nothing Can Go Wrogn LP
Inferno / Execute split LP
Violent Children: Self-titled EP
Former Cell Mates: Hustle CD
Indirekt: Nacht Und Nebel EP

Everybody’s Enemy: Enter the Enemy LP

I believe I picked this LP up for two reasons: 1. it’s Japanese and 2. a review of it in Short, Fast and Loud compared it to the Circle Jerks. Well, the first one turned out to be true (it’d take a real fuck-up to get that one wrong), but I should have known that the grindcore-lovers at SF&L didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. I mean, for me at least, the Circle Jerks are one of those kind of holy comparisons that you just don’t make simply because a band shares a few extremely general characteristics with them (like being both fast and slightly melodic, something you could say about a zillion other bands as well). I’m not saying that because the Circle Jerks are the best band of all time or anything (though Group Sex puts them up there for sure), but they sounded so distinctive that you just can’t throw that comparison around. This same principle applies across all kinds of genres; for instance, you can compare bands to the Clash all you want (nary a press release goes across my desk without a shout-out to Strummer & Co.), but you better have a really fucking good reason for comparing a band to the Sex Pistols.

So, I was somewhat disappointed when I first listened to Enter the Enemy, but once I got over my expectations for what it should be and realized what the record actually is it grew on me quite quickly. What Enter the Enemy is, essentially, is a spot-on hybrid of the kind of melodic Japanese punk that typically gets released on labels like Snuffy Smile (think I Excuse, the Urchin, Navel, etc.) and fast and melodic early 80s hardcore like Life Sentence and Articles of Faith. Basically, it sounds like energetic, punchy punk rock with a very slight early 80s influence… not enough to totally win over the record collectors, but certainly enough for a poseur like myself.

There are 10 songs packed onto this one-sided 12″ (the other side contains an etching), but they kind of go by in a blur… there aren’t really any super melodic or catchy moments that make me want to spin the record again and again just to hear them, but the playing is solid and the energy level is high throughout. If these guys loosened up their songwriting just a tiny bit and allowed enough breathing room for a sweet guitar or vocal hook every couple of tracks it would likely push them over the edge into essential territory, though that hasn’t quite happened yet. Still, though, it may be worth picking up this limited-to-500-hand-numbered-copies, colored vinyl package just in case their next record is amazing and you want to know where they came from. All in all, though, I guess that I wish I liked this more than I actually do.

Former Cell Mates: Hustle CD

Former Cell Mates is a new band from Sunderland, England, featuring Davey Burdon, who has played bass on the last 3 Leatherface albums, on guitar and vocals. After Davey’s great vocal turn on “Rabbit Pie Alibi” on Dog Disco, Leatherface’s last full-length (Burdon also had songwriting credits on that song and a few others on Dog Disco) I was very much looking forward to Hustle and I practically ripped the package open when I saw the Newest Industry’s return address on the envelope. I jumped in the car, popped Hustle in the CD player and…

Honestly, “utter disappointment” was my initial reaction. In retrospect, now that I’ve realized what an utterly fucking brilliant disc this is, I think I can pin that down to one aspect of the album, and that’s Mr. Burdon’s accent. I can’t recall hearing him talk too much in the 10 or so times I’ve seen Leatherface, but that’s not what I’m talking about: it’s his singing accent. I’m not sure how to describe it exactly, but I’ve noticed that when some people try to sing they naturally affect what ends up sounding like a southern (American) drawl; it’s like if you have the same accent as all the great old country singers you’ll automatically be as soulful as those guys and gals. Combine this with an unfortunate similarity in timbre between Burdon’s vocals and those of the guy from Hootie and the Blowfish and Hustle will, unfortunately, not hit you with the immediate impact that it might otherwise.

But when it does hit… fuck! I think that the first song that really hit me was “Rocky 3,” a pure pop song that practically begs a lawsuit from the Police. The reggae-fied guitar riff, the lilting vocal melody and the punchy chorus are all straight off of Regatta de Blanc, and while I’ve never been one to rock the Police’s albums on a consistent basis (really, this is only because the production makes them sound a little dated and because Sting is an asshole) I can certainly appreciate the brilliance of their songcraft, and the Former Cell Mates have channeled it perfectly on “Rocky 3.” Seriously, if this had been the song that the Newest Industry had chosen to put up as their mp3 download from the album I’m pretty sure every one of you reading this would click on the link, listen to it and immediately submit your credit card to the proper authorities in order to secure a copy of this album. The label picked a different track, though, so you’ll have to save “Rocky 3″ for when you actually lay your hands on this monster of a disc.

Once “Rocky 3″ hooked me highlights started to emerge all over the album. “Sparkle” is a delicate, acoustic-based song with a nursery-rhyme melody and “Inhaler” is almost like a blues song with its simple guitar figures and straightforward, affecting vocal. And of course there are the punchier, punkier numbers like “Last Chance,” “Sonic Stamp” and “Pretty Dress” that will satisfy those of us who have a deep-seeded appreciation for this style of heavy, melodic UK punk. Burdon’s lyrics can also, at times, be nearly as irreverent as those of Mr. Stubbs himself (my favorite line: “I only want to see videos / of ugly people fucking”), quite a suprise given that this is the first band I’ve heard of him fronting.

As most of you who read the site regularly probably realize, I’m a very big fan of this style in general. There’s something about that big guitar sound, the Motorhead tempos and the soaring vocals that just get me every time, but Hustle is an album that truly goes above and beyond the call of duty, pushing the idea of what qualifies as a punk songwriting style to its extremes without ever losing the energy and aggression that attracted us all to the genre in the first place. If you liked Leatherface’s more diverse efforts like The Last and Dog Disco you’ll flip over this, so get it immediately.