Featured Releases: November 4, 2024

Closetalkers: Path to Peace 7” (Neon Taste Records) Neon Taste brings us the debut vinyl from this three-piece hardcore band from Calgary, Canada. While the label describes Closetalkers as d-beat, I don’t hear much Discharge in their sound, except in the roaring maximalism of the production and the sense of menace that pervades these six tracks, which also makes me think of creepy mid-80s Japanese bands. The riffs are catchy (just on the verge of melodic, in fact), relying primarily on furious downstrokes that make me think of S.H.I.T. or Blazing Eye. Closetalkers’ secret weapon, though, is their drummer. The guitarist’s furious downstrokes hold down the driving rhythm, freeing the drummer to pack these songs full of inventive rhythms, creative fills, and unexpected accents. Closetalkers are ripping enough to grab you within a few seconds, but as these songs sink in, you’ll realize there’s a lot more going on than you might notice at first.

Guiding Light: S/T cassette (Down South Tapes) The cassette label Stucco (and its many sub-labels like Impotent Fetus and Down South Tapes) has been bringing us some of the most creative and exciting music from the hardcore-adjacent underground for the past several years, and their latest from Texas’s Guiding Light is one of my favorite releases yet on what has become one of my favorite current labels. Guiding Light’s sound is difficult to pin down. Broadly, I’d put them in the tradition of forward-thinking, progressive hardcore bands like the early Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust, but if you come to these five songs looking for an homage to a certain band or era, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, Guiding Light has firmly established their own voice, built around furious hardcore drumming, propulsive bass playing that isn’t afraid of melody, distant, mannered vocals that alternate between German (I think?) and English, and a brilliant guitarist who sounds like Johnny Marr trying to squeeze himself into an early 80s Midwest hardcore band. While the overall sound is definitely hardcore, it’s a brand of hardcore I’ve never heard before, and one that belongs entirely to Guiding Light. Even more impressive is the way Guiding Light explores their sound over these five tracks, showing how fertile their peculiar chemistry can be. While the opening track, “Sterb Doch,” leans into an artsy aggression that makes me think of Essential Logic, mellower moments in “Lost in Voices” and “Simmen” have a sun-bleached , Southwestern vibe that actually sounds a bit like the Meat Puppets. These adventurous songs—particularly with their rough, analog-sounding production—remind me of the creative explosion of UKDIY, but the more aggressive aspects are bound to alienate the modern iteration of that scene. On the other hand, Guiding Light is a fucking weird hardcore band; like the bands I mentioned at the top of this description, though their music sounds like hardcore, they do not feel like a hardcore band, but a band whose different paths intersect with hardcore’s extremes of tempo and volume. But for someone like me who loves the Raincoats and Mecht Mensch in equal measure, this tape is pure gold.

Bottled Violent: No Rules 7” (No Norms Records) No Norms Records brings us the vinyl debut from this hardcore band from Bandung, Indonesia. While Bottled Violent is from Southeast Asia, their sound draws most explicitly from early 80s US hardcore, with hyperactive rhythms, shouted vocals, and a thin and scratchy guitar sound that marks them as sonic allies of 2000s bands like Regulations, Social Circkle, and School Jerks. Like those bands, Bottled Violent’s decision to keep the distortion in check prevents their simple and catchy riffs from getting subsumed into an inchoate roar, but my favorite part of No Rules is how youthful it sounds. The riffs are dead simple, the band is slightly sloppy, and the production isn’t 100% dialed in, but while it’s easy to dismiss these things as shortcomings, it’s precisely these aspects that communicate Bottled Violent’s infectious enthusiasm… they’re just so stoked on hardcore that they’re making it happen and not sweating the details too much. And in a scene full of 30- and 40-something bands who are so good at what they do and so self-aware as to sound sterile, No Rules sounds refreshingly like a hardcore punk record and not a simulacrum of one.

Alambrada: Ríos De Sangre 12” (Unlawful Assembly Records) Ríos de Sangre, the debut LP from Bogotá, Colombia’s Alambrada, arrived earlier this summer in a small edition that disappeared instantly, and now that we have a restock in-house, I wanted to hip anyone who might have missed out on this monster record the first go-round. While displaying the trademark intensity we expect from the contemporary Bogotá hardcore scene, Ríos de Sangre fits with a particular strain of hardcore I’ve often championed at Sorry State. I don’t think there’s a name for this sub-scene, but I think of it as true psycho shit, bands that play at ridiculously fast tempos, cramming their songs to overflowing with musical ideas and whose unbalanced, evil-sounding vibe borrows from the outsider hardcore canon of Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, Spike in Vain, and Septic Death. Allergic to safety of convention, this is music that keeps the listener off-balance through a carpet-bomb deployment of odd rhythms and whiplash tempo changes. Incredibly, Alambrada keeps up the intensity across this record’s entire 20 minutes, not only abandoning hardcore’s genre-wide conventions, but rigorously avoiding repeating themselves or falling into their own patterns that might deaden the impact of their constant jump scares. It would take longer to catalog Alambrada’s seemingly endless bag of tricks than it would to actually listen to Ríos de Sangre, but even the final quarter of the album feels full of surprises, like the exceptional Buzzcocks-esque guitar solo in “Silencio Sepulcral” or when the drummer finally does a full-on blast on “Rabia.” It’s a wild ride, and like similarly over-the-top recent records from Psico Galera and Idiota Civilizzato, these twelve tracks will crank your heart up to hummingbird tempo and not let you rest until they hit the last note.