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What’s up Sorry Staters?
It’s been a crazy last week or so. Raleigh catching the edge of that hurricane has made for some terrible weather for several days straight. My phone was buzzing with flash flood warnings left and right. One morning when I woke up, after the storm had been particularly bad overnight, there was standing water in my apartment. Crazy shit. Hey, what’re you gonna do? But over the weekend as I was writing this, everything cleared up, the sun was shining, and the store seemed like it was slammed busy! People be havin’ that cabin fever, I suppose.
Public Acid had to unexpectedly cancel and didn’t end up playing Armor’s record release show this past Saturday. After making this decision, I unfortunately decided to stay in Raleigh and missed the gig. I’ve been seeing clips and photos of the Invertebrates set, and it looks like my homies tore it the fuck up. Gave me a dose of F.O.M.O. for sure. At the time this newsletter comes out, I would imagine the Argh/No Knock gig on August 12th in Raleigh will be taking place in real time—possibly as you’re reading! Wish I could use this platform to announce ahead of time that The Losers from San Francisco were added to the gig last-minute! Hoping it ends up being a killer gig. 3 ripping touring bands? Hell yeah.
Speaking of ripping bands, I think I’m late to the conversation on this Malakili band. I knew that they’re from Portland. Sorry State has stocked a couple tapes from them over the last couple years, and we just got in the band’s debut LP released on Black Water a couple weeks ago. I’ll be honest, I never really gave those previous tapes a proper listen. Maybe the band’s name threw me off? But I saw the cover art on this new LP: a skeleton in his bedroom surrounded by empty beer cans… I thought to myself, “This is relevant to my interests.” And man, I don’t know what I expected, but I threw this thing on and to my surprise, this record is just straight up, go-for-the-throat, ripping hardcore!
At first, just because of the style of hardcore that Malakili plays, I wondered if this band possibly featured folks from the Brain Squeeze/Alienator crew, but upon further research it doesn’t look like it. The guitar playing stands out to me immediately. Furious riffing that makes me think of Swedish käng influence straight out of the modern hardcore landscape of the Herätys/Infernöh/Larma variety. But I think to simply describe Malakili as a “d-beat” band would be somewhat of a misnomer. There’s a definite US hardcore flavor in the mixture of ingredients. The guitar sound is pretty clean, like the guitar is plugged straight into the front of a cranked Marshall. The singer’s voice is kinda high-pitched and more snotty and snarling, definitely NOT a deep, burly growl. The vocals are double tracked too, which gives it this seasick, off-kilter feel when the singer kinda gets in and outta time with himself.
But because of these stylistic factors that stand out to me, I think Malakili has more in common with a band like The Hell, or maybe even another contemporary example like The Massacred? Also, though, the band’s blend of snotty US hardcore and käng riffing, along with this perception of disorderly nastiness reminds me a lot of Gas Rag. Malakili surely has slightly more polite lyrics than Gas Rag, but you get what I’m sayin’ maybe? I think of them sounding more aligned with bands of this ilk than they do bands going for straight Discharge influence. Perhaps due to their environment, I do hear a bit of early-era Poison Idea creeping its way into the band’s style. There is a Poison Idea poster hung up on the skeleton’s bedroom wall after all, haha. There’s a couple mid-paced stomper tracks that sound way more like “Pure Hate” than they do “Protest And Survive”. You pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?
Anyway, if you were like me and sleeping on Malakili for whatever reason, I would definitely recommend giving this record a shot. A sleeper ripper in its own right.
That’s all I’ve got this week. As always, thanks for reading.
‘Til next week,
-Jeff