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New releases from Skemäta, Gay Kiss, and Excessive Cruelty out now on Sorry State!
Sorry State has three new releases ready for mass consumption! We haven't put out a batch of releases that are this straight up hardcore in a while, so we're hoping everyone is going to be really excited about these! Here's the info:
First up is the brand new LP from Raleigh's Skemäta, A Bright Shining Hell. Here's the description:
Excessive Cruelty is a new band featuring key players from the Bay Area’s Strung Up, who were simultaneously one of the best-regarded and most underrated bands of the explosion of early 80s-style US hardcore in the early 2000s. If you’re smart enough to be familiar with Strung Up’s catalog (and if you’re not… do your homework!), you’ll be pleased to know that the blisteringly fast rhythms, complex riffing, gruff vocals and literate, socially aware lyrics are still very much present in Excessive Cruelty’s sound. You can also hear a touch of thrash and crossover influence here—which makes sense given that guitarist Dan Randall spent many of the intervening years since Strung Up disbanded playing in Ghoul—but like Dealing with It-era DRI or American Paranoia-era Attitude Adjustment, this is hardcore with metallic elements and not the other way around. Any way you slice it, though, this 12” delivers 6 blistering dispatches of pure rage and energy.
3 New Releases Out Now on Sorry State: Joint D≠, Natural Causes, and Mind Dweller
Oh happy day! 3 new releases are now available from Sorry State Records! Here's the skinny on each:
A highly significant leaked dossier of ripping hardcore, ‘Intelligence’ is dripping with arch rage and lateral hatred. This unrelenting dispatch from camp ≠ sees their quick fire bile launcher trained expertly on insidious fascisms old and new, looking both inwards to their home state of North Carolina and outwards to the murderous effects of American foreign policy, facing down this complex cluster fuck without flinching, reduction or cliché, instead deploying all the class, riffs and wordplay you’ve come expect from these quarters. Fusing the wild-ass pace Japanese hardcore mania with riffs recalling Poison Idea at their moist concentrated dose, Intelligence is both a sonic ultimatum and a helpful compass. Mandatory listening for both those who are just waking up to the nightmare, and those, like Joint D≠, who’ve had eyes on their drones in the sky for quite some time. - bryony beynon
The second big slab from North Carolina’s Natural Causes. While their first record on the Snot Releases label was a rough around the edges affair with raw production and a clear fascination with the jittery, pop-inflected synth-punk of bands like Ausmuteants or Lost Sounds, this second self-titled effort finds the band “maturing” in all the right ways. , whether you’re talking about the brooding, Fall-esque “Average Cost of Living,” the up-tempo garage punk of “Gun,” or the big, careening melodies of “New Hues.” The production here is also much clearer and more powerful than before, revealing far more depth to the band’s sound than what you could hear on the earlier 12”. We tend to love bands that fall in the cracks between subgenres here at Sorry State, and the way Natural Causes combine the atmospheric arrangements and angular riffing of post-punk with the energy of garage-punk, all the while sprinkling the whole thing liberally with big pop melodies, makes them a perfect fit for the label. Recommended if you like your punk loud and aggressive, but still forward-thinking and adventurous.
This LP comes with a beautifully-designed jacket featuring a 2-color print on raw chipboard.
Mind Dweller features members of most of the key Raleigh hardcore bands of the past several years coming together to play a riff-driven style of rocked-out punk that has pretty much one relevant historical antecedent: Annihilation Time. There have been countless bands that have attempted to fuse rock and punk, but like Annihilation Time, Mind Dweller don’t skimp on the rock or the punk, taking the best parts of 70s hard rock and infusing it with hardcore energy. And while a lot of bands go wrong with this style by having vocals that sound like either Eddie Vedder or Joe Denunzio, Mind Dweller’s vocalist takes an RKL-like approach where he sounds punk as hell but also has a range of more than one note. Whether this style is right in your wheelhouse or whether you’re incredibly picky about your rocked-out punk, Mind Dweller have what you need.
Limited to 100 pro-duplicated cassettes in purple shells with a full color j-card.
If you're a Sorry State Records superfan we're also offering bundle pricing if you want to grab all three of these new releases, which not only gets you all three new releases but also saves you a few bucks. You can check out the bundle here.
Now, you may be wondering to yourself, "wasn't Sorry State supposed to release the new Excessive Cruelty record on April 7?" Well, here's a pic of that one:
Looks pretty cool, huh? Well, unfortunately I can't sell it to you because when the pressing showed up at the store yesterday we realized that every single copy is visibly warped. This is pretty much a complete nightmare, but we're soldiering through and trying to move through the claims process and have these repressed. So I'm guessing it'll be at least a month until I can sell these to you, perhaps more. This is far from the only problem we've had with this batch of releases... the new Natural Causes jackets originally showed up without any of the white printing on the jacket (and consequently you may find those misprinted jackets used as packing material in a future order), the Joint D≠ LP probably went through half a dozen artwork resubmissions before it was accepted, and now an entire pressing is warped! Actually getting these things realized and into the physical world has been a real ordeal, so know that when you buy these a truly extraordinary amount of effort has gone into them.
All Things to All People Vol. 8
I mentioned in my last blog post that Terminal Escape wrote about Blackball, and then whattayaknow, a week or so later they actually write about one of my old bands, Infección. Reading other people's reviews / assessments of your work is always weird, but Robert's description of Infección probably jibes least with my perspective as a member of the band than anything I've ever read about one of my musical projects. Usually when I read reviews of my bands it's clear that the writer has listened to it at most once or twice and consequently it's easy to dismiss whatever they say, but I don't know if that's the case here. Of course I'm honored that my guitar would be described as D. Boon-ish... actually one of my big goals with Infección was to play with minimal distortion and have a brighter, trebly-er guitar sound that made much more substantial use of the lighter strings. However, I have to take issue with the fact that he describes us as so weird. Maybe the recording came out weird (I did it myself and I have basically no knowledge of home recording), but I feel like Infección is probably the most straightforward, pop-oriented band I've ever been in.
Infección had two main inspirations: the Shitty Limits and Sudor. After driving the Shitty Limits on their final US tour I had a moment of realization that the personal and musical issues that hampered the band I was playing in at the time, Devour, weren't a necessary part of being in a band, so when I got back from that tour I left Devour with the idea of starting a new band that was a lot more fun. Bobby Michaud was obviously my #1 pick for drummer (and he remains my favorite punk drummer), and I had spoken briefly with David about him singing in a Spanish-language band a few months earlier so I hit him up with the idea. If memory serves, Rich from Whatever Brains either heard some of my home-recorded songs or heard us practice and offered to join on bass, which infinitely more melodic sophistication to my simple, straightforward punk songs.
I remember when we played our first house show there was already a buzz about us. Aside from maybe Crossed Eyes, there hadn't been a Raleigh band that came from the hardcore scene but had melodic elements. I think that people were already growing sick of the retro hardcore thing and we got an immediate positive response, and people continued to react really positively every time we played. While the recording on the tape certainly could have been better, I felt like that initial batch of songs pretty much accomplished the goal I set out for, which was to merge the riff-y, straightforward, classic punk style of Shitty Limits with the energy and urgency of Sudor's early releases.
Unfortunately the band didn't really progress much beyond that. We wrote two additional songs that didn't appear on the demo, and each served to expand our palette. One song was a short, blisteringly fast song built around a slightly discordant series of notes delivered in rapid-fire triplets. The second was a mid-paced, new-wave-influenced song that was, by far, the most pop thing we did. Once I figured out that Rich would add richly melodic basslines to whatever I did, I pushed myself to write even simpler guitar parts, making the guitar hold down the rhythm (which is usually what the bass does) and freeing up the bass to carry the big melodies. It's a strategy employed by a lot of my all-time favorite bands (most importantly, Wire), and I was really pleased to be (an admittedly small) part of a song I thought was really great. However, as we were doing a new recording session with Will from Whatever Brains (with an eye toward possible release as a 7" or 12"), Bobby announced that he was moving to Atlanta, and unfortunately Infección never practiced or played live again. As a matter of fact, we didn't even finish mixing that session.
I might have mentioned this in some respect before, but lately I've been having a lot of meta-type thoughts about punk. Here in Raleigh we're in the midst of a bit of a venue crisis. There are a couple of bars that are supportive of the punk scene, and I am eternally grateful to them for letting punk happen in their respective establishments. However, to me bars simply are not punk, particularly since nearly every bar in this area (with the only exception, I believe, being the Nightlight in Chapel Hill) is either unwilling or unable to do all ages shows.
When I started the record store I hoped that it would be a shot in the arm that would take the punk scene in Raleigh (and, more broadly, in North Carolina) to a new level, but that hasn't really happened. In fact, nearly the opposite has been the case; while there are still a ton of great bands in the area, there have been barely any DIY punk shows to speak of in the past year or more. Touring punk bands now routinely hit up Greensboro before Raleigh, and I think we've pretty much lost our reputation for the wild explosions of energy that shows here were doing the mid- to late-00s. I think that part of the reason the store hasn't sparked some kind of NC punk renaissance is that, particularly in the era of downloadable music, a record store really only services a small corner of the punk scene.
It's always been the case that people are attracted to punk for different reasons, and the different priorities and values of these camps causes a lot of the conflict in punk. Some people are attracted to punk because of fashion; people on the outside of this group might call them poseurs, while people inside this group wonder why everyone else doesn't dress punk. Some people are attracted to punk because of its association with radical politics, and they grow frustrated at other punks' political apathy and/or inertia. And then there are the record nerds, which I realize, retrospectively, is the group I identify with. We are the keepers of the flame, the ones who curate and preserve the artifactual evidence of punk's existence. it's a noble pursuit in the abstract and my little group often grows frustrated with people who don't "support the scene" by buying stuff. However, the flip side of this perspective / attitude is that punk can become just another market, another set of goods and services to buy. When I opened the store I thought it would be a meeting / hangout space for the punks, but really it's just that for a certain kind of punk: the kind who both likes and is able to buy stuff. I certainly don't want that to be the case, but when a space is billed primarily as a store I can see how it would seem weird to go there without the intention of buying something.
So, in light of all this thought I've been trying to wrap my mind around how a DIY venue might be possible. Would this be the mythical meeting place that brings the punk scene together? Would it be something else for people to complain about, take advantage of, and eventually take for granted? Would it be more trouble than its worth? Would it spell my final and complete financial ruin? I have no answers to any of these questions... in fact, they strike me as the kinds of questions you can't answer without the requisite experience.