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picture by
Kyle Rios |
Finally! Finally the time has come to talk about the almighty
Crisis Man!
If you've been around this page a little bit you may have found a
Crisis Man track buried deep under mountains of dust in the
Oktober Fist Compilation #2
from September 2019, yes I've been obsessed with this band for a while
(and it's only recently that I finally managed to get my hands on a physical copy of
their 7"!) and their first LP recent release gives me the perfect opportunity to take a look back at what I consider to be one of the most interesting
punk bands of our troubled times...
Crisis Man hails from the sunny state of California and as everybody knows California is a territory full of experienced punk musicians, well Crisis Man is made of some of these people... yes since the band very first release there is no doubt that these guys know their shit...
So there is Ross on vocals who's known for screaming in
Ceremony
and
Spice. There is Ben on guitar who played/plays in great bands like
Acrylics
(one of my favourite contemporary hardcore punk band),
Rut
and Smirk. There is Jess on bass who's got his own solo project called
Marinero. And there is Nick, behind the drums, who's played in numerous
greats bands like
Smirk,
Autistic Youth,
Public Eye
and others...
It all starts in 2017 with this 5-track cassette (demo?) released on
Melters. To be honest this debut release went rather unnoticed at the time, yet
these five tracks are far from being deprived of interest.
All the foundations of what will be Crisis Man for the next five
years can be found here: Ross' barking snotty vocals who sound
like pure rancid frustration, Ben's sharp guitar riffs that manage to be
punk as fuck while sounding like they would not be totally irrelevant in a
more garage-punk oriented kind of band and some great songs' structures full of
weird out-of-place sounds popping out of nowhere. Yes there is a lot of
Acrylics in Crisis Man's debut and nobody said it's a bad thing at
all.
Crisis Man manage to sound extremely intense without having a
crushing sound or an insanely fast tempo, it just sounds punk as fuck, period. The vocals add the extra layer of anger and snottiness that makes the
whole thing so sweet to my old punk's eardrums.
Yes it does sound like a demo tape so I knew that the real deal has yet to come...
It's one year later, in 2018 on
Digital Regress, that the
Crisis Man
nuclear nuke really exploded to my face. Immediately seduced by the
deviant art of Riley Kerr (the band "official visual artist" who plays in
Nasti, the amazing band of what I called Freak Punk or
Freak Core, which dropped a killer of a first album before losing me with their second one), I also instantly fell in love with the deranged and
dirty chaos that makes up the sound of The Myth Of Moderation...
Just take what we got on the debut release, make it faster, make it
meaner, make it sound loud, dirty and nasty and you'll get close to what
The Myth Of Moderation is throwing at you. From the opening eponymous track where Ross
sounds like a mad dog surfing a tsunami of sharp hardcore punk guitar
riffs to the dirty rock'n roll of Superlunary by way of
the "à la"
Lumpy And The Dumper
(Huff My Sack
era) vibes of
Ego Death, this record is just non-stop killer in-your-face fucking
FREAK punk!
But don't expect an unrelenting deluge of raging riffs and brutal
drumbeats like what all the current Nordic-influenced D-beat bands offer,
no here we're talking more about high frequency punk rock... and it bites,
it rips, it screams, it twists your eardrums until your nose bleeds but
above all, it pauses, it resumes, it bounces, it builds up freaky
atmospheres and it grows in something which is, ultimately, extremely
rock'n'roll (the guitar!), a bit like what
Beta Boys
or
Lysol
do in their own genre of hardcore.
I don't know how to say it otherwise, but this 7" is insanely good!
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| picture by FlashBang |
I had to wait four bloody years before finally listening to new
Crisis Man tracks and yes that's a tragedy but here it is... Out on
Digital Regress
and
Erste Theke Tonträger
(for Europe), Asleep in America is the first full length of the
California band and... it fulfils all my craziest wishes! And yes this new
Riley artwork is, once again, fantastic.
Opening up with organ layers which, for some reasons, make images of Clockwork Orange and Terminator flash in my mind, the opening track opens fire with pummelling drums and bass beating the shit out of your silly face... things are made crystal clear from the start, both instruments are gonna sound like proper bass and proper drums this time! Oh yes that record sounds good! The perfect good for what Crisis Man got in the guts: Ross' barking vocals sound meaner than ever, the guitar's distortion is a bit more chubby today but fits well with the fatter version of the bass and drums... everything's set up for success.
And the songs are exactly what I was expecting: smartly built freak punk gems with just enough musicianship to make the whole thing fascinating but not pretentious or boring for a sec. There is Who? whose hardcore drumbeats and guitar riffs would make Mike Pence pogo at a Christmas mass, there is the sad and supplicant Blue & Red States that made my bedside lamp cry, there is the beautiful Police Injustice whose catchy rhythms would make Putin wear a BLM shirt and, at last, there is the closing eponymous track that draws as much from the hardcore songs of the A side as from something closer to 70s American rock or at least more mainstream popular rock music, and it works beautifully...
And that's exactly what Crisis Man are so good at, they're always where you don't expect them. Sure, the vocals are so specific to their identity that you couldn't go wrong with the merchandise, but as for the rest, Crisis Man is always out there somewhere, hiding in the corner, crawling underground or levitating deep in the storm, ready to take you by surprise with song structures that are never typically hardcore or typically punk or typically anything else really, they're just axe-molded spiky balls of energy that are mercilessly tossed into your fucking face...
I could go on and on for ever about this album, it's just beautiful from start to finish... that finish made of the last dying notes of organ layers fading into a void of distortion... until next time!
N,J'Oi!
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