Ok I know I haven't been very active in April, I needed a break, I sometimes struggle to keep up with the pace I have chosen for the activity of this blog... I was also busy with the next Guimauve record (our first LP) which is now at the mastering stage.
Anyway here we are with a new compilation full of ripping hardcore punk tracks (lots of hardcore this time) but also some post-punk and other stuff!
N,J'Oi!
01 - Prowler - Facade 02 - Reflex - Any Decision 03 - Red Gaze - Narcissistic Injury 04 - The Dweebs - Braindead 05 - Sanitizers - Painleaking 06 - Real People - I Wanna go Home 07 - Stray Bullet - Factory 08 - Primer Regimen - Culpables 09 - Feral - Cycle 10 - Crosshairs - Camo 11 - Gripe - Perdido 12 - Draumär - Medisin 13 - Joker - Giggles 14 - S.M.I.L.E. - Lobotomy 15 - Warthog - Four Walls 16 - Gad Whip - Sky Bird 17 - Bodies - The Great Equaliser
Pitva is a noisy-punk quartet hailing from Vienna, Austria.
Dominik, the singer, is from Czech republic though and most of (all?) the
lyrics are in Czech (Pitva means Autopsy).
Dominik seems to be the very active type, I won't even try
to mention all the projects he's been involved in, but he was/is part of several Black
Metal influenced bands like
Parasite Dreams
and
Smuteční Slavnost
(Funeral party) but is also in
Autor
(I reviewed their debut release
very briefly two years ago) and in
Urban Lurk, not a band but a tape label and show promoter based in
Vienna.
Standing behind the synth is Robert Pawliczek, a german
visual artist and musician who plays/played in a bunch of bands you probably have heard of like
Heavy Metal,
Bobby Would,
Schiach,
Privat
and
Agir
(I've probably missed a few), he also manages an
"artist run off space" called
Drive-In / Drive-Thru
and is involved in a label and distro called
Quality Music. Yes the man's been busy.
Raphael, the drummer, is not the idle type either and he's
spent years exploring various musical genres (from black metal to
dark-wave and post-punk). He is the drummer for Parasite Dreams but also
the man behind
Rosa Nebel
and plays in
Gates of Londra, Phantom Gold and
Peace Vaults. He is also the other half of Urban Lurk with Dominik.
The guitarist, aka Johnny Brise, seems to be obsessed with Metal, he played/plays in
Death Racer,
Hagzissa,
Kringa,
Forgotten Shrines
and other loud acts which are light-years away from my musical interests...
Anyway you got the point, these guys obviously didn't grab their first
guitar/drum kit/whatever last week end... so what do we have here on the postmortem table?
Pitva's demo
was released at the end of 2018 on the Prague-based label
Stoned To Death
and let me be straight, I'm not going to spend much time reviewing it. I discovered the demo
after I listened to their self-titled LP, which is a completely different story, and the demo black metal infused
vocals is a straight NO NO for me, I just can't stand it. So yes this first release
sounds closer to Parasite Dreams, and all that black metal stuff
Dominik is fond of, than what came next. Give it a try if you're
into that kind of stuff, I'm not.
So here is what deserves your full attention in my opinion, Pitva's
recent (2022) self-titled LP released on the super cool Berlin-based label
Static Age.
At first I didn't really understand the cover picture (wtf?), and then I
remembered what Pitva means (I told you at the very beginning of
this post!) and the whole thing instantly made sense! (thank you dear Google Translation).
Ok here were are, forget about the lousy Black Metal shit, this record is something else!
To be honest I had to listen to this LP A LOT to be able to really figure it out, yes it starts a bit like a noisy but bass-less punk band, the synth building up a dark and gloomy atmosphere made of distorted layers on which the guitar nails acute and haunting melodies. The vocals and the drums counterpoint all of this, keeping the burning anger right in your ugly face, Dominik screams and shouts while Raphael keeps it sharp and fast. The whole noisy punk vibe made me first thought of Bathouse (even if the bass is a big part of the swedes' noise and not of Pitva's) and the comparison's not completely irrelevant in my opinion but limiting Pitva to that is way too narrow.
Indeed, from the third track onwards, the record turns into something else, something that sounds colder, something that sounds a lot more "disillusioned", something that sounds very German in my opinion and recalls dirtier versions of Maskeand, even more recently, of Die Verlierer.
But don't get me wrong, the noisy coldness "à la" Einstürzende Neubauten (the freezing cold Pytlak!) and the eastern anger from "behind the iron curtain" hardcore bands (Odpadki Civilizacije was mentioned somewhere, even if Pitva doesn't swim in the same kind of waters) are never very far. On Bestie the band even takes us halfway between Indus and cold-wave before diving back into a fast and cold synth punk.
But the main question in the end is always the same. Is it good? Do I like it? Yes and Yes I do but beware, don't be fooled by the "punkitude" of the first two tracks, the whole thing is a lot darker, gloomier and cold than what you might expect at first, yes, this album is a grower! The kind you're going to love coming to again and again.
Probably the best disturbing and noisy record to come out on Static Age since the amazing Walking Korpses LP!
Here we go for the 33rd edition of the infamous RAF compilation featuring a quite balanced mix of hardcore punk, noise punk, anarcho-punk and even some post-punk here and there (yeah the options in terms of adjectives you can put in front of the word "punk" are literally limitless!).
The 17 bands of today are from the US, Australia, Austria, Malaysia, Germany and Romania, mainly from the US to be honest, I try to keep on covering bands from all over the world but the American scene is so vivid and full of great bands it's just impossible to ignore them.
N,J'Oi!
01 - Crisis Man - No Standing Ovation 02 - Split System - Climbing 03 - Pitva - Kapr 04 - Church Clothes - Relative Power 05 - D.Sablu - Bomber Stomp 06 - ConSec - You're Not Going Anywhere 07 - Crime of Passing - Tender Fixation 08 - Deluded - Wash The Scum 09 - Straw Man Army - Faces In The Dark 10 - Mercenary - No Uniform 11 - Xero - Scheme 12 - No Future - Pig Fiend 13 - The Hard-Crop's - The Band 14 - Cold Brats - Living Room La Vida Loca 15 - Science Man - The Want 16 - Maske - Eiszeit 17 - White Suns - Night Pours In
Modecenter is a quartet hailing from Vienna, Austria, which has been around since
2018/2019 and features members of
Goldsoundz,
Master Gottlieb
and
23 Söhn.
Most of the time I try to go through the whole band discography in my reviews but for Modecenter, as there was only one tape (Mode
für jung und alt, Fashion for the young and old, recorded in 2019) released prior to their
first full length and as I'm not convinced by its quality compared to the
LP, I will focus on the LP only.
To be honest I only discovered Modecenter very recently
(thanks to the always great
Perte & Fracas, cheers mate!), indeed their LP got out in July on
Numavi Records, one of the most active label from Vienna which has also released a few
albums from
Melt Downer, another great noise-rock band from the capital of Austria). But better
late than never I guess so here is the occasion to catch up on this great
record.
First I have to say that I was really impressed by this record, it's a
proper full length, a dense record including ten well-written songs which
take from various influences and, despite a couple of unnecessary tracks,
it's absolutely killer.
Modecenter ventures into a few different genres, into the Fugazi era of post-hardcore
with Chain Boys (that can't not recall the vocals of
Guy Picciotto's band) and into the "indie side" of modern post-punk
with Hot Body, but where the quartet is definitely at its best,
where all the energy and the "genius" of the band can really burst out in
the open, it's clearly in those good old bass-driven noise-rock tracks reminiscent of classics like Big Black.
The heavy and obsessive bass lines support an extremely tense song
structure which gives all the necessary room to vocals to exude anger and
frustration. I'm talking about songs like Deceit,
I Am Straight or the heavy, but airy, OK Computer but most
of all I'm talking about Stylo, the masterpiece of the album...
Lead by a "perfect" obsessive noise-rock bassline, the hallucinated
vocals scream all the insanity, all the fear of being completely lost in
an environment dragged into an uncontrolled run forward a not so distant
wall, whereas some stressful synth layers keep the situation as tense as
it could possibly get... I love that kind of song! Grease is built the same way but the
vocals got a more desperate tone that takes us closer to
Chain Boys, the track being mostly instrumental anyway it doesn't
change the "vibe" much.
So everything could be just perfect right ? Unfortunately I have to put a
small downside, a few tracks tend to break the energy of the record and
it's a real shame, I think of the never-ending 187 (a "very"
instrumental track of 6 minutes and a half) which starts very well and
then gets lost in something a bit boring after two minutes (ok it ends the
side A of the vinyl version but it's right in the middle of the digital
album!) or of Mode B, a totally unnecessary "surfish" instrumental
track and most of all of Mind Eraser, the final track, an awful
radio rock (dream pop?) ballad which ruins an ending that could have been
brilliant with the super good I Am Straight.
But I don't want to end on a negative note, so don't get me wrong, Modecenter's album contains some of the best noise-rock songs I've heard this year, tracks that totally kick ass and for that alone, you have to give it a go!
Autor is a new female-fronted band from Vienna, Austria, singing in german and playing some kind of dark and heavy mid-tempo punk (yes that's not far from post punk sometimes).
The band has just released a 8-track demo cassette on Die Plattenfirma (the physcial release may be postponed due to the you-know-what crisis). With these great heavy bass lines, the more sung (or talked) than screamed vocals and this cold and gloomy dark german punk vibe, Autor manages to bring us back to the early 80s in germany, somewhere between the Neue Deutsche Welle and some more SO36 raw attitude (ok I know the band is not german but that's the bell it rings!).
Well as usual you get your dose of new punk/hardcore/post-punk for the month... So many great releases these days it's hard to keep up!
N,J'Oi!
01 - Punter - Lockdown 02 - Autor - Sinn 03 - Gaffer - Hang 04 - Smut - Cum Inside 05 - C.H.E.W. - King Kurtis 06 - Avec Toi Dans Un Champ - Humiliation 07 - Donors - Breakfast Anytime 08 - Sonic Warhead - Talk Is Poison
09 - Maske - Leere Blicke 10 - Neutrals - Hitler's In The Charts Again 11 - UZI - Competencia 12 - Deletär - Plus Croire En Rien 13 - Shit - Eraser III 14 - Warsh - Burning Urge 15 - Vangas - Dog Walker
And as usual the full compilation can be downloaded: HERE
