"Fucked Up [...] the best hardcore album band of at least the last 2 decades"

[Ptommydski]

The two notable exceptions being Minor Threat and Bad Brains. It's odd to me how the two bands which effectively originated the subgenre made a continuation of the sound more or less an irrelevance. If I want to hear some Hardcore, I don't ever feel the urge reach past the early records by those two bands. Nothing sounds quite as good to me.

[KharBevNor]

Why does the discussion of hardcore never veer away from like, six pitchfork-approved bands from two cities in America?

[Jeans]

Tommy: Dead Kennedys? MDC? Fear?

I'll admit that no hardcore punk I've heard sounds as good as Minor Threat or Bad Brains, but then, Nation of Ulysses doesn't sound as good as Fugazi, and I still listen to them quite often.

Khar: What other good hardcore do you know of? My knowledge of hardcore punk consists of a) bands mentioned in Dance of Days and b) bands mentioned in American Hardcore, plus the odd other band - I'd love to expand, I just don't really know where to start.

[E. Spaceman]

There was also an european, parallel but separate, hardcore scene.

I also don't like it

[Christophe]

HEY TOMMY I THINK YOU FORGOT SOME DUDES, LIKE US.

[Ptommydski]

Tommy: Dead Kennedys? MDC? Fear?

Meh.

[KharBevNor]

European-style hardcore has the enormous advantage of morphing fairly rapidly into crust punk and grindcore, two (sub?) genres that offer far more decent music than hardcore, whereas american-style hardcore hung around like a bad smell before it turned into post-hardcore, which is all extremely boring.

Post-hardcore then went on to inspire many of the worst bands ever.

[Johnny C]

i'd rather listen to DOA than grindcore

[a pack of wolves]

European-style hardcore has the enormous advantage of morphing fairly rapidly into crust punk and grindcore, two (sub?) genres that offer far more decent music than hardcore, whereas american-style hardcore hung around like a bad smell before it turned into post-hardcore, which is all extremely boring.

Post-hardcore then went on to inspire many of the worst bands ever.

You are remembering that American hardcore invented the blastbeat, right? Plus, they're really good at snot-nosed bratty hate. Just look at Charles Bronson. They really did do a lot besides post-hardcore, including with Discordance Axis the best grind band ever.

Also, powerviolence was a US thing. And I fucking love a bit of powerviolence.

[KharBevNor]

I'll give you powerviolence. But I'd also like to point out that since the 90's the two styles of hardcore have crossed geographic borders in their influences, which is why I said 'american style' and 'european style', referring to evolutions from those early (1979-1985) scenes. I wouldn't imagine Funeral for a Friend trace their lineage back to Crass and Discharge, despite existing on the same landmass, for example.

[a pack of wolves]

Well no, but queercore bands like Behead The Prophet, No Lord Shall Live, Limp Wrist, Mukilteo Fairies, Knifed et al are tracing their lineage back to The Dicks, MDC, Big Boys and the faster bands like Siege, Deep Wound and Negative FX. All very much in the American style.

You got to take the good with the bad. Like the fact that grind was largely responsible for the existence of Anal Cunt, crust meaning I've seen one too many utterly interchangeable bands in my time, and all that macho crap that came out of Clevo and NY.

[Christophe]

grind was largely responsible for the existence of Anal Cunt

YOU CALL THIS A BAD THING?

[David_Dovey]

I honestly don't understand your outrage, dovey. The only decent hardcore bands were the ones that moved away from the hardcore sound like Fugazi,Rites of Spring, Slint, Husker Du, The Minutemen (it must be noted that although Black Flag moved away from the archetypical hardcore sound, they were never a good band).

Well I guess the main thing here being that in contrast to most of the people here, I would consider hardcore as including a lot of the off-shoot movements that take in bands like Fugazi and Hüsker Dü, particularly in the eighties/early nineties when hardcore had less to do with rigid musical restrictions and more to do with an aesthetic or ideological slant. This is why by my standards the Minutemen, as previously stated, are one of the most hardcore bands to have ever existed, because of their dedication to independence and egalitarianism moreso than the speed of their drums or how shouty the singer is.

In this respect I see hardcore as being pretty much the same as it's punk rock forebears, in that punk can sound like anything as well, and is far better defined by the attitudes of those making the music. I suppose this perspective puts me in the minority.

[a pack of wolves]

I'd totally go along with that way of looking at hardcore as well. I've seen sets by one guy with an acoustic guitar that sounded like hardcore to me, and I always thought of the Minutemen and Fugazi as just being hardcore bands.

YOU CALL THIS A BAD THING?

Hideously overrated band, and from what I've heard Seth Putnam really is as big a dick as you might expect. Arsedestroyer and Sore Throat were far superior noisecore bands. Hell, I'd even listen to Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck over Anal Cunt. They're down there with Cock And Ball Torture in terms of crap grind that far too many people inexplicably like.

[David_Dovey]

The two notable exceptions being Minor Threat and Bad Brains. It's odd to me how the two bands which effectively originated the subgenre made a continuation of the sound more or less an irrelevance. If I want to hear some Hardcore, I don't ever feel the urge reach past the early records by those two bands. Nothing sounds quite as good to me.

Man if people only ever listened to the very best example of anything then every other band would go broke and The Stooges would be the world's largest economy.

[Ptommydski]

That's why I pretty much just listen to '19th Nervous Breakdown' on a loop.

[KharBevNor]

Hideously overrated band, and from what I've heard Seth Putnam really is as big a dick as you might expect. Arsedestroyer and Sore Throat were far superior noisecore bands. Hell, I'd even listen to Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck over Anal Cunt. They're down there with Cock And Ball Torture in terms of crap grind that far too many people inexplicably like.

I don't think anyone over-rates them, they just find them amusing. It's pretty hard not to crack a grin at 'Stayin' Alive (Oi! Version).' (and who would really expect them to be nice people, although I used to be in vague contact with Seth Putnam through the Impaled Northern Moonforest forums and he didn't seem particularly bad, by the standards of extreme metal musicians). Also, I'm slipping in to serious genre confusion here. Sore Throat and Arsedestroyer I just think of as grindcore. To me noisecore is an industrial dance subgenre somewhere between power electronics and rhythmic noise. I take it you mean to refer to grindcore bands who place a particularly small emphasis on ideas like sounding like music and having songs more than half a minute long?

[a pack of wolves]

Yeah, pretty much. It's one of those things where the big nerds will get all in a tizzy over what technically is and isn't noisecore (particularly due to that period in the early '00s when stuff like Johnny Truant and Converge were getting tagged as it), but for the most part it's just those grind bands that would really just rip without much regard for structure. I've got the Gore Beyond Necropsy stuff from the split with Arsedestroyer and Nikudorei on now and for good chunks it's hard to tell that's a band and not just straight out noise.

I really have seen far too many people properly rate AC, aside from the humour value. As for Putnam himself, he pissed a lot of people off at Blastonbury back in, oh, '07 I think? I wasn't there myself so this is proper second hand info, but general consensus was that he was a massive cock and they played terribly.

[KharBevNor]

I would imagine, from what I know, that the extent to which Seth Putnam pisses people off probably has a lot to do with how much cocaine is inside him at the time. It's certainly no secret that AxCx have had some pretty high profile idiotic feuds and fights over the years. I actually kind of like some of their earlier stuff musically (h-h-hipster punch) but w/e. I have no idea what grind bands it's cool to like anyway, so my taste is always gonna sound terrible to people who know shitloads about it.

That said I do really think that most of the grind subgenres are pretty spurious, and this is from a dude who can distinguish between five or six distinct sorts of death metal.

Apart from mincecore of course. Mincecore slays.

[a pack of wolves]

Particularly because of what mincecore means for Agathocles:

We have been using the name MINCE CORE already in the 80's, but just in the 90's, we used it more often because a homophobic movement had started in the grindscene, which is fucking it up. And as you know, we don't wanna have anything to do with such homophobic bands, because we don't support opinions which are based upon ignorance, fascist views, discrimination. We want the people to know that MINCE CORE stands for socially and politically aware GRINDCORE, the old roots of this kind of music.

The whole idea of cool grind bands just seems daft to me. I mean, it's grind, it's about as uncool a music as you can get. In the UK even a big international band will be playing upstairs in pubs. The whole idea of a fest like Obscene Extreme is mindboggling to me, thousands of people all there for grindcore? Insane. So dividing it up into proper little subgenres also gets mental because it's just so niche, it isn't like death metal where there's loads more bands playing the music. So crust grind, death grind, tech grind, noisecore for me are more like descriptions of the type of grind being played than real subgenres.

On a side note, the Ablach album slays. I was loving their tracks on the European Fastness 5-way split anyway but with a bit more time to stretch their legs it works even better. Moshpit Tragedy have released it for download in their usual "pay what you want, even nothing" way. They've got the first Phobia album too, bonus!

[KharBevNor]

What I meant is, I don't feel comfortable discussing my taste in grind, because I have no idea what grind bands are ridiculous to like. I don't even reliably know this stuff for metal anymore. I was banging around last.fm these months and apparently nowadays, listening to Amon Amarth is as bad as listening to Children of Bodom, funeral black is now called 'depressive suicidal black metal' and is for posers, Agalloch is a hipster band and Drudkh aren't nazis. Who makes up this stuff?

[David_Dovey]

Who cares about this stuff?

FYP

Man fuck that shit Amon Amarth rules

[pinkpiche]

Particularly because of what mincecore means for Agathocles:

We have been using the name MINCE CORE already in the 80's, but just in the 90's, we used it more often because a homophobic movement had started in the grindscene, which is fucking it up. And as you know, we don't wanna have anything to do with such homophobic bands, because we don't support opinions which are based upon ignorance, fascist views, discrimination. We want the people to know that MINCE CORE stands for socially and politically aware GRINDCORE, the old roots of this kind of music.

The whole idea of a fest like Obscene Extreme is mindboggling to me, thousands of people all there for grindcore? Insane. So dividing it up into proper little subgenres also gets mental because it's just so niche, it isn't like death metal where there's loads more bands playing the music. So crust grind, death grind, tech grind, noisecore for me are more like descriptions of the type of grind being played than real subgenres.

Yeah I agree, but there's a huge, totally ignored grind-scene in the Czech Republic so that might explain it. While I was in Prague for three days, I saw four shows - all grind.. I didn't get to go to the fest though. I don't know that there's anything similar in the world.

[KharBevNor]

I don't know if it's exactly ignored. I can name at least 5 czech grind bands off the top of my head, two of which (!T.O.O.H.! and Contrastic) are among my favourites. I also kinda like Jig-Ai but I sense that this is something that I probably shouldn't mention in polite society.

[a pack of wolves]

As long as nobody delicate googles them and sees their cover art then you're probably safe from being lynched for being a tentacle enabler.

Never heard Contrastic before now. They've got cheesy guitar solos! They're fun, and they don't overdo the guttural which I find appealing. I'm enjoying !T.O.O.H! as well, definitely my sort of thing.

[Damnable Fiend]

Man fuck that shit Amon Amarth rules

I think it's a reaction to Twilight of the Thunder God kind of sucking.

[KharBevNor]

I got into Contrastic when I heard this song, which made a lot of sense back when I was pretty obsessed with The Berzerker and Curse of the Golden Vampire. Fairly atypical though, but then that could really be used as a blanket statement for them. Their (unfortunately only) full-length is well worth checking out.

[Ballard]

Skipping this lame circle jerk to say:

Jesus what a piss-poor fucking review. I couldn't make fun of it as soon as I read it because jesus, it's some of the worst writing I've seen, even by Pitchfork standards.

[valley_parade]

Man fuck that shit Amon Amarth rules

I think it's a reaction to Twilight of the Thunder God kind of sucking.

Dog did you not listen to Varyags Of Miklagaard? The guitar harmonies on that make up for the rest of the album.

[Damnable Fiend]

I'll give it another listen.  To be fair I haven't heard anything but the title track (which is actually pretty good, I thought, and has the added bonus of being in an awesome music video) since I went to see them live (I think I tried listening to it like five times all the way through before that).  For me anyway, everything after the end of the title track sounded like the worst sort of generic melodic death metal.

edit: you know, this isn't half as bad as I remembered.  Apart from the parts where it's just that main riff playing, anyway.  It's a boring riff.  Also the production on everything but Johan's vocals is too slick.  anyways, not bad, yeah.

[Akima]

I'm more puzzled by what an 'album band' is.  Is it a band that releases albums?  Isn't that all bands?

I thought an "album band" was one that didn't release singles, because they didn't get any radio airplay    You know, like all the good ones..  

[E. Spaceman]

That's a silly thing to say.

[E. Spaceman]

I mean

[Jeans]

Well, The Beatles, anyway.

[KharBevNor]

...etc.

[KvP]

one of the Fucked Up dudes made a 7"-centric mix for FACT.