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Showing posts from July, 2009

Subhumans - Reissues

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With the exception of Crass (who often teetered on the edge of art-punk or equally experimental conduits), the UK’s Subhumans are arguably the most influential anarcho-punk band in history, and certainly one of the most prolific. With eight studio records to their name, an addition to the Live in a Dive franchise and a handful of EPs, Southern Records has taken it upon themselves to re-master and reissue six of the band’s classic albums originally released on the band’s own Bluurg Records. From their DIY ethics to their radical left rhetoric, the Subhumans helped continue to carve out the definition of anarcho-punk even while the genre’s pioneers, Crass, were moving swiftly towards their end. At a time when bands like the Exploited and Chaos UK shouted their lyrics like political slogans, the Subhumans often seemed more reflective, or at the very least, like they were part of something much bigger. Their first LP, The Day the Country Died became somewhat of an instant classic, selling

Review: Straylight Run - "The Needles the Space"

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With the recent departure of co-frontwoman Michelle DaRosa as she attempts to launch a solo career, now seems as good a time as any to examine an album largely ignored by the Punknews community, and for fairly good reason. Coincidentally, it is DaRosa who creates the more captivating moments on The Needles the Space, which wouldn't seem like good news for Straylight Run as they continue on without her. Outside of a few tracks, the biggest drawback here is how unmemorable the album is as a whole. While the compositions have become much more rich and layered than they were on the band’s 2004 debut, they’ve completely swapped out the energy necessary to bring their songs fully to life. Though they chime, bubble, beep, echo and whir, they never rise above a feathery murmur for their entire 45 minutes of existence. Some of that is by design. “How Do I Fix My Head” hovers menacingly, aloft with DaRosa’s sighed song voice before surrendering to an unsteady bob of skillful hi-hat work and

Interview: Jesse Michaels (Operation Ivy, Classics of Love, Common Rider)

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When I first started getting heavily into punk around 9th grade, Operation Ivy was one of the first bands to really resonate with me. Their simple message of individualism, unity, and nonconformity was uncompromising, but never without a glimmer of hope hidden beneath. Years later I heard my first taste of Common Rider and was blown away to find out it was the same singer as Operation Ivy, Jesse Michaels. Since then, I have collected every piece of music he has done, from Operation Ivy bootlegs to the four-song Big Rig EP, to Common Rider and beyond. When I heard Jesse Michaels and his new band Classics of Love was coming to Minneapolis, I jumped at the chance to interview him and could not be happier with meeting him and finding out more about his life and projects. In a 2003 interview, Michaels said of the late Joe Strummer, “I was lucky enough to meet him and he was everything one would hope for in somebody they looked up to.” Now I can say the same of Jesse Michaels. You can click

Review: The Mars Volta - "Octahedron"

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What about the voice of Geddy Lee… How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy (?) I know him, and he does” - Pavement, 1997 What about the voice of Cedric Bixler-Zavala… How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy (?) I’ve heard him, and he kind of does” - GlassPipeMurder, 2009 It’s been just a year since the Mars Volta’s Grammy-winning The Bedlam in Goliath dropped, but everyone’s favorite pair of afroed Texicans are already back with a new set of spacey riffs, vexing time signatures and hallucinogenic lyrics comprising the eight songs of Octahedron. While comparing this post-hardcore/prog-rock/Latin-influenced jam factory to Rush is both a lazy description and an erroneous one, it’s harder to avoid on Octahedron than in the past. While this may be due in part to not promoting the album with a free Circle Jerks cover, and the album itself somewhat lacking the frequency of spastic freakouts found on Goliath,

Review: Outbreak - "Work to Death"

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What’s the appeal of Outbreak? That’s a lot like asking why people enjoy slam-dancing, hedg-ediving, or skateboarding without pads. It’s violent, it’s aggressive, it’s crass, and it’s fun. Outbreak throws back to the golden days of hardcore, but not in a completely aesthetic way like such similarly great acts as Government Warning, Double Negative and Chronic Seizure. With Outbreak, the crude lyrics, manic shouts and sandpaper riffs aren’t homage to the past -- they’re the full-throttle effort of a band whose initial ambitions exceeded their correlating abilities. But that’s kind of the charm. And while they’ve grown musically and lyrically since, the offsetting youthful vigor has helped them maintain a level of rawness that most bands would have lost after six years of touring and putting out records. Thankfully to rest any doubts that might exist based on the previous paragraph, the band has provided such illustrative examples on their new 7”, Work to Death, as the 38-second A-side “