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When discussing Boston’s illustrious history with hardcore, it’s difficult to leave out Dicky Barrett, best known as the gruff-sounding frontman for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. That the man’s work with a third-wave ska band is subservient to contributions made to D.Y.S. or Gang Green isn’t too surprising—the music’s been more impactful for a longer period of time than third wave bands. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of the two Cleveland bands set to deliver well-worn metal and hardcore to audiences at the Cobra Lounge, Ringworm’s the better-known act, having worked with Victory Records during the better part of its career. And as a connection with that label hints, Ringworm takes itself as serious as its labelmates take animal liberation. Dedication is well and good, but occasionally makes the band hard to palate. “Angelfuck,” from last year’s “Scars” is tough to take in, but near classics like “13 Knots” just go down easy while aping a bit of thrash. Smart-ass uncaring runs through Keelhaul, though. Album titles like 2009’s “Triumphant Return to Obscurity” and a single from the same year called “You Waited 5 Years for This?” point to the level of professionalism the band holds itself to. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Chris Roque

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Hardcore’s a pretty personal music. Detailing tough times and political views, though, isn’t the totality of the form lyrically. So, it’s unsurprising that H2O would release an album comprised of compositions from a handful of decade-old groups that band members idolized in adolescence. H2O, which started kicking around during the mid-nineties, lays out a Bad Brains track to open “Don’t Forget Your Roots.” While eventually working in NYC bands like Madball, they are also conscious of including left coast acts like Social Distortion. Read the rest of this entry »

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Driving east out of the Bay Area certainly starts out enjoyably. Passing through the various East Bay communities and into cowtown cities, a bucolic landscape unfolds only momentarily disrupted by Sacramento. Entering Tahoe National Forest, despite a few reminders of the Donner Party, it’s easy to understand the allure California holds over so many folks. Coming down out of those mountains, Nevada begins to unfurl, verdancy replaced with shifting brown hues. Then travelers enter Reno. The freeway, which eventually leads to an interstate stretching to Chicago and on to the East Coast, is a major route for drug trafficking. “Reno 911” isn’t a joke—it’s variations on reality. In Reno, getting stopped by cops and being detained for no reason isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. And they really like unloosing the K-9 unit. Read the rest of this entry »

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Canadian hardcore punks Fucked Up have had an intriguing rise to fame. In their early career, they released only very limited-run seven-inch records and played basement shows in their hometown of Toronto. Nowadays, they are receiving coveted Polaris Music Prizes and releasing modern interpretations of the rock-opera format with this year’s “David Comes to Life.” They’ve managed to become a “hardcore band for people that don’t generally like hardcore,”  as reflected in their signing to the indie-rock label Matador Records and their collaborations with the likes of Kurt Vile, Tegan & Sara and even Moby, who joined them on stage to perform a Ramones cover during the twelve-hour set they performed in New York City in 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

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Pinpointing the birth of metal, and its subsequent doomy offspring, frequently falls upon the shoulders of just a few groups. Sabbath and Blue Cheer are rightly heralded. As is Virginia’s Pentagram. While this latter group aptly distills the aforementioned bands in their sixties incarnations, its singer, Bobby Liebling, chooses to emulate Cheer’s Dickie Peterson on the mic more so than his British counterpart. Arriving at an American confluence of psych-inflected guitar soloing, quick tempos and subject matter embracing evil women as much as an evil Lord should have resulted in Pentagram’s emergence as radio-regulars during the band’s heyday. It didn’t. The fact that the band’s held together in some form over the last forty years is a remarkable feat on its own, but especially considering the first decade of the ensemble’s career passed without any long-playing records. Read the rest of this entry »

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Pretty much every band proclaims that the recording of a new album entails trying something utterly new. For the most part, that’s nonsense. North Carolina’s Corrosion of Conformity, as its name hints, actively works towards confounding listeners, moving from its early thrash to metal and, as of 2005’s “In The Arms Of God,” even including a bit of funky percussion from Stanton Moore, best known for his contributions to NOLA’s Galactic. Despite the endless procession of stylistic shift-ups, COC’s still best remembered as being one of the early eighties’ metal/hardcore crossover provocateurs. 1983′s “Eye for an Eye” put the Southerners squarely at hardcore’s apex, drawing from the harDCore thing in the nation’s capitol as much from delinquent skateboarders on the West Coast. Read the rest of this entry »

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Packing it in after recording 1998’s “The Pleaser,” Athens-based Harvey Milk figured there wasn’t much else to do apart from lead normal lives, work day jobs and such. With three well-received albums comprising the band’s legacy, a new millennium’s investment in hard rock of the stoner variety found the band being held up as paragons of underground accomplishment. What’s odd aren’t the comparisons to other sludge-minded, grunge-era performers, but that Harvey Milk doled out tracks wrapped up in orchestration like “The Anvil Will Fall” from the its 1996 “My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be.” The composition eventually pushes through stringed-finery to arrive at a dirgey, half-sung-half-moaned section with musical backing befitting a seventies’ hard-rock cover group, ten beers deep and beholden to Pentagram or some other similarly minded metal progenitors. It wasn’t just Harvey Milk’s penchant for odd accompaniment endearing them to the open-minded end of sludge’s musical spectrum, but the band’s ability to genuinely work in other forms. A wealth of droney rock bands find their ideas spun out during any number of Harvey Milk’s eight-minute songs. But works like “Go Back to France,” an extended exploration of percussion, seems as likely to be found on something with John Zorn’s name attached as on Relapse Records. Sporadic touring isn’t set to make the band, which has in the past included ex-Melvins Joe Preston, figureheads of any movement. Those live dates with ample crowds, though, probably provide a sort of solace for conceiving of such an odd act ten years ago. Hopefully, the band’s new albums, which began arriving in 2006, and its expanded fan-base keep the ensemble together for a while, allowing Harvey Milk to summon new ways to combine musics which should be at odds with one another. (Dave Cantor)

July 19 at the Beat Kitchen, 2100 West Belmont, (773)281-4444. 8:30pm. $12. 17+.

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For the better part of the last thirty-five years, Keith Morris has trucked in the most vocally abrasive and primitive forms hardcore’s offered up. Founding OFF! out of desperation and disgust only carries on his mounting legacy. Helping to devise hardcore’s blueprint around Los Angeles’ beach towns with Black Flag has a bit to do with the singer’s audience granting him the ability to recast his music every few years. Counting as one of the band’s pre-Rollins front-men still ranks as the base to an irrefutable résumé. Subsequent to his short stint with Greg Ginn and Black Flag, Morris went and reworked some of that material in the Circle Jerks, a band that was every bit as capable as BF, but wont to toss in a bit of sardonic wit largely absent from early era hardcore bands more concerned with Reagan than yuks. Convening OFF! seems to stem from the same frustrations which birthed the Circle Jerks. Whatever the interpersonal situation with assorted Jerks, Morris began writing material for a recording which accidentally became the bedrock for the newly minted OFF! recordings that were issued last year. Compiled for digital distribution, Vice Records swooped in to release the cleverly titled “First Four EPs.” Any selection from the sixteen-track, seventeen-minute album becomes difficult to differentiate from Morris’ other groups, each potentially arriving as a coulda-been unreleased track from the late seventies or anytime during the eighties. No one expected dramatic steps forward. Read the rest of this entry »

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Madball, one of New York’s longer-running acts trucking in the hardcore milieu, came to prominence during the early nineties with a a single featuring a handful of Agnostic Front’s brain-trust. That group, which is oddly best known for its cover of “Crucified,” remains a cultural crossroads for the genre, after which divisions among city-centric eighties hardcore scenes devolved to surprising lows. Henry Rollins frequently gets tagged as the figure moving punk from a haven for pencil-necked geeks to a place where tough guys exert dominance. But more than that much-maligned figure, New York’s mid-to-late eighties scene should be understood as the turning point. Granted, if you’re squatting in some abandoned building, being able to dole out beatings is worthwhile. The ability just doesn’t always need to be taken to shows. But Madball sounds like it should soundtrack the murder of some schnook on the Lower East Side. After the band jettisoned its AF members, Freddy Cricien fronted a group interested in merging hardcore, metal and thrash. Songs’ runtimes don’t usually move beyond two minutes—best-case scenario, it’s all over in less than sixty seconds. After a trio of mid-nineties albums, the band settled on a relatively consistent sound, turning in gang-shouted choruses and barely audible grunted verses. While the group persists in being recalled for thrashy tempos, it’s the breakdowns when Madball works best—from “Spit on Your Grave” to “Timeless” from the group’s newest disc, 2010’s “Empire.” Being true to oneself and fighting well doesn’t provide for much lyrical development, but if you’re punching a guy in the face while dancing, it might not matter too much. (Dave Cantor)

June 24 at the Bottom Lounge, 1375 West Lake, (312)666-6775. 5:30pm. $20. All ages.