Sacrilege

One of the more polarizing topics in the last couple of years is female vocalists in punk. You either love em or you hate em. I personally love them. I think there's a certain abrasive / snotty quality that the female voice's higher pitch offers a complement to the often frenetic paced punk tunes they're singing over. If I had a criticism for female vocals, it is that effects are used a lot that the aforementioned vocal quality I just talked about is lost in the mix. The other side of that coin is that reverb drenched vocals are great so it is another point to the argument that female vocals are cool. In the last few years, there has been a surge of great female-fronted bands in hardcore punk. However if you want to which band is queen of the female-fronted genre, look no further than Birmingham, England's Sacrilege.

A common conversation with detractors of female fronted hardcore punk bands might go something like this:
"I don't like female vocals"
"What about Sacrilege?"
"Well that's different, you can't hate Sacrilege."

When you discuss the best female-fronted subculture bands (punk, hardcore, metal), Sacrilege is always the first band brought up. The rest of the discussion is to determine who is second best.

The band came out of the early 80s UK crust scene. This is the same scene that gave the world Deviated Instinct, Hellbastard, Axegrinder, Napalm Death, and Bolt Thrower. Sacrilege is fronted by the Lynda "Tam" Simpson. Earlier I said a lot of female vocalists utilize heavy reverb, Tam was one of the first to do it. When we think of the best uses of reverb in hardcore punk vocals, Sacrilege's name is almost always at the top, gender notwithstanding.

The band's output includes two demos and three albums. Their first album Behind The Realms of Madness is an essential album both in the crust and thrash scenes. Its pacing is so methodical. The riffs are something that thrash bands in the USA were a few years away from arriving at themselves. The d-beat driven drums never fail to keep pace and, at times, dictate it. Lastly, Tam's vocals are almost paradoxical. When you hear them, it's clear they're a female's, but never once do you make the mistake of presupposing that she is some kind of dainty flower. She have been conscious of this fact when recording: that she needed to sounded menacing but also convincing. Too often when a woman wants to sound "mean" on record, it usually comes off as very forced and laughable. Tam's vocals bear a sense of anxiety, urgency, and anger to them that speaks to a lot of feelings women grapple with daily. It's almost as if Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House was given time in a recording booth to air out her grievances with daily life. The record itself is perfect. Most thrash records usually have one overbearing element like the guitars or vocals. Behind The Realms of Madness is a perfect blend of biting guitar work, sublime vocals, and strong drum work. It is essential listening. "Shadow From Mordor" is also one of the hardest songs ever written.

Included is Sacrilege's complete discography (yes, even those metal records most people don't like).

http://www.mediafire.com/download/11yf7x25e7xeivj/Sacrilege.rar

Mission Statement and New Features

It's November 6th 2015.

I don't remember when I said I was moving to Justified Arrogance from the basic confines of the blogspot to a full site. It might have been January. As they say, life happens. I moved to a different part of the country. I got a new job. I saw friendships end. I made new ones. Things kept progressing and all the while I still thought about the proposed evolution of Justified Arrogance.

I pursued other writing opportunities in that time. I had hoped that I could parlay Justified Arrogance into bigger opportunities that could help me improve my life station. It didn't work and I ended up compromising myself in the process. It wasn't a great feeling. Sometime recently I gave up on this goal of trying to make a name under someone else's. Much like everything else in the subculture, the best way to make a name for yourself is by yourself. I forgot that this year.

So I'm back again. I gave up on the idea of a full site for now mostly because I was using it as an excuse to not pick this back up. In addition to essays, Justified Arrogance will be broadening its scope of coverage. The general idea of this is to cover more than just the past and to talk about more current topics. These topics will include:

New Band Spotlights - There are great new bands coming out all the time. Consider the fact that this year's Best Demo list had to be upped to 10 because there were too many great debuting bands this year. Justified Arrogance will work to highlight the best new bands year round.

Album Reviews - Covering more than the classics and essentials. Justified Arrogance stays current with the best music of the day as much as it does those of yesterday. One of the most common criticisms within the subculture is that "nothing good ever comes out anymore". This statement couldn't be more false and our album reviews will showcase the best music coming out.

Show Reviews - Bands cut their teeth with recordings but always make their bones with their live performances. Highlighting worthwhile shows and tours carry many latent effects. Most importantly, it relays the elements of a band that can't be captured on record.

Interviews - The art of interviewing is to uncover knowledge about the subject. The questions are the instrument of discovery. The line between asking stock questions and gossiping is so thin that it is easy to miss it. A good interview is something that transcends time and place. It is more than something about a new album or how a recent tour fared. Justified Arrogance will work to bring these kinds of interviews to you.

Book Reviews - The genre of subculture literature continues to grow exponentially every year. With more and more titles being released, it is important to highlight and celebrate the best ones. Justified Arrogance is committed to the knowledge of the subculture's history and written culture as much as it is to its sonic excellence.

Artist Profiles - One of the best things about the subculture is its neverending supply of talented artists. Being in the subculture typically means you have a fractured view of the world, life, and society. It is always refreshing and captivating to see the artwork by so many great artists. While the art will end up on record covers, merch, zines, and other ephemera, the artist is largely unheralded. Justified Arrogance is a place that celebrates great artists and their work.

I want this to be a place where people can come to learn more about the subculture they belong in. I also want it to be a place where people can just learn more in general. If you can come away from Justified Arrogance having learned one thing you didn't already know before, then we will have done our work right. This blog / idea started out over a year ago because I was losing my mind and needed an outlet. In the beginning, I was really just talking to myself about my favorite bands. I didn't think anyone was reading.

Justified Arrogance is the idea where you know you are great at what you do. Being in the subculture is a privilege. It is a badge you have to earn. In recent years, the subculture has become increasingly accessible for people who don't care about its history, culture, and ideas. It has become a place where kids are often stagnant upon entry with little desire for growth. They are happy to collect their attendance awards, believing that alone is enough. If you are not here seeking personal growth through a community whose very existence is predicated on the acrimony borne from its opposing views on society, culture and lifestyle, then why are you here? It isn't enough to be different anymore in 2015. Too often our society tells us that we are already different and we are already special. Being different is the new normal. Going forward, you have to be better. That's what Justified Arrogance is about.

- James Khubiar

Best of 2015

James Khubiar
Justified Arrogance Boss

Top Hardcore and Punk LPs:
1. Total Abuse - Excluded
2. No Tolerance - You Walk Alone
3. L.O.T.I.O.N. - Digital Control And Man's Obsolescence
4. Anasazi - Nasty Witch Rock
5. Vaaska - Todos Contra Todos
6. Dawn Of Humans - Slurping At The Cosmos Spine
7. La Misma - Kanizadi
8. Sudor - Enamorado De La Muerte Juvenil
9. Violent Reaction - Marching On
10. Absolut - Hells Highest Power

(At the time of this writing I have not heard the Butcher, Video, Magic Circle albums but they are worth noting as they likely would have made this list)

Top Non-Hardcore Punk LPs:
1. Kacey Musgraves - Pageant Material
2. Royal Headache - High
3. Destruction Unit - Negative Feedback Resistor
4. Pleasure Leftists - The Woods of Heaven
5. Young Guv - Ripe 4 Luv
6. Best Coast - California Nights
7. Title Fight - Hyperview
8. Wildhoney - Sleep Through It
9. John Carpenter - Lost Themes
10. Swervedriver - I Wasn't Born To Lose You

Top EPs / Singles:
1. Rixe - Coups Et Blessures
2. Blazing Eye - Ways To Die
3. Sadist - The Shadow of the Swastika
4. Ajax - Ajax
5. Barcelona - Extremo Nihilismo En Barcelona
6. Ivy - A Cat's Cause, No Dog's Problem
7. Anxiety Hammer - What Stands Between Us
8. Pure Disgust - Chained
9. Exit Order - Exit Order
10. Aggression Pact - Aggression Pact

(At the time of this writing, I have not heard the newest Aspects of War and Strutter and is worth noting as it would have likely made this list)

Top Demos (Usually this list is limited to 3-5 but 2015 was an incredible year for debuting bands):
1. Strutter
2. Concealed Blade
3. Latisha's Skull Drawing (LSD)
4. Mommy
5. Girls Living Outside Society's Shit (GLOSS)
6. Firewalker
7. Lock
8. Body Pressure
9. Blockhead
10. Smear

(I haven't heard the Indignation demo at the time of this writing, rest assured it would be on this list)

Top Rap Releases (in no order since 4 are from Future and 3 are from Young Thug):
- Young Thug - Slime Season
- Young Thug - Slime Season 2
- Young Thug - Barter 6
- Lil Durk - Remember My Name
- Lil Ugly Mane - Third Side of Tape
- Peewee Longway - Blue M&M Vol. II: King Size
- Future - Dirty Sprite 2
- Future - Beast Mode
- Future - 56 Nights
- Future x Drake - What A Time To Be Alive

Power Trip - Intro / Manifest Decimation

At the This Is Hardcore Festival this past summer, Power Trip performed at the Kung Fu Necktie for an after show. The intro they opened with is a segment of a new song from their upcoming album. They followed it by breaking into the opening song off their transcendent opus Manifest Decimation. In the bridge, there is a shout out for us here at Justified Arrogance. Worth posting by sheer virtue of the fact that it is this outfit's first shout out on stage. Thanks, Power Trip. You were one of the first Justified Arrogance essays and we can't wait for the new album.

Total Abuse

Austin, Texas for about ten years has been one of the strongest fortresses for hardcore punk in the United States. It is a city that prides itself on being "weird". The fact that the city has become increasingly consumer driven in the past decade should be distressing to the city's subculture scene. In theory, if the locale is becoming safer and more normalized, the scene should suffer, right? Instead, the opposite is occurring: kids are becoming more aggressive, inspired to new heights, and the quality of the scene continues to be raised. The same has been happening in places like Portland and Brooklyn. Turns out the more normos your city gets, the better your punk scene becomes. Austin's has been blessed with a lot over the years. Things like Chaos In Tejas, a parade of incredible bands, venues, and personalities have helped to make Austin one of the premier scenes in the world.

One of the Austin scene's most remarkable products are Total Abuse. The band was formed in 2006 and featured members of older local band The Snobs. The thing that makes The Snobs such a noteworthy band in the annals of history were the members' ages. Everybody in the band's ages ranged from 12-14. They were literally kids when they were taking the stage at places like Posi Numbers Festival. Total Abuse was a completely different monster from The Snobs however. The band, named after a Peter Sotos book compilation, features a line up of Rusty Kelley (vocals), Ryan Foster (guitar), Duncan Knappen (guitar), Dustin Pilkington (bass), and Matt Lyons (drums).

There are a variety of factors that one can point to and say "Total Abuse is special". First, the band's personnel boasts experience and nuanced sensibility that few within the hardcore punk scene possess. Kelley's major interest is power electronics / harsh noise, a genre where the absolute worst of life is harnessed into sound. While Kelley is far from the first person to traverse into both subcultures, he is the first to grasp an understanding from harsh noise and translate it into hardcore punk. On record, Kelley's vocals are dripping with the nihilistic vantage point of life that friends, sex, drugs, and violence fail to remedy. Most hardcore punk vocals can be gauged on a scale of primary emotions like love and hate. Kelley's are gauged somewhere between 'kill you or kill myself, either way I don't care'. What's more, the band is able to recreate these attitudes on a sonic level. Anywhere from the blown out bass kicking in like a sledgehammer for segues to the guitars that alternate from grating to despondent. Total Abuse on an emotional level understand the music they're producing. This sounds corny, but consider it this way: if you're trying to articulate a message, an idea, or a feeling and you're trying to sound like Negative Approach to do it, you're not really expressing yourself, you're using their mouth to say your words. Not many bands playing understand this idea and the few that do are the ones who transcend the milieu of bands in the subculture. Negative Approach got it, so did Cold Sweat, and Total Abuse does now. What's insane is that all three of those bands are criminally underrated (yes, even Negative Approach when you consider how high people hold them among first wave USHC bands).

Part of why Total Abuse are so underrated is because a lot of kids in hardcore punk really can't handle what they're doing. I know I've criticized today's kids in the past so this point shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Total Abuse cultivate a sound that makes people uncomfortable (when you're named after Sotos, if you're not making people uncomfortable, you're doing something wrong). A lot of kids aren't really ready for the mental / emotional depths that Total Abuse drags listeners to. Most of the time the people who really appreciate it, have been there themselves or are fascinated by it. Hardcore punk kids will sit there and say that the scene is a place that is naturally uncomfortable, but the fact is that much of what is produced is often in the same vein or archetype. There's no danger in a record influenced by Breakdown. It's the same thing you've heard going all the way back to Breakdown. Hearing an album like Prison Sweat is something that serves to condition you to what they want you to hear. A lot of people can't handle that kind of idea. Records are meant to be played, not grappled with. Music is supposed to be fun, not a spiritual gauntlet. Total Abuse attacks basic convention on how we should approach music. They're not for everyone. It isn't because they're too esoteric, it's because most people are too weak.

I took Total Abuse for granted when I was younger for a lot of the reasons I just described. It does take a certain kind of person to really get them. They're one of the best bands of our generation and you don't even know it. Check them out. Listen to their records now. Listen again after you've gone through a personal tragedy or hardship. Listen to them again when you're at a low point. Total Abuse isn't about overcoming challenges and they're not about understanding yourself better. If you think you're a bad person, you're right. If you think life sucks, it does. If you wonder if things will ever get better, they're not. That's Total Abuse.

Included are their Mutt, Prison Sweat albums as well as their Sex Pig, Self-Titled, and Looking For Love EPs.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/2akorgmedr9ma8r/Total_Abuse.rar

4-1610

Discharge

The two most important bands in hardcore punk history are the Bad Brains and Discharge. If you disagree with this fact, you're wrong.

The Bad Brains took the American punk movement and made it into hardcore. More often than not, you can't actually quantify the difference between hardcore and punk into sonic terms. Especially when it comes to the first wave of USHC. The Bad Brains presented the formula of harder, faster, and meaner. There was something to be seen from what they were doing in DC. In the course of their time, they inspired the scene around them to step up. Because of that, we got the early DC scene that included Youth Brigade, Void, and Minor Threat. Eventually the Bad Brains were "banned in DC" by 1979 where they picked up and left for New York City. Now boasting the Bad Brains, New York City's hardcore punk scene exploded almost overnight. The band showed kids how it was done and the entire scene rose to the challenge of keeping up with the Bad Brains. Almost overnight bands like the Cro-Mags, Beastie Boys took cues from the Bad Brains while kids wanted to play harder, faster, and meaner. While Bad Brains was causing the scene to undergo a renaissance, back in DC the hardcore punk scene was already entering its twilight years. By the mid 1980s, much of the DC scene's first wave of hardcore would be broken up. The best way to explain the Bad Brains's importance to USHC history is to look at them like a foundation. Where they went, they laid down the groundwork that others built themselves on top of. In DC they were the city's foundation (HR famously claims that it was him to tell Ian MacKaye to put himself out there more with Minor Threat). Once they left, the scene stayed up for but a few years before collapsing into post hardcore (something that would eventually happen to NYHC in the late 80s). They arrived in New York where they laid down the basis for the greatest hardcore scene of all time. Without the Bad Brains, NYHC never really happens.

The point of explaining the Bad Brains' importance is to better understand Discharge's importance. While the Bad Brains were the 'foundation', Discharge were the disease. Their influence is not something that people have built on top of. Rather it is something punks have spent thirty years trying to reinterpret, distort (sometimes literally), and co-opt Discharge's iconography, aesthetic, and sound.

Whereas Bad Brains' influence is limited mostly to the DC and NYC areas, Discharge's infection spread across the world like a plague with varied results. It's interesting when you look at the global punk landscape and see what Discharge wrought from it. Without them, we don't have Swedish or Japanese punk as we know it. The US crust punk scene would also be markedly different. There are punk legends that have made entire careers in pursuit of Discharge's mantle such Disclose and Anti-Cimex. The band took the most basic concepts about war, death, and society and hammered home a sense of futility and nihilism to all of it. While the anarcho bands were preaching about a call to action, Discharge was making it very clear that all the rallies and votes in the world won't change the fact that you will never get a say in society's workings and if the war has to come to kill you, so be it. Anger borne from society and politics shouldn't illicit apathy, but it does. That's part of Discharge's magic. A sort of kamikaze spirit that has come to terms with the fact that we will all die and that our control of this death is minimal. It speaks more to the solider fashion (and typically reckless lifestyle) that many punks take on.

The band's golden era runs from 1977 - 1983. The lineup included Anthony "Bones" Roberts on guitar (who would leave in 1982 to start Broken Bones), Royston "Rainy" Wainwright on bass, Terrence "Tezz" Roberts on drums (the man who is often credited for innovating d-beat in punk), and Kelvin "Cal" Morris on vocals. These were the four major members (the band has famously had a revolving door of personnel for the last three decades). In that period they produced two albums, five EPs, and three singles. The full length albums Why? and Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing are classics, only worth comparing to each other. Those six years of Discharge are without measure or peer. Some punks will spend their entire lives trying to understand and recapture what the band was able to produce in that time. There's a reason why the Never Again dove, the Decontrol face, and the rest of Discharge's iconography ends up everywhere to this day. They are a disease. One that continues to inspire kids and scenes around the world. No one will ever be Discharge again, but in the course of trying, amazing bands will happen.

Included are both full lengths and all of their EPs / singles under The Clay Punk Singles Collection compilation. Download these. Learn them. Hear them. There is only one Discharge.


http://www.mediafire.com/download/zbev3j18kc1q652/Discharge.rar

The end of NYHC's Golden Era

Can revolutions be interrupted?

New York hardcore was supposed to be a revolution. People today will still you it was a revolution. They want to believe that it was about unity, brotherhood, and passion. They're not all the way wrong in the belief that NYHC changed things forever, but they're also not telling you the whole story. The timeline to the first generation of NYHC is wild. It is loaded with great bands, wild anecdotes, and legendary personalities. The first period is pre-82 New York punk. This is the city's formative years where nothing was anything yet. The second period is 82-86 where the Bad Brains arrived like the big bang and the entire scene exploded with the likes of Agnostic Front, Warzone, Murphy's Law, and more. It is in the second period that NYHC was truly born. The third period is 86-87 which is NYHC's golden era. For two years, the scene was at its zenith with the likes of the Cro-Mags, Youth of Today, and Breakdown holding it down. The fourth period is 88-91 which saw to the end of the first generation of NYHC. Beginning in this era, a lot of the kids within the scene had moved on elsewhere to crossover metal, post-hardcore, and other ventures. The kids that did stay were left to confront the harsh changes that were about to hit the NYHC scene head on.

By 1988, the city was undergoing a great deal of upheaval, particularly in the famed Lower East Side and other parts of lower Manhattan where most of the NYHC community claimed as their stomping grounds. Gentrification, drugs, and growing sectarianism caused fractures within the scene's once united front.

Today's Lower East Side and its neighboring areas resembles an adult Disneyland. Upscale bars, classy dining, and enough good looking people in one area that you'd think the place was a eugenics project. The LES that Raybeez famously sang about was a markedly different place. It was a drug-soaked warzone where basic laws no longer existed and the social contract was effectively replaced by the laws of the animal kingdom. The laws that the 80s NYHC kid lived by were simple: strength in numbers, do unto others before they do unto you, and most of all, survival of the fittest. Where you would measure someone living off Houston St in 2015 by their money, you would measure someone in 1985 by their survival instinct.

By the end of the 80s, beginning with the Tompkins Square Park riots which illuminated to the powers that be that there was a third world country rotting in lower Manhattan, the city began to root out a lot of undesirable parties in favor of more attractive ones. Where this concerned the legendary CBGBs, which resided at 315 Bowery (now an upscale fashion boutique), became an uphill battle to stay put. There were still hardcore shows happening there, especially the famous Sunday Matinee shows, but by the end of the 80s the shows would continue to become more and more violent. Stabbings were a regular occurrence, as were people getting jumped and beaten with most anything kids could get their hands on. CBGBs finally banned hardcore shows as the violence was drawing unwanted attention from the city.

Here's something you should know: it doesn't matter how famous a venue is, no city office will ever want a hardcore punk venue in their town and they will find any excuse to shut it down. With this in consideration, CBGBs banning hardcore shows was inevitable. A lot of people will point the finger at Dmize for the ban saying their shows specifically were the most violent. Because of this NYHC had to find a new home. The scene would set up shop in places like Coney Island High, ABC No Rio (who was also engaged in its own legal war with the city / changing neighborhood) and Wetlands. They served their purpose and the scene survived on. Meanwhile CBGBs stayed put in the Bowery at the heart of a losing war with gentrification. By the time NYHC was welcomed back to the venue by the mid 90s, the disease was thick in the neighborhood and it was clear that CBGBs would not survive. It was only a matter of time.

Growing sectarianism within the NYHC scene at the end of the 80s was another major problem for the scene. At this point, much of the people in the scene had grown up together. A lot of them gelled together like a family, while others were like oil and water. The ABC No Rio scene became a mark of difference between CBGBs kids. Where ABC No Rio kids were punks, CBGBs kids were the hardcore kids. The biggest reasons for these schisms, in addition to sonic differences, was also the arrival of drugs to the scene. This will sound corny, but drugs destroy people. If you consider drug addiction for what it is and not what you've heard, you know that it can hold a person, change them, and eventually take them from you. It is no surprise that the youth crew movement really got its legs in the fourth period of NYHC (the same time drugs, namely heroin, began to invade the scene). The youth crew movement is cliquish by nature and standoffish because it had to be. Kids today often criticize modern day youth crew kids and their attitudes towards substance abuse as immature. The thing worth noting from the original youth crew movement is that it was simply following the rules allotted to them by the scene: strength in numbers and survival of the fittest. Today we joke about edgebreak as this passe ritual, in late 80s NYC if you broke, you were liable to become a full blown junkie.

Other groups formed for the simplest of reasons. For example, a group of kids across the bridge from Queens who liked to write graffiti and go to hardcore shows started their own clique. It would come to be known as DMS (a derivative of NYHC forerunners Agnostic Front's Doc Marten Skins). DMS bands like Madball, Crown of Thornz, Merauder, and others would become the backbone of NYHC in the 1990s. Without DMS in the 1990s, NYHC as we know it dies.

Where there no groups or cliques existed pockets of outliers. Kids who were still in the scene but held no real designation or clique. They just played hardcore to what they knew. This group of bands like Uppercut, Life's Blood, and Citizens Arrest played music that sounded angry, cynical, and exhausted. You could actually hear how tired they were in their music and voices. They were voices of people who had become frustrated with what the scene had become. They made hardcore their entire lives only to see it beaten back by the establishment and from within. They were voices of kids who had nowhere left to go and no idea what to do with themselves. They had been defeated. By society, by their own principles, by their own people. They felt betrayed by the very scene they gave themselves too. This sounds dramatic but it is a reality in the subculture. You grow up with the same group of kids living a certain way and, I'm not saying it happens to everyone, but for some you say "this isn't me" and you begin to question all of it.

Coming up in NYHC, you don't really have many modes of expression, there's aggressive and outright confrontational. A lot of these bands were confronting their own scene and its perceived failures. For failing to stop drugs from getting in and for failing to stay united in the face of change. They didn't want to fight about it nor did they want an apology. They were just wanted to declare that it was over. The golden days were done. What they had, their subculture utopia, was gone. I think they just needed to tell themselves that more than anyone. Listening to bands like Uppercut and Life's Blood is a sad experience because you can hear them lamenting over the loss of it all. By 1991, you saw most of these bands completely gone. Much like a great deal of the NYHC scene, they had departed to other projects.

Did the revolution fail? I don't know. Hardcore stayed alive and well in NYC thanks to the likes of Madball (they even wrote an album called Hold It Down if that gives you an idea of how they feel about the 90s) and others. Kids who left would eventually call back to their roots with great fondness. Today's NYHC has undergone a renaissance. This is thanks in part to CBGBs efforts to keep from closing in 2005-2006. Just about every band you could think of got back together to help do their part to keep the place open. Unsurprisingly they failed and the famed venue still shut down, but for the first time in almost twenty years the scene felt whole again. Beyond that, the work of the Black N Blue Radio and their annual Black N Bowl festival helped to bring back bands like Judge and Burn to the stage in recent years.

To revisit the question one more if the revolution failed or not, I guess that all depends on your perspective. Revolutions aren't always fought with soldiers, front lines, and battles. Sometimes they're deeper than that. All it takes is belief. Belief in what you're fighting for and, more importantly, who you're fighting alongside. NYHC's revolution didn't fail and it didn't end, it just assumed new forms.

Violent Minds

Hardcore punk has two qualities that have made people gravitate toward it since time immemorial: personality and animalistic conduct. People like hardcore because it is out of control. They want to hear that this dude in that band is "out of his mind". The story of Violent Minds is unique. It's the only way to describe it. The band was a cut out of the 80s NYHC scene. Not in the sense of sound, in that sense they were first wave USHC, 100%. They were a cut out in the sense that the band featured a revolving door of members, but, like, Agnostic Front with Stigma / Miret and Warzone with Raybeez, Violent Minds also had its talisman: vocalist Zach Amster AKA Zach Attack.

Amster made a name for himself in the early 2000s Philadelphia hardcore scene with the band Shark Attack (along with one-time Violent Minds member Matt Summers). After Shark Attack ended, Amster would move to Toronto to join No Warning. It was there that the seeds would be planted for Violent Minds. The early 2000s Toronto hardcore scene was (and really, still is) a bit of a jaded place. The kids there knew hardcore better than most people in North America. They would tell you if they thought you sucked and if you weren't good, you didn't last. It was that simple. This was the same scene that would produce the likes of No Warning, Career Suicide, and Fucked Up.

Quick to ensure that Violent Minds would not become "The Zach Amster Show", Amster molded a talisman for the band in the image of the wolf.

The Wolf.

So much has been written about the animal that it defies any effort to catalogue it. Books have been written to discuss its feral nature. Poems written to describe its pride and spirit. Movies made to provoke fear into the hearts of people. The wolf is both the most beautiful and terrifying animal. It was for these reasons that Amster chose it for Violent Minds.

The band would see a variety of personnel come and go over the years. Despite that, the band continued to write excellent music. In the process, they quietly became one of the best hardcore bands of the 2000s. It didn't matter if they weren't headlining fests or selling out a thousand records. They knew they were great. The people who knew them, knew that. Violent Minds became an understanding among the initiated.

Amster chose the wolf for another reason: it is immortal. Much like Aldo Leopold wrote of the resurgence of the wolf population after their near extinction in A Sand County Almanac, Violent Minds can't die. It won't die. This spring, Amster is returning to the studio to record a new LP along with Ben Cook (No Warning, Fucked Up), Justin DeTore (not even going to try to list them all), Haroun Khan (RZL DZL, Cold World, Build & Destroy), and Matt DeLong (No Warning). Along the way will also be long time Violent Minds member Tait Organt who will be there to tour with the band (this does mean Violent Mind gigs are coming).

The wolf is back.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/99eu7jmrm39uv2o/Violent+Minds.rar

No Warning

One of the most important and polarizing hardcore bands of the 2000s was Toronto’s No Warning. In just a few short years, the band took over hardcore with their NYHC influenced music and no fucks given attitude. I can’t stress the attitude part enough. No Warning made a rep for being as hostile off the stage as they were on it. From their demo to the Bridge 9 released self-titled EP, No Warning produced anthems like “My World” while taking aggression in hardcore to another level.

Part of the No Warning appeal was the fact that they carried themselves without pageantry. Too often in hardcore, we assume certain stereotypes about bands that sound like No Warning. No Warning didn’t look like they were tough, they just were. They didn’t need to intimidate you because they didn’t care and when things went south that wouldn’t stop them from trying to fuck shit up. That was the aura of No Warning: expect things to be violent because that’s just how we are, not how we look.

An important event in No Warning’s rise to subculture hegemony was their 2001 CBGBs performance where they opened for the recently reunited Harley / JJ Cro-Mags. Anyone who was there will tell you one simple fact: No Warning stole the show and blew the Cro-Mags off the stage. This show didn’t erase doubts about No Warning (there were never any to begin with). This show declared to everyone that the band was for real and, terrifyingly, they wanted to make hardcore No Warning’s world. If you see any videos of No Warning from 2002-2004, you can see it in the crowd: That mad dog look, that intense desire to hurt someone. During this period, No Warning ruled hardcore in a way that few bands, before or since, have.

No Warning during Posi Numbers 2003

In late 2002, No Warning released one of the most influential hardcore records of the decade: Ill Blood. On it, you could hear a certain grasp of NYHC ala Breakdown, Biohazard and Madball combined with the band’s personal touch. Above the assailing music were Ben Cook’s venomous lyrics. When you listened to them, you could hear his anger and apathy, and all of it felt real to you. That’s what made Ill Blood so special. The lyrics weren’t about a wasteland in a far off place (ala 80s/90s NYC) and it wasn’t about some hyperbolic tough guy trope.

The lyrics on Ill Blood are about waking up feeling like shit because your life sucks in a world that sucks being surrounded by awful people in a society that is corrupt. On its face, the lyrics on Ill Blood paint a world that would make someone want to kill themselves. For No Warning, they took that world as a reason to fight, because fuck it, better them than you. When you heard lines like, “You wanna see me lose? Get in fucking line” or “Please don’t waste my time, don’t ask me if its true, I’ll just tell you what you want to hear and hope trouble finds you”, that’s just raw misanthropy matched by a desire to confront the world. Ill Blood was GG Allin’s famous quote “Everybody's an enemy. Fuck. I hate everybody. I'm not part of any scene. I do my own thing. My mind is a machine gun, my body is the bullets, the audience is the target” personified.

No Warning never really politicked. They had their friends and they had their enemies. It was never a popularity contest for them in the hardcore scene. They were always out for themselves. This is what makes the next part of the story so controversial. In late 2004, No Warning released Suffer Survive on Machine Shop Recordings. Never heard of it? It was a subsidiary of Warner Bros Music that was owned by members of Linkin Park. The album was produced by Sum 41’s manager. The outcome of all this was an album that was not Ill Blood. There are songs that sound like some thing that would have ended up on Ill Blood (“Dirtier Than The Next”, that breakdown on “Scratch The Skin”) and some parts that sound like Sum 41 (the chorus to “Bad Timing”) For No Warning, they were good with that. They had grown up since Ill Blood. More importantly, they’d conquered hardcore. They had nothing to prove to anyone and no one they needed (or wanted) to impress.

Hardcore kids who swore by Ill Blood were unforgiving of Suffer Survive. They lambasted the band for “selling out” and changing it up. No Warning responded the only way they knew how to: by laughing at everyone for questioning the decisions No Warning had made. They were right to laugh. The notion that a group of kids who are simply fans of your music somehow have a right to judge you for your decisions is laughable. You can say what you want about the band’s sound and the people they toured with, but you could never accuse No Warning of changing who they personally were. That much was certain. Not long after the release of Suffer Survive, the band quietly broke up. No final tour, no last show. Like that, they were gone.

In 2014, after almost a decade after the demise of the band, the members of No Warning came back together to record a single to help long time friend Zach Martin AKA Zach Attack (of Shark Attack / Violent Minds fame) in his time of need. For as much that had been said about No Warning by the band’s detractors that they were only in it for themselves or sell outs, the band made one thing clear by coming back: they will always look after their own. The single, “Resurrection of the Wolf” (backed with a Violent Minds cover), was a rousing success. Not only by selling out copies almost immediately, but critically as well. People praised the single as a return to form for the band. No Warning was back.

After the single dropped, the question became, “when will the show happen?” Very rarely do bands get back together to record new music and not gig. It is usually the other way around. Well, the answer came in the summer when No Warning appeared at Belgium’s Ieperfest. Playing Europe is something, but it isn’t playing the States. So again, the wait was on for a No Warning show. On December 22^nd 2014, kids got their answer: April 15^th 2015 in Howell, NJ at Gamechanger World. So here we are: a band whose legend is met with reverence and ignominy at the mention of their name has finally returned.

I’d tell you that I know what’s going to happen next, but the fact is when they said they would never come back in 2005, I believed it. The truth is no one knows what’s going to happen next, the only ones who do know what’s coming is No Warning and if you look at their history, you’d see this is the way they want it to be. Their entire existence was unpredictable and 100% on their own terms. I guess some things never change.

“We appreciate you supporting music with guitars. I don’t even care if you know who No Warning are. You guys are supporting guitar music. You could be at a rave right now. It’s a shit show in 2014 for bands. So thank you for your support.” – Ben Cook, Ieperfest before closing with “Ill Blood”

Included here is Ill Blood & their S/T EP.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/oho4rhb6494pfxx/No_Warning.rar

Reflections On Dimebag Darrell's Death

Sorry for the absence, a lot of stuff has been going on between the holidays and some professional stuff. Rest assured, I have not forgotten about Justified Arrogance. This essay featured for the Dallas Observer this morning, so technically this is kind of cheating. I am really proud of this article. Dimebag Darrell and Pantera were important figures in my musical development. This is the original cut before editing. For the finished cut, please visit 

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/dc9/2014/12/dimebag_darrell_death_changed_dallas_metal_forever.php

Music is all about the immortals. We talk about them all the time: the Ozzy Osbournes, the James Hetfields, and so on. We let these people into our lives. They become a part of us; helping us along as we grow up. Some of them are there for the biggest moments of our lives, the highs and the lows. In Dallas, Texas’ world of metal, there is only one band that has held a monopoly over this emotional connection to its fans and to the city: Pantera. I’m not going to bore you with the Behind The Music story. You already know the story. Formed in the 80s by the Abbott brothers (Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul) as a glam metal band, they really became successful when Phil Anselmo joined and the band really cut their teeth around the world as PANTERA to become one of the biggest metal bands of all time (for reference: Far Beyond Driven made it to #1 on Billboard almost entirely without help from mainstream media support; an unheard of achievement even to this day). But I digress, you already know this story. The story I’m about to tell you about, you already know too because it is metal’s greatest tragedy. It is when mythology clashes with mortality. As much as people want to believe these guys are gods, at the end of the day they’re still only human. Even Phil Anselmo, who brags he has legally died four times from overdose, will eventually pass on one day. That’s life. Even for those who live larger than life.

On December 8^th, 2004, the metal world lost Dimebag Darrell in a tragedy that defies words. It wasn’t like when Randy Rhoads died in a plane crash or when Jeff Hanneman died of failing health or when Cliff Burton died in a bus crash. As tragic as those events were, those kinds of things happen. There wasn’t a whole lot anyone could really do about it. Dimebag lost his life at a club in Columbus, Ohio on a cold night when a demented Pantera fan named Nathan Gale, who blamed Dimebag for the breakup of Pantera, attended Dimebag’s new band Damageplan’s show. During the band’s set, Gale jumped on the stage and drew a handgun, opening fire on Dimebag and road crew members. Dimebag, along with three others, lost their lives (with seven others wounded). I remember when I heard the news. You couldn’t escape it. My first thought was “this isn’t real”. Even in a genre of music like metal, where things are often without reason and occasionally nihilistic, none of what happened in Columbus made sense. Musicians die. It happens. But they’re not supposed to get shot on stage.

Dimebag’s death changed everything for everyone. Case in point: December 17^th, 2004, only nine days after the shooting, I attended a show at Trees: Hatebreed / Sick of It All / Terror / Full Blown Chaos / No Warning. When I walked up to the door, the reality of what happened in Columbus hit me in the face. The security at Trees was on full alert. People were getting patted down and handheld metal detectors were running over everyone. On the walls everywhere were “RIP DIMEBAG DARRELL” flyers. It was like a subculture dystopia. A world without Dimebag Darrell. More to the point, the bands were nervous. Everybody was. Nobody knew what to expect. What happened to Dimebag had never happened before. Was it a harbinger of things to come? The show started and it went off without a hitch. Terror, a hardcore band from Los Angeles, is famous for calling their fans to the stage to partake in stage dives during their set. Like every Terror set I’ve ever seen, the fans were out in full force stage diving. I even hit a few of my own. Every time someone hit that stage though, I saw it in the corner of my eye: Trees security and road crew members jumping an inch every time a fan hit the stage. Even though that Terror set was business as usual, the world they were living in no longer was.

Here we are now. Ten years later and what has changed? Luckily, there has not been a repeat of what happened in Columbus and no one else has had to go through that kind of tragedy. That doesn’t mean it still doesn’t weigh on the minds of some. When Phil Anselmo’s sludge band Down played the famed Maryland Death Fest in 2013, he made a big demand before the band would play the fest. He asked that the fest security collect attending fans’ bullet belts. Maryland Death Fest has a large crust punk attendance and a major fashion staple of crust punks are bullet belts. Despite the fact that the bullets are not live and they are merely for show, Anselmo had convinced himself that someone would sneak in live ammunition and attempt to assassinate him.

Elsewhere in Dallas, the memory of Dimebag is celebrated and honored by touring bands. For years, the Clubhouse, or the “Pantera strip club” as out-of-towners refer to it, was a destination for visiting musical acts. They wanted to drink whiskey at the Pantera hangout while taking in the sights. They wanted their picture taken next to all of the Pantera memorabilia in the lobby. In the last few years, fans have taken their Pantera pilgrimage a step further: they visit Dimebag’s grave in Arlington. At Dimebag’s grave, people smoke blunts and pour whiskey out for the man whose ability to party was only surpassed by his ability to play guitar.

It is easy to say Dimebag is gone. That he died in 2004 and that was that. It wasn’t though. Randy Rhoads died and Ozzy kept putting out records. Cliff Burton died and Metallica kept touring. When Dimebag died, things ended with him. People understood it then as they do now. You can’t replace Dime. You just can’t. The beard, the Dixie guitar, and the drinking while he played his solos. That was all him. We watch 3 Vulgar Videos From Hell and we smile at all of it. That was him as he lived. When he died, the world didn’t end. The world just admitted that they couldn’t replace the irreplaceable.

RIP “DIMEBAG” DARRELL ABBOTT