BARN BURNER RECORDS

Back in college I spent a Sunday afternoon at my friend’s apartment who promoted a show with several touring solo musicians by saying “come hang at my apartment and watch some dudes play songs”. I sat on a futon bunk bed and watched a modern cowboy spill his heart out onto a dirty bedroom floor. The following Autumn I had the pleasure of inviting this man into a bigger space in someone else’s home and made a dear friend in himself and his tour-mate Koji. His name is PJ Bond, originally from New Brunswick, New Jersey but as far as I can tell he is what many would consider a nomad. From humble beginnings with a homelessness touring project called “Year Of A Thousand Roommates”, PJ has seen himself around the world several times over playing his folksy-americana style of rock & roll with Austin Lucas, Arliss Nancy and many other punk-meets-country legends to disenchanted loners, losers and anyone who has the time and heart open enough to listen. 2015 brought about Where Were You?, which in the 6 or so years I’ve been following his catalog is without a doubt my favorite release he’s ever laid out.

With Communipaw acting as the backing band for this album of vagabond blues, PJ Bond maps out eleven tracks on Where Were You? that cover some tattered landscape and serious social and global issues including domestic abuse, gentrification, the making and breaking of trust and the atonement of sin. That isn’t to say this record is a bottle of whiskey funneled straight into the listener’s most fragile feels; more often than not the songs themselves have uplifting grooves and intoxicating hooks played on resonating lap-steel slide guitars, subtle synth lines and humble acoustic guitar riffs that showcase a wealth of talent and technique. Solo artists have a difficult time writing songs that don’t all sound like copies of eachother; it relieves me to hear that even with a decade of songwriting under his belt PJ continues to showcase a wide range of influences and puts himself to the task of outdoing everything he’s done before.

PJ and I have a standing date to get coffee somewhere in South Philly, when that will happen is uncertain to say the least. Every text message could go unread for weeks due to a spontaneous trip back to Vienna, a drive down to the Carolinas or simply by being a man too busy to keep up with anything coming into a stupid cell phone. He may very well be chasing the woman he’s singing for on Where Were You?, he may be running from her. Wherever he is, I hope he’s doing well, he’s eating enough, he’s sleeping somewhere warm and that he continues to fill social media with his unique brand of thoughtful positivity whenever he gets around to looking at the internet. I wonder how long it’ll be before he reads this…

New York’s Hudson Valley is often admired for the natural scenery (if you gloss over the polluted river aspect) and for the wide variety of art created by the vibrant, chill-as-fuck college culture surrounding the area (SUNY Purchase, Bard, New Paltz, etc). The Hudson Valley also has a darkside (if you direct your attention to the polluted river). The region fosters some cities with higher crime & poverty rates than the rest of the state combined, and anyone who has lived in any part of New York can tell you the cultural environment of New York state as a whole is hostile no matter how nice your neighborhood is. This area is also home to some dear friends of mine that one day decided to let high-end amplifiers feed back while one of them screams frantically into a microphone and another smashes thing with wooden mallets. They decided to name their project something to let the listener know everything they’re about to hear is absolutely disgusting: Trenchfoot.

Bands that push the boundaries of the genres they’re confined to tend to collaborate with one another to make the musical landscape an exceedingly difficult area to traverse. The 90’s were ripe with unforgettable collaboration albums with genre-benders like Boris, Sunn O))), Xiu Xiu & Man Is The Bastard. The recent renaissance of heavy music has brought about a new wave of collaboration albums including the double LP from Full of Hell & Merzbow via A389 Recordings. Two hyper prolific bands Thou & The Body, both infamous for playing notes and distorting voices in ways most individuals didn’t believe were obtainable by mere mortals have released two incredible collaboration LPs together; Released From Love in 2014 and You, Whom I Have Always Hated in the Winter of 2015.

Both Thou & The Body have perfected the creation of unforgiving sonic onslaughts of absolute suffering; the audible embodiment of what it means to die slowly as a species aware of its own worthless existence. Thou tends to sludge their sound in the lowest registers their instruments can conjure, having created the gold standard of the modern doom genre. Thou also takes influence from the great aggressive innovators of the past and pays homage to them with singular covers of their material, including acts like Black Sabbath, Nirvana and the Nine Inch Nails cover of “Terrible Lie” found on You, Whom I Have Always Hated . The Body also plays low, often indecipherable chords, yet sometimes they incorporate ambient and ethereal textures and chords often heard within the genre of black metal betwixt pummeling percussion and punishing chord progressions. When the vocalist screeches in a way not dissimilar to the way one would scream having their limbs ripped from their torso all at once, there is no denying that you’re listening to The Body.

It seems to me that the farther an individual strays from areas with tolerable weather conditions like those found in the north-east region of America, the more volatile their creative works become. That theory holds some truth when listening to Nashville’s Yautja as they take limbs from every style of distorted woeful music with their new EP Songs Of Lament and construct a modern day Frankenstein of aggressive material; wholeheartedly hell-bent on destroying the senses of anyone foolish enough to stand against it. Sporting a couple short trips away from home, a brand new split 7” with Forn that sincerely dropped days ago, an EP from a year past Songs Of Descent and a couple of older EPs from their early years; the band has time on their hands, and idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.

Sonically this group is completely off the charts. Taking the tasiest morsels from the likes of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Gaza, Baroness, Cursed, Converge and Full Of Hell they create a sound that’s simultaneously spastic, sludgy, searing, salacious and simply maddening to comprehend. The guitar tones more than match the quality expected of the bands listed above (and that’s saying something), the vocals are daunting, deliberate and dutiful and the drummer Tyler Coburn may soon be seen in a fictitious wrestling ring fighting for “best drummer of a young punk band” with the likes of Nick Yacyshyn of Baptists. If I had to imagine the Wildings north of the great ice wall in Game Of Thrones listening to any kind of music in between raids of murdering smallfolk and fighting the living dead, they’d probably be sharpening their steal with Yautja playing by the cookfires.

Axis are a quintet of enraged Americans living low and inland around Tampa, Florida. The band made their presence undeniably heard & known nationwide this year with the release of Show Your Greed last month through Good Fight Music. Their unquenchably furious history in metalcore spans back to 2010 including two EP’s Rites Of Passage and Weight Of The World as well as a split 7” with the punk collective super-group Self Defense Family of Deathwish Inc. and a multitude of other labels. 2015 saw them on the road with their label mates Old Wounds, Exalt and Of Feather & Bone and the success of their sweltering debut LP has earned them a place on the stage for some ungodly-good Southern hardcore events including the last Foundation show in Tampa alongside Blistered and Seraphim. Simply put, Axis isn’t a band you have to think about; either they set your guts ablaze in the first minute of “Graze The Fire” or you simply don’t have blood left to burn. 

This record isn’t perfect, and no record is. I sincerely appreciate when the lyricist of hyper-aggressive bands can write words that say something earnest while also capturing the emotional impact of the instrumentation they’re being bellowed over. Axis doesn’t necessarily get my brain buzzing with the lyrical content; but the way they get my blood boiling and muscles straining within seconds with the way they write music has me seeing red in all the best possible ways. If I had to summarize their style in one sentence, Axis is the sonic equivalent of ripping your wisdom teeth out with a ribbon of razor wire and cleaning the wounds out with moonshine. It’s as if they took We Are The Romans by Botch, No Heroes by Converge and Poison The Well’s The Opposite Of December and cut them open like cadavers to see their deepest afflictions and captured all that painful refuse in twenty six minutes of this year’s most unforgiving release in aggressive music.

Not quite unlike fellow tour mates Self Defense Family, GIVE made their early mark in the punk community with a series of strong seven-inch singles released and repressed by labels big and small within the scene. After years of touring in support “Flowerhead”, “I Am Love” and “Boots of Faith”, GIVE hit the studio to write an honest to god full length (not quite sure what you call their first self-titled release at seven songs: not quite an EP, not quite an album). Electric Flower Circus proves to be the band’s strongest material to date across all platforms as a band. The rhythm section is tighter and more intricate than ever heard before, the guitar work wails in its signature hi treble rock and roll tone and works with entirely new concepts while still sounding like a GIVE record. The vocal delivery is the same discernible shout from a poignant, long haired, very tall gentleman that you expect to hear; which is deeply appreciated because some of the lyrics on this record are the best GIVE have offered the world. “Death is so boring/until it happens to you”

Chumped is a band that received some attention from their debut EP for the simple fact that a female is the primary vocalist of the band, something not so common in punk rock. I’m not going to turn this into a long rant about gender norms and sexuality within the confines of punk, so all I’m going to say is the singer of this band is in fact a woman and that shouldn’t make anyone listen to this punk band any differently than they’d listen to any other punk band. The ability to create good music should be the primary talking point of any band, and Chumped has good tunes (and sadness) in heavy abundance.

When I was younger someone asked me “Why do girls like pop punk so much? The singers just spend the whole time shitting on their exes, I don’t get why girls would want to hear that” to which I replied “Girls have exes they want to shit on too. Who cares if it’s a dude singing the things they want to say to someone who screwed them over?” Anika Pyle’s lyrics on Teenage Retirement are insanely relatable to anyone dissatisfied with their personal relationships, with themselves, or even with something as simple and inevitable as the weather. To me, Teenage Retirement is a record for someone with a detailed list of all their issues written out, a list they carry around everyday in their wallet. They read that list every day and have internalized what needs to get done to get better; but they don’t get around to it right away. Not before smoke and drink and the feeling of inadequacy have their way with the author. It’s only when the author is on the move or fatigued from months of running that they might stop and take a look at the list again.

The first noticeable difference between Gates first EP and Bloom & Breathe is the increase in production quality. It’s almost like Gates on The Sun Will Rise is a entirely different band of young dudes that heard Bloom & Breathe through some twizzy time travel shit and tried to rip off the sound with the tools available to them. Bloom & Breathe is criminally outrageous in its sonic clarity and quality and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Watts, engineer of B&B and like minded artists As Cities Burn and As Tall As Lion, is booked solid in the studio for the rest of the decade after this record went public. Lots of time, effort and money went into making this record as huge as it could be and it’s impossible to ignore, from the single “Not My Blood”, “Low” and “Bloom” as well as on the longer cuts of the album “At Last The Loneliest Of Them” and  “Again At The Beginning”.

Last week I saw Koji playing for the jillionth time and he opened his set at Oneonta Punk by saying “I’m a punk musician that’s fed up with bands singing something sarcastic and ironic. I think that’s bullshit, I think punk rock is worthy of a more meaningful dialogue than that.”. To me, The Smith Street Band filled that half-hearted void in punk music perfectly. Much like Bukowski, Wil Wagner sings exactly what he thinks and feels stripped of all pretense and in his brutal honesty, what he’s saying is poetic and profound even when he’s singing about endlessly tapped topics like drinking and losing love. There aren’t many clever rhymes or typical verse-chorus lyrical structures, it’s as if he’s sitting in his flat with a notebook and a guitar trying to make sense of his stream of consciousness by framing it with riffs and rhythm. Not to take away from the musicianship of the rest of TSSB, but with a talent like Wil’s it’s hard not to talk it up.

Throw Me In The River is a record written by a matured band of punks that are still blown away by the good fortune their music has seen in a short four years. Several worldwide tours opening for their idols and packing out houses thousands of miles from their home in Melbourne, Australia could assure anyone that there’s something beautiful still in a world as chaotic as the one we live in, as seen in The Arrogance of The Drunk Pedestrian “We’ll keep on through the shitstorm until the metaphors are literal and forced screams are guttural.”. Sonically, Throw Me In The River is the biggest sounding record they’ve made with a supergroup of audio engineers working on this album including Jonathan Low & Jeff Rosenstock as well as the engineers responsible for their previous records Matt Voigt (Don’t Fuck With Our Dreams) and Sam Johnson (Sunshine & Technology). These folks know the band doesn’t have to struggle to fill the backroom of their local pubs anymore, they know where they want to be as a band and they recorded an album that reflects their ambitions.

My introduction to this band was seeing them play a basement show in Rockland county back in 2009, well before the recording & release of I, Murderer, I or This House Is Doomed via A389. Aside from being located somewhere in New Jersey and including ex-members of The Banner, I do not know any intimate details about this group of warlocks & have not seen them perform since. 19 year old me didn’t need to know anything about their personal history and neither does present day me: once their set begins the outside world is consumed in a doomed, spiraling plume of horror, despair and distortion. As a Philadelphia resident I am heavily debating leaving my fair city to trek to Baltimore or northern New Jersey to witness the inescapable trauma their set will create at the tail end of their six week North American tour with Ashtabula, Ohio’s metallic-hardcore outfit Homewrecker. It’s worth noting Homewrecker is touring in support of a new full length being released this Halloween via A389 Recordings as well called Circle Of Death, a release which (in my opinion) is also worth your time and attention.

Let’s talk about the record itself, aptly titled Negative Everything. Musically it is a vast evolution from Pharaoh’s previous 7” efforts, predominantly compositions that revolved around a single relentless riff for four to six minutes. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with one riff songs, I play in a band currently that does exactly that. As a listener it’s refreshing to hear a band you respect evolve their sound over releases rather than rehash previous tropes and tricks. Pharaoh incorporates rhythm styles and intricate riffs of Negative Everything that stretch across the wide spectrum of metal and not obtusely focused on the monodrone stoner metal formula of mid tempo groove to slow groove and back and forth again and again, ad naseum. Pharaoh even takes a leap and throws in a little electronic sampling at the tail end of the record. Admittedly it took a few listens for me to warm up to it, but within the entire album I think it fits. The vocal delivery of Pharaoh augments the crushing torrent of sound that washes over you, as if you were defying science by smoking weed at the bottom of the Nile River with the chilling current rushing through your unkempt hair admist the frogs and locust corpses. Lyrically, the words keep true to the mixture of doom and stoner metal that Pharaoh is close to perfecting as a three piece and hold true to the theme of Negative Everything, the first line being “Every time I hear a lie, inside, it’s what I want to hear anyway.”. Negative Everything isn’t merely an extreme exercise in self-deprecation (although there is some present), Pharaohchimes in some socio-political issues within the lyrics including allusions class warfare, inequality in the workforce, violence in foreign policy, mass suicides, and as one might except, a suspicious outlook on organized religion.