Foul Taste Music

I was sitting quietly on my couch scrolling through my Intagram stories when I came across a poster for a concert taking place on April 6 and 7 in Lisbon (Disgraça) and Ovar (Buraco Pub) in Portugal - with reference to the spanish post-harcore band FOSCØ and, for the first time in the history of portuguese cultural heritage, a band called Reia Cibele, subtitled as Screamo from Lisbon. Finally we have the scramz word in Portugal?! As a Lisbon native and fan of the scramz community, I rushed to see if they had published something. This single Lótus came out on March 27 and I didn't even know anything about it…

The heavy music scene in Lisbon is dominated by noise, crust and prog punk, classic hardcore and, more recently, strange and mesmerizing stuff by bands like Hetta, Linger and clericviolence, always with many musical references to power and emo violence, beatdown hardcore and punk, but with new ideas and textures. I think that when I heard Reia Cibele and their single Lótus I felt a big contrast to the "screamo" I usually listen to. It's much more violent than that, very attached to the roots and habits of the city. Portuguese people don't follow the rules of tonality, they don't like beautiful and predictable melodies or things with obvious emotional references. That's why I loved it. I can perfectly fit screamo and its new life in there. It makes perfect sense and I'll let you know why.

The drums and vocals are completely loyal to the subgenre and the guitar and bass play very well with distortions and other textures typical of the above genres, as well as with tones that aren't well defined. In fact, I can't even tell what key the song is and this isn't a very common thing in screamo. The unleashing is very satisfying and it's very difficult to describe what's happening there. A total chaos. The experimentalism is evident and it's a very positive aspect for the cultural growth of the portuguese music scene as well as scramz itself. There’s guaranteed suffering, a lot of people envolved in the pit and not much to dance about.

In short, I highly recommend people to listen to this single, and moreover this band and what it has to offer. The supposed cover of the album is itself ambiguous (illustration by @estripadores.malditos), with shapes that, although they seem obvious, you can't really understand what's there and that comes down to the music itself. Paradoxically, the lotus flower is a flower that represents rebirth and the purity of starting a new life, as is the case with Reia Cibele - I see them introducing skramz to the territory in a big way and influencing a lot of young people to play and make good music, as the concerts seem to be full.

What is truly spectacular about this type of music is that we can embrace various sounds and not deprive ourselves of the freedom of harmonic/rhythmic expression, without giving anything aesthetic continuity, but opening the door to new sub-cultures, introducing our own.

«my life is in your hands. free, i suffocate myself. a flower without a scent grows without a root. in a fragile soil, watered by the ego. history repeats itself. the fruit of a desire embraces the spines, this seed dies alone. in the shadows. it inherits a dream, almost impossible. it embodies a will that it cannot fulfill. it feeds on lack, it sustains itself with leftovers. it loses itself in its spirit. it lives alone, without warmth. without a stem, it flies with the wind. it grows, without a root. i will forever be a stranger to my gaze».

For two decades now, post-hardcore has been considered a sub-genre descended from hardcore, which in turn was considered a sub-genre descended from punk, and which in turn... well, it's not important to put musical genres and sub-genres into boxes purposely organized to fit people and their ways of dressing and other useless aesthetics promoted by media/digital cultures. But for two decades now, post-hardcore has been asserting itself as a well-defined genre, with well-defined textural characteristics, as well as certain types of chords and experimentalist riffs in the nostalgic-depressive world, heartfelt screams with a poetically sad story to tell in the most imperfect and dirty way possible, where D.I.Y. is valued in the various arts that embrace recorded and live music.

In 2003, music researcher Jessica Hopper wrote the review "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" for a column in Punk Planet 56. It was already in the cradle of the emo thing at the beginning of the century that we noticed an absence of girls at concerts - at first there was no mention of them playing or making music, but even their absence from the public as listeners / active participants in this subculture and community. Girls began to enter this world in a very controversial and unrevolutionary way, but always with all the freedom.

Obviously, through the promotion that took place on the internet on the various platforms, the genre reached more stages, more people, more musical cultures and gained a large structure. Girls (like everyone else) start going to these places, often through an interest they already had in other genres such as indie, punk, metal, etc., and as soon as they buy a ticket to go to a concert, we have a group of 50 young men talking about love, depression, nature and other "weaknesses" seen through the eyes of toxic contemporary masculinity. And girls are welcome here. They will always be welcome until they start making music out of fear, because in punk they've already had the chance to revolutionize themselves and post-hardcore/screamo gives voice and space to boys who also suffer from prejudice.

Hopper talks about this band that dedicates a song (Strike Anywhere - Refusal, 2001) to the girls about their problems and lives, and claims that we need more of that: protection and respect. But this hasn't happened and girls still don't feel encouraged and empowered: they are an inspiration for the experiences and texts of this subculture, they are desired as artists and recreationists, and even though they aren't sexualized or repudiated in all cases, they feel obliged to get on the boys' knees to make it too, perhaps even better. A fight against meritocracy, male dependency in order to learn or be promoted and supported, where we are ALL programmed to think that we have a sex organ between our legs and that public reception is influenced by this: either in a positive or a negative way.

«And so I watch these girls at emo shows more than I ever do the band. I watch them sing along, see what parts they freak out over. I wonder if this does it for them, if seeing these bands, these dudes on stage resonates and inspires them to want to pick up a guitar or drum sticks. Or if they just see this as something dudes do, because there are no girls, there is no them up there. I wonder if they are being thwarted by the FACT that there is no presentation of girls as participants, but rather, only as consumers – or if we reference the songs directly – the consumed. I wonder if this is where music will begin and end for them. If they can be radicalized in spite of this. If being denied keys to the clubhouse or airtime will spur them into action».

- Jessica Hopper (2003)

Hanoi Traffic is not fucking dead – as they affirmed themselves for the concerts they gave before it all began. They are simply working on a start for intellectually violent listeners.  On february 9, the australian band from Meanjin made their (almost) official debut with their first EP towards an end after spending an year slowly releasing singles until january of 2024 on streaming platforms and actively playing live. And the EP gets off to a flying start, blazing, with a very interesting set that won't tire our ears. I believe that the australian screamo scene is excited about their first online release, since the hype we have for this kind of fusion of emoviolence and soft dark melodical sh*t is literally huge at the moment.

But let's talk about important things: spring is coming and I really needed to feel a good groove of blast beats and musical hiccups with 500 bpms, lots of cymbals and two-minute songs without taking a breath - for this reason, I can't choose my favorite song(s) of this EP – and all the details going on here leave me reflecting on how good emoviolence (when it's well thought out and experimented) is. We do get to hear a lot of rhythm sections that, although chaotically undispersed, are so creative as well as riffs. And it's all so well done that we can actually groove with 6, 5 and 3 stroke bars. The song minks two by two is distinctively unexpected as a start of a set. It's harmonically anxious and simple at the same time, with no breaks and a gripping ending; daylight crept in through the bandages is an unrecognizable, electronically changed, sadistic and unmusical excerpt (wtf but I love it and for some reason it makes sense); in the third one, life on the cutting room floor, the connection of the bass to the guitar right at the beginning and some rhythmic characteristics that give the drums a hand, gives me some soft flashbacks of the hardcore pits (maybe that's why it's the most listened to); in the next one, horse, I see a lot of potential for crying and hitting people at concerts at the same time, and you can really see here that the band's ‘emoviolencing’ is perfect when it comes to the coherence of the riffs and the adjustment of the musical layers; the same goes for the song that closes the EP right after, when it’s time, with a very clear and clean guitar. I wasn't expecting it at all and I'm pleased.

In 2022 they released a cover for a Spotify compilation of various artists from the emerging scene of different places, genres and extremely different musical worlds. In the midst of so much instrumental, so much indie, quiet singings, acoustic and sympathetic sounds, we have the song The Ghost In My Eye, cover of the great Blind Girls, that doesn't even appear on Hanoi Traffic’s artist profile on the platform automatically. We can already recognize anyway the authenticity of the band here as a first impression, always with many influences and evident elements of other great bands such as Flowers for Emily, Nuvolascura, Youth Funeral, Othiel, and others. But the big start publicly is now, and we have to start actively controlling the news they put out on social media, because they have a lot ahead of them and the audience is still mostly australian.

This EP was the best gift that 2024 could give me, and we're still only in March. A game between the traumas in the stories recounted in La Dispute's first "great" albums - Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair (2008) and Wildlife (2011) - revolutionary for the experimental world of midwest emo, post-hardcore and the underground community in general, and the latest works of art that are most listened to and reflected on, which tell us through the details of everyday life, feelings, landscapes and images open to the listener's imagination - Rooms of the House (2014) and Panorama (2019) - when recitation becomes part of the post-hardcore trends.

Despite the pained voice and the contrasts that create the perfect synthesis of the guitars and bass, the rhythmic coherence of the drums and the literary personality of the band that has always been faithful to us from the beginning until today, elements that have created the "brand image", I notice that these geniuses of emo music don't mind experimenting with new electronics, the absence of screams and distortions, love, new ways of saying things. The fact that we can't catalog and put aesthetic labels on certain artists, because they are constantly metamorphosing and contradicting themselves with the genres given by fans and record companies, certain types of festivals and events, algorithms of streaming platforms, etc., is a proof that the post-hardcore of these bands that continue to record over the years is maturing as a movement. And this EP has made me reflect on my generation, which adapts to trends by not adapting to it at all. Perhaps silences and improbable harmonic resolutions are the oxygen pump for artists and listeners of music created in a studio as if it’s a laboratory.

Here, Hear. is a collection of four volumes, the first of which was released in 2008, the band's big bang year. In the four volumes, we can see that La Dispute exploded at the beginning and took their own advantage of the sounds in a very genuine, pure and direct way, unashamed to use unconventional instruments such as pianos, maracas and “folklorized” melodies - always recognizable on a timbral level, anyway - but it was in this last one, sixteen years later, that we see the band flourish, not in an explosive way as before, but always pure and honest. They reinforce simplicity and the timeless stories. Sixteen, the fourth song on the EP, and one that had been released before on Spotify, marks a new life of La Dispute: it reminds me of the walks I had to school when I was fourteen and of my first crush had dedicated the song Such Small Hands (2008) to me in anonymity; of the song Woman (In the Mirror) (2014) when I was always at home trying to discover my own way of (always hidden) teenage happiness. Today I've discovered how happy I can be and that the nostalgia for the sadness, heartbreak and melancholy that went on in the corners of my neighborhood while I listened to La Dispute's entire discography for most of the years I lived there is part of it. We were sad listening to sad music, and happiness, today, is based on that. This single, according to my empirical experience and to the community of fans writing online as well, reminds us of those nostalgic times.

And the group's aesthetic minimalism continues. Not just in the music, but in the band's overall image. And I'm enjoying watching it. The lyrics and stories increasingly make sense, since the instrumental part of the EP makes them prevail. In the song Reformation, which concludes the EP in a mode of ecstatic tranquillity, we have a beautiful guitar that harps along with Jordan Dreyer's unsung and unshouted voice. Just like that. Everything that the music of sensitive people needed to offer about the art of growing up and noticing life's little symbols, even when you drink your coffee in the morning before facing the life of an adult who is emotionally trapped by the years that have passed.

«You awake at 3AM to the soft voice of her dream, saying

"These are the people who said that you like him would never die

Until you do and you will and I will too

Just like this, baby, but longer, forever

And there's nothing past that door, I know it"

Before she drifts back to sleep where you can't now and it's okay

Peace be with you»