The songs on Belfast are taken from two moments in Toxic Waste’s development: Side A has been selected from records produced in 1985 and 1986: From Belfast with Blood — The Truth Will Be Heard, a split EP with Stalag 17 released by Mortarhate (run by Londoner punks Conflict); and We Will Be Free, an LP compiling songs by Toxic Waste, Stalag 17 and Asylum, first released by the Warzone Collective. Side B includes tracks from a later session, featuring Toxic Waste’s Roy Wallace alongside members of DIRT, a London-based anarcho-punk band. There are sonic consistencies that render the sounds on both sides comparable, most notably the dual male and female vocals, though on Side A, founding member Patsy sings, and on Side B, you hear Deno from DIRT. For both line-ups, the influence of Crass is palpable, in the interplay of the voices and the relative simplicity of the songs’ constructions — and legend has it that Toxic Waste was created in the aftermath of a 1982 Crass gig in Belfast. 

You can draw a fairly direct line from Stations of the Crass (1979) to We Will Be Free to Nausea’s Extinction, from “You’ve Got Big Hands” to “As More Die” to “Godless.” That sort of genealogy building is informative and interesting, but the importance of the immediate social context of Toxic Waste’s music should not be reduced. The situation of anarcho-punks in a politically fraught conjuncture like mid-1980s Belfast lends the music a particular power. Songs like “Tug of War,” “Burn Your Flags” and “Religious Leaders” demonstrate the band’s continual symbolic and ideological displacements, to a marginal in-betweenness, then to a radically placeless outside. As anarchists, the punks in Toxic Waste weren’t Catholics or Protestants, Fenians or Loyalists, natives of Sydenham or of New Lodge. Their relations to Northern Irish identity were infernally complex. There’s this, from “Song for Britain”: “You take a look at Northern Ireland / And think it’s too far away to worry about / But it’s not that far / And you may have to experience what we’ve put up with for years.” That seems like a collective “we,” cutting across the country’s sectarian lines. But in a city so divided, where could that “we” live with any sort of stability? And from whence does the treat in that final clause originate? Then on “We Will Be Free,” you hear, “I am not Irish / I am not British / I am me / I am an individual / Fuck your politics! / Fuck your religion! / I will be free! / We will be free!” Shorn of national, religious and political markers, who is that “We”? Is it the same “we” that speaks in “Song for Britain”?

It’s impossible to say for certain, and all of those contingencies and fluidities make the music on Belfast volatile, always on the move, always riven with restless desire. Perhaps the most coherent statement of the intent driving Toxic Waste can be encountered in “Traditionally Yours” (present on the record in two versions, from the two iterations of the band — a double voicing that further complicates all the other double voicings): “The struggle became a movement / Human rights was its concern / ‘How dare they!’ cried the rich / We’ll see those fuckers burn!” The anarchist language embedded in the passage is as powerful as it is ambiguous. What do we make of the past tense? Does that indicate that the movement is moribund, undone by Northern Ireland’s violence? And what about that “we”? Is it spoken by the song’s lyric speakers, representing the anarcho-punks that sing? Or is that “we” the “rich,” expressing their outrage at and malign plans for the anarchist cause? The syntax remains unresolved, and while Northern Ireland’s worst armed struggles have receded, these songs remain explosive, messages from displaced people that systems of oppression would like to exploit, exhaust and cast aside. But even the most institutionally entrenched powers find that Toxic Waste isn’t so easy to dispose of. 

Stylistically Great War strips the band’s sound back to raw intensities, much in the vein of the Archaic 10”. Great War’s harsh textures are even more mechanical. Most of the record’s songs sound like the band has used a drum machine for percussive rhythms (see “Mental Cases” for an especially dry, brittle and inhumanly precise snap). That seems apt, if a bit reductive in its sonic enactment of the truism about World War One as a first truly mechanized conflict. Significantly mechanized firearms technologies had already been used in the American Civil War, the Boshin War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (and the Prussians’ rationalizations of command, troop deployment and supply were perhaps even more important innovations for the conduct of modern warfare). But the scale of the slaughter — on the Somme, during the Brusilov Offensive, at Verdun — was indeed unprecedented, and the introduction of chemical warfare intensified the awfulness, the utter contempt for life. Blinko’s voice is instructive here. His own experiences of immiseration register in its cragginess, its depth and weirding power. It carries Owen’s sweeping bitterness into very dark places. 

Of course, the trenches that Owen knew from France were already dark, dismal, dreadful places. Media’s contemporary representations of war are considerably different: drone strikes and drone footage; dusty desert villages, hot sun, endless masses of buckled concrete that were once cities; asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency. Some songs on Great War can help you think and feel back across the more than a century that has past, back to mud, shit, tides of rats, flooded ditches, rotting feet, festering bodies, the horrific fixity of the trenches. “Asleep” comes at you in quickly phased waves, claustrophobic rushes repetitive riffing, unrelenting yelling. It’s an anxious experience. “Strange Meeting” slackens the pace a bit, its signature riff a slowly intensifying, gnashing, grating machine. It’s not especially violent as an array of noises and textures, but it still feels completely pulverizing. 

And that’s a fair generalization for all of Great War. The record doesn’t have the gonzo, maniacal unpredictability of Rudimentary Peni in the full floridity of the late 1980s, but this new record’s simplicity conjures a different sort of force. Everything feels necessary — and that in turn conjures the inevitability of the war itself, as monopoly capital surged to global crisis. The songs vibrate with requisite anxiety and anger. Blinko’s creative sensibility continues to find idiosyncratic sites at which contests among form, function and philosophy flare into music, and then scorch and scar everything in their path. Better take cover.