lets find a dissensus best hardcore record list

M

martin

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US lot - Middle Class - 'Out of Vogue' EP and 'Love Is Just A Tool' - too good for words. my favourite of the lot. Black Flag - 'Damaged' the first 6 songs - after 'Police Story' it goes scooting downhill. Agnostic Front - 'United Blood' 7", silly but glorious. Dead Kennedys -side 1 of 'In God We Trust Inc' 12" (side 2 is crap). Can't remember what it's called (Anthems for the New Aryans?), but the first Reagan Youth LP was pretty good.

On the UK side, 'Why' by Discharge and their first 3 7"s all fit the bill. Don't know if "Increase the Pressure" by Conflict qualifies, but it should. "Burning Britain" EP by Chaos UK, "Factory Man" by Total Chaos and "Young and Bold" by Clockwork Criminals all straddle the punk/HC line, the latter's one of the most discordant brickwall production speedfreak records I've ever heard.

Then "Police Bastard" EP by Doom, the first Napalm Death Peel Session, first Intense Degree Peel Session, and "Holocaust in Your Head" by ENT.

Oh yeah, does anyone remember John Peel used to play loads of tracks around '88 by a group called Japan (from Japan)? Thus making them totally google-proof, but they had a song called 'Nightmare' which sounded like being shredded into a wall by a combine harvester on crack.

Oh yeah, and Vegan Reich (joke)
 
STN

STN

sou'wester
Can we have Social Distortion? and the Eye, with Screaming Mad George? And High Rise?

Or does it have to be US stuff?
 
P

psherburne

Well-known member
Awesome responses. Petergunn, thanks for all those tips. I'm glad that you guys seem more in line with my own tastes (and semi-arbitrary distinctions of hardore-icity) than the commenters over at Chunklet.

A few notes:
SSD- Get it Away - (a HUGE influence on the modern metal/mosh sound that dominated HC from the early 90's onward)​
You know, I never really knew them at the time -- knew OF them but never actually got my hands on the records.

Agnostic Front- Victim in Pain EP​
Good point. I was never a bit AF fan but obviously they're crucial.

Angry Samoans- Back from Samoa (if you're going to have one of those lists that puts the Dead Kennedys and the Germs as H/C bands, you have to them)​
Another band that somehow I missed entirely, I don't know how.

OH AND "BIKINI KILL" are NOT HARDCORE... they are fun, but their whole bedroom sloppiness vibe is what makes them not hardcore, i mean they are art kids... if you wanna put a girl band on the list, put Frightwig!!!!!!​
Yeah, I probably fucked up here. I did want a "girl band," I'll admit, and I guess I saw them & Kill Rock Stars in some sense as a bookend of a certain strain of hardcore. But it was a reach. I REALLY wanted Mukilteo Fairies in there, but my 7" is boxed up a continent away and I couldn't find any audio online (criminal!). At least be glad I didn't include Huggy Bear. :) (Whom I love.)
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Did you have rorschach on there? There were multiple scenes of Rorschach worshipping filth in the late '90s that were just great.
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
Mr. Tea said:
Haha, woah - Zeppelin an influence on USHC? Not heard that one before!


(Actually, there is that Minor Threat cover of 'Kashmir', now you mention it... ;))
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all these kids who were 19 in 1980 were listening to a lot of standard 70's rock stuff like Zep before they went punk... and think more "Communication breakdown" not "Kasmir"...
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
bassbeyondreason said:
Me too, actually. And this is an excellent time to mention how incredible Iron Cross were. Not sure how you can link Powerviolence to rap metal. Thugged out NYHC definitely, but not Infest/Spazz type stuff. Also, I'm really into the "bad" NYHC records like "One Voice" and the Supertouch LP (NYHC guys try and sound like Alice in Chains, and it fucking WORKS!)
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yeah, Iron Cross are awesome...

One can easily link Powerviolence to rap metal, just not sideways, but backwards...

bands like Negative Approach were probably direct influences on bands like Infest AND bands like Madball... of course from that point on, the respective paths don't cross, but they are starting at the same point of origin...

the rap metal thing was a BIG sound when i was starting to go to shows in 92... every band had breakbeat drums and rap style delivery in vocals... most of it was pretty bad...

Rage Against the Machine made it big with that sound and Zach De La Rocha used to be in Inside Out, who were on Revelation...
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
psherburne said:
Awesome responses. Petergunn, thanks for all those tips. I'm glad that you guys seem more in line with my own tastes (and semi-arbitrary distinctions of hardore-icity) than the commenters over at Chunklet.
Click to expand...

just checked out the response at Chunklet...

that guy took it personal... he did have a couple good points (Die Kreuzen, "cows and beer" is totally awesome (and got repressed recently...) and being from Boston, i can never have enough X-Claim stuff), but his list was just as arbitrary as yours... like "Dealing With It" by DRI is an insanely good record, but it's the begining of their metal era and the end of their hardcore one, maybe he should have listed the Dirty Rotten 7"... like if you picked the "wrong" Minutemen LP, he picked the "wrong" DRI LP...

the thing with hardcore is that it is once you leave the "cannon" of universally accepted 1980-86 bands, it is TOTALLY personal, as from the mid 80's on, every town in america has had it's bands and scenes, and everyone is going to like that band that they used to go see when they were 17, whenever and wherever that was...
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
martin said:
"Young and Bold" by Clockwork Criminals all straddle the punk/HC line, the latter's one of the most discordant brickwall production speedfreak records I've ever heard.
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thank you posting this, your description made me curious (i'd never heard of 'em) and i tracked it down online, it is indeed totally awesome spazz out music... never heard any UK stuff from that time period that had equal levelness of weirdness and aggression... it's like Subway Sect mixed with Discharge...
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Just checked out the list -- it's pretty good! Totally random though (EHG?! WTF?!). And Peter even mentioned Rorschach. And Born Against. And Heroin. Dunno how you justify any of these choices -- there seems to be a lot missing -- and hardcore is such a massive scene, if you include all the derivatives, but then, like the man said...
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
petergunn said:
re: the "cutoff date" for H/C... there isn't one, there's just Old School, NEw School, etc... the Cro-Mags are kinda like the first Second Wave NYHC band... that first Cro-Mags record is so fucking ill, but it's different from Kraut, or Urban Waste (that 7" is AMAZING)... and then you have bands like Underdog, Leeway, Sick of it all. 25 ta life (man, did they suck), whatever... i mean, there is a direct chain of HC... but to me, there is a magic to the 80-86 stuff that is missing from everything after...the template was set... so, i don't think that an Eye for an Eye record from 1990 is any better than Sam Black Church record from 94, but that Jerry's Kids are WAY better than both of 'em...

the thing is with hardcore after 86 is most of the smart kids had left the room... big tatooed dum guys need music too, but judged purely as MUSIC, some of it is absolute shit..
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Ok, so I see where you're coming from Peter and you probably have a point about the smart kids leaving the room, but I dunno about this. One of the things that I always hated about MRR in particular and punk/hardcore more generally was the way everyone was so obssessed with sounding as generic as possible. Like the way MRR wouldn't feature a band if they weren't "punk". They might think they were punk (e.g. Neurosis), but if they didn't toe the party line, they wouldn't be invited. Emo had the odd column, true, but by emo they really meant, thrash, power violence, evil Spanakorzo or Coleman-type stuff and very little of what I would describve as emo. Hardcore got the ocassional interview or review, but mostly it seemed to be about wanking over some long dead dream.

The thing about punks always going on about how hardcore wasn't hardcore any more and how it's gone really metal (and I used to know loads of people like this), is that probably about the same time hardcore got 'metal', metal got really 'hardcore'. Honestly, you couldn't have bands like Morbid Angel or Slayer or Darkthrone or Sodom or Terrorizer or Possessed or Bathory or fucking anything that doesn't sound like Maiden or Sabbath without punk and hardcore. At the end of the day, if you like fast agressive music (or slow agressive music), you're going to listen to both and take your influences from wherever you find them.
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
vimothy said:
For instance, thrash: is that a hardcore thing or a metal thing?
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both...

at least to me, thrash was a place where metal and HC mixed... i think i touched upon this in an earlier post, but thrash had a lot of punk in it... the template was like New Wave of British Heavy Metal mixed with Hardcore...

bands like Metallica, Anthrax, and Slayer were def into and aware of hardcore... Black Flag stuff like Damaged and My War was a big influence on those bands... (actually Slayer covered a Minor Threat song like 10-15 years ago)... around 80-81 HC was faster than metal... Thrash was a case of taking HC speed and fury and streamlining it... than later (86) the HC bands began going metal as they got a little older and got into beer, blow, and girls... and thrash bands like S.O.D. were basically exactly half punk and half metal...

re: yr above post, i get what yr saying... that's EVERYONE'S problem with MRR... they are boring elitists who mostly listen to boring ass retrograde music... i mean, shit, that's why i'm not a punk anymore... the thing you have to always keep in mind is that really, at this point, punk is like a club, with dumb ass rules as to who can and can't get in...
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Yeah, we're well on the same page.

The two scenes did converge heavily, even while maintaining some kind of weird hostility and sense of distance. It's fun to trace the cross-polination, like side B of My Way > EyeHateGod, Grief and Southern Sludge and crusty Doom and even some later Pantera. Or GBH > Bathory and Darkthrone and therefore basically the whole of Black Metal, despite the sort of ostensible hostility most BMers direct at punk. The development of Thrash is unimaginable without fast ass punk. Even the subject matter of lyrics became more 'real-world', less wizards and orcs, everyone starts wearing high-tops...

Fuck the lot of 'em though -- scenes are for dicks.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Been trying to think of my top 20 h/c records. Not in an canonical sense, just my favourite ones from when I was younger. So far I've got,

Union of Uranus -- Double 7" (one of my favourite ever records)
Spazz side of the Spazz/Toast split 7" on HG Fact
Ice Nine 7"
His Hero Is gone -- 15 Counts of Arson
Integrity -- ...and for those who still fear tomorrow
 
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