“So let me ruin my guts tonight” sings Dylan Slocum as Spanish Love Songs’ latest full-length, Brave Faces Everyone, kicks into gear on album opener, “Routine Pain”. The preamble is filled with self-effacing lyrics that see how much “lower (he) can go” as it sets the tone for a set…
Just another absolutely dynamite premiere today here at Heavy Blog; marking the beginning of a new calendar month with some absolutely rip-roaring rock’n’roll of the noise variety. As cold and clinical as Peter Stormare’s eyes in Fargo when he’s blending Steve Buscemi, Minneapolis power-trio Human Impulse delivery the riffy, dirty…
Welcome to another god damn new year and the mea culpa/house cleaning edition of this here column. A bit of housekeeping, first. I’ve decided to make this thing a bit more compact for the new year. Gone are long-winded descriptions of albums and the multitude of links to individual songs.…
It takes a lot these days for me to get into modern hardcore, particularly that which shows clear roots to certain subsets of the genre. During the late ‘90s and throughout the ‘00s we saw a lot of hardcore acts that started to infuse their sound with themes more commonly…
It’s an election year in the United States, arguably the most divisive election year in the country’s history, if not ever. I (and many others) predicted we’d see a glut of politically motivated punk rock after the results of the 2016 election in the States and true to form that’s…
So a few words about format. For the sake of brevity without this just being a total listicle I opted for a top 10 overall and some pseudo-specific categories to talk about some of the other highlights in the music that was punk and punk-adjacent in 2019 which, good grief,…
So, confession time: I have owed you all this glowing recommendation for this tremendously bright, angular slice of Midwestern autumnal ennui since late this summer. Why is it coming now when there’s snow on the ground in the places that generated this soundtrack to an albeit energetic fit of depression?…
Finally, at long last, I was back in Florida. Sweating bullets and worrying over configurations of various manners of problems that might waylay my efforts to get from Orlando to Gainesville for the first time in more than 10 years. These are the kinds of things that happen to you…
Surely everyone who has ever picked up a guitar, microphone, or drumstick has fantasised about creating an album revered as a bona fide, epoch-defining classic. The dream of having a collection of songs that are still spoken about in hushed, reverent tones more than two decades after their release is…
Short bursts of off-kilter aggression have yet to go out of style for me. As much as I’ve gravitated toward longer and more complex music, I still periodically revisit my high school affinity for the ’00s mathgrind and noisecore scene. I was addicted to bands like An Albatross, iwrestledabearonce, and…
