Straight Hedge! Noel Gardner Reviews Punk & HC for July

From LA's greatest exports of regressive rock via umlaut-abusing Londoners, a smattering of strutting French crunchers and a decades-spanning Deutschpunk compilation, your buyer's guide to the best new punk music returns

There’s a time and a place for regressive rock, and in this house it’s whenever the day has a Y and the clock has a spring. I love to get hifalutin and turtlenecked with my listening whenever the mood takes, but every human diet needs roughage, and rough boys can often be relied on to feed you by the spoonful.We are talking Hot Load of Los Angeles, on the occasion of their second studio album Realized (Drunken Sailor), and – before getting to the music – admiring their timeless punk larrikin aesthetic. Beerguts unconstrained by leather waistcoats, shades donned for photoshoots, photoshoots in graveyards. Pausing only to share with you the probably apocryphal story about a bag of coke being included with one random copy of their demo tape, know that this LP is one crucial unit if being caught in the early 80s USHC / 70s proto punk / pre-Kill ‘Em All metal warzone is your idea of a good time. Marvin Noyola and Steven Preciado can do all that and more as Hot Load’s guitar twins, and when Christopher Franco’s bass pushes upfront, as on ‘Hot Night’, it’s like Painkiller-era Priest unleashed on Japanese metalpunk.This is, I’m sure, the most heavy metal-coded thing the Drunken Sailor label have released yet, but you’d have to be some kind of greenhorn to not realise/realize Hot Load are from the punk side of the tracks. Matt Trejo, or Fuckhead to use his sometime band alias, is a hollerer, a ground-glass gargler and an “UGH!” adlibber with a register that surely owes much to Jerry A from Poison Idea and stands out through force if nothing else. If you’re reading this in the UK, Hot Load are playing several shows here in August and there’s a good chance one comes close enough for you to test all your senses at it.

ÜMLÄÜT ÄBÜSË ÄLËRT! It’s possible that the Ä in Äxe serves a precise pronunciatory purpose, but the band are from London, so I’m not betting the farm on it. There again, I haven’t seen the passports of even one of Neheroth, Professor Speed, M. Warmaster, Nihil Kaos or Jim Hawkmoon, all of whom could be authentic exiled Teutonic thrash footsoldiers. It is certainly true that Autogeddon (Caligari), Äxe’s second album-length demo tape, is the product of a global extreme music community that still clings onto the long tail of 1980s tape trading even while conducting its business via broadband.This band are the converse of the one reviewed before them, in that their hybrid of metal and punk is avowedly metal-first. That album by Japanese newjacks Verdalack I reviewed a while back does a similar-ish thing – super noisy speed metal – but that group have a sight more technical flash than Äxe, who (while we’re talking Japan) I’d bet (maybe not the farm) dig some Crust War Records spikes’n’mushroom clouds type racket now and then. ‘Violent Hedonism’ is a battering ram of Sodom proportions but also has a solo about two-thirds in I could envisage being off some old Clevo hardcore release, and ‘Dark Justice’ has a pogo beat built for steel toe caps and pool balls in socks.

Two of Lionel Cadiou’s many bands have been reviewed in Straight Hedges of yore: Coupe Gorge and Syndrome 81, where his input on drums and bass respectively went unremarked on by me. With Prisonnier Du Temps’ Le Pouvoir Par La Force (La Vida Es Un Mus), third time’s a guaranteed charm for the Frenchman, as he’s the only musician on an album that’s elegantly rambunctious, eclectically focused and which uses his Oi! priors to craft a big old strutting rock album.I mean, a punk rock album certainly, but the determination not to be boxed in by what some would consider the limitations of that approach is audible. Jacky Cadiou, as he calls himself in this project for whatever reason, shows no desire to ‘be experimental’ in the way one normally thinks of this. It does, though, mean the choruses are heftier, the mix is more multitracked and even if you need phonetic French to sing along, the spirit might just grab you. ‘Trahisons Et Mensonges’ opens Le Pouvoir… up at red herring tempo (almost hardcore-frantic, which isn’t quite the case for anything which follows) and ‘Dans La Douleur Et Les Larmes’ is already the LP’s biggest, blowsiest arena-streetpunk cruncher before Cadiou chucks in a Poison Ruin-type pomp-synth bridge for the hell of it.

The four quarters of Consensus Madness have notched up a lifetime and a half of band membership between them, stretching back to the 90s in some cases. Sarah Ryczek, singer in this Chicago group, self-describes as a “middle-aged punk person” and scanning her lyrics on Endeavors (Iron Lung), Consensus Madness’ debut LP, you’re left with a repeated sense of weariness that invariably comes from prolonged exposure to the world most of us have to endure. This, importantly, is not to be mistaken for defeatism – ‘Let’s Go To War’ might be their signature song in this respect – and is countered tenfold by a breathless musical energy, with Scott Plant, Jeff Rice and Bryan Welch firing off 12-cylinder new wave that uses melody as a weapon.Guitarist Plant also adds some keyboards now and then, and their effect is subtle but profound, with ‘New Bag (Money)’ rocking an especially pleasing Stiff Records-y coda. ‘N.R.P.’ is enlivened by a tinfoil-chewing solo a la East Bay Ray, and that San Francisco proto-hardcore vibe is maintained on ‘Fighting/Type A’. All but one of Endeavors’ songs are under two minutes long, but do clever things with their arrangements so the effect of epic crescendos within small spaces is created.

These columns include something released via UK tape label Noise Merchant often as not, because I appreciate its continued efforts to share global DIY music I would otherwise be unlikely to encounter. Whether Sola of Santiago approached NM’s Pete Tromans, in relation to their ten-song debut Nada Por El Punk, or vice versa, the outcome is beneficial and the album is exemplary bass-heavy rawpunk that sounds ‘very Chilean’ to me at least.If wheel reinvention doesn’t occur inside this quarter-hour, neither is Nada… any kind of genre exercise. It’s got a crust punk production but goes walkabout a bit more with its rhythms; ‘Sola’ (the song) and ‘Defiéndete’ both pirouette towards pogopunk, but this is more an exception than the rule. And while things can get up to hardcore tempo, the slower semi-dirge of ‘Una Vida De Lamentos’ is as heavy a hitter as anything here. Lyrically, Sola are bleak and heavy, depicting a world where cruelty and abuse is the order of the day and one is forced to share social space with drugged-up egotists (as targeted on ‘Excusas’).

Floridian hardcore band Love Canal are unrelated to the mid-80s Californian hardcore band Love Canal, who you can find attempting to start halfhearted beef with their younger namesakes in the comments under this Instagram post. There have undeniably been more bands called Love Canal than ought to be the case, but unfortunately for the olds I think the Floridian ones are better, or at any rate I have more use for them at this moment in time thanks to Warheads On Foreheads (11PM), their debut 7”.Of the three Love Canal tapes preceding it – I’m not sure if these were even offered for sale to the wider world, but they’re all streamable here – the first two were recorded as a solo project by Sid Smith; six people are credited for the third, and as of Warheads… they’re a four-piece with Smith on vocals. They’re also a lot more digestible and coherent than was previously the case, which is saying something given that these eight minutes contain hardcore with a thousand ideas and a distinctly eccentric, creepy and babbl