Issue #412: Accidentally Wrote About Ten Records
Something about this Music League round, songs that make you cry, didn’t move me.
Maybe it was a little difficult for me to get in touch with my feelings. If I were being honest, I would have submitted this:
But there’s no version on Spotify with Koyuki Tanaka’s anime singing voice, Hirabayashi Kazuya.
Or maybe this:
Or this:
But I figured nobody would get any of these and nothing I could write would convey the emotion of being there (watching either of these anime or playing this video game at the right time in your life). Instead, I submitted this:
It wasn’t a well-received submission, but I remember hearing this song for the first time on the radio in 2001 and a genuine feeling of anguish coming over me. It is cheap, perhaps. And the song has a reactionary strain to it in the final verse that condemns the woman in question for her circumstance. I don’t take that as the song’s final word, though, even if the presentation of the plights is salacious.
The league is almost over, with two rounds left to write about. Season three will open up in March.
We will also be movie marathon-ing on Wednesday via Discord. A link to the server comes with your paid subscription to the newsletter.
What Hardcore Records Did I Actually Like This Year?
As one who remains a servant to the scene, I wanted to highlight some hardcore that came out this year. I didn’t intend for this to be a top ten list, but it ended up being one.
Ultimate Disaster — For Progress…
The list is not meant to be in order but I think this is my favorite hardcore music to come out this year. Instantly occasions aggressive head bobbing and guitar miming in my house. This band is d-beat played in the correct way. Song titles include question marks, ellipsis, and even apostrophe. Discharge’s Why (1981) only has 2/3.
Kaleidoscope — Cities of Fear
I saw Kaleidoscope play with the band LIFE in New York this year. People got upset with me when I said they sound kind of like Burn. Nonetheless, it is true, there are shades of Burn in Cities of Fear. This record is straight up incredible. The guitar tone is particular (no wave-y, My War [84] style), rhythms are unique, just so good.
Piston — Capital Crime
This is a very good oi-influenced HC tape from Tallahassee. I like the kind of vocal cadence where the singer is really struggling to fit in every word in a verse and having to rapid-fire certain lines. At the middle of “Spit Your Take,” “You can’t bowdlerize what I say, What’s in my heart and what’s in my head” fits the bill. Changing the rhythm of your vocal deliver matters a lot. It’s a technique underutilized in hardcore music. But not here. Good.
The Massacred — Nightmare Agitators
There’s a certain je ne sais quoi certain bands from Boston are afforded. These bands rarely play and are revered in part because of their uncommon live appearances. But The Massacred are a fantastic band with the ‘78 UK street punk inflection to their less distorted style of d-beat. This record was everywhere this year even though there is no promotional machine proselytizing Nightmare Agitators. Sometimes people like the good shit.
With Hate — From Boston, With Hate
Not much straight edge representation on this list, which is too bad. With Hate has my favorite lyrics of the year. I have a story about seeing Doug preparing to perform these lyrics for the first time I won’t share in any more detail other than it was memorable and immediately endeared me to a band that had not yet played a single note for public consumption. They are the perfect encapsulation of the 2000s era of straight edge music.
Zip — Model Citizen
It’s kinda hard to pin down Zip’s style on Model Citizen. They have the capacious, contemporary sound that seems to absorb every respectable influence for a hardcore band. They are from Indonesia, but playing songs that mostly sound American with a very light touch of Burning Spirits. The recording sounds so fantastic. Maybe more people should be going to Daniel Husayn for mastering? Some real inside baseball shit from Zip making that call.
Bombardement — Dans La Fournaise
Absolutely hate the keyboard intro on this but otherwise a “ripper.” Continental hardcore.
C4 — Payback’s A Bitch
C4 is a great local band to have. They play fast but still somehow make people do acrobatic spinkicks. Their lyrics are a lot less goofy this time around. Instead Owen indulges the most vitriolic and anti-social dimension of his worldview. You might not guess that everyone involved in this release is a load-bearing pillar of the Boston hardcore scene. Would any one of them disappear tomorrow, something would be irrevocably lost. Turned to dust. Because of this record, everything else but Boston hardcore is what’s blown away.
Rigorous Institution — Tormentor
Tormentor is very metal-inflected hardcore, but not metalcore in the sense that most people intend it nor in the sense of having a shared lineage with most contemporary bands that would self-describe this way. They do have conventional mosh parts but their riffing is like midtempo black metal played with a 2000s crust guitar tone. They have some of my favorite album art this year. The lettering on the album title is insane.
Necron 9 — People Die
This band might be even more poppin’ than The Massacred so maybe I don’t need to say anything. The singer is really belting it out on this one, sounds like he’s going to need larynx surgery in a year or two.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.ultramanconnection.com/news/celebrate-the-holidays-with-the-ultraman-yuletide-collection/ — Christmas is over, but next year you can run the Ultraman Yuletide Collection. A themed Blu-Ray like this brings me back to the similarly collated VHS releases of my childhood. The episodes on here are really good. In 1972’s Ultraman Ace Christmas episode, there is some remarkable social commentary about the ascendency of American Christmas iconography in Japan.
I had no idea this Christmas album, performed by the original Pokemon anime’s English voice actors, existed. I found it looking at covers of “Must Be Santa.” It’s a mix of the aforementioned classic covers and some original Christmas songs — that’s what I have linked here. Bizarre stuff, reissued in August of this year to be available on modern streaming services.
Live A Live (1994) is one of my favorite games of all time. Magnus, prolific newsletter author on the JRPG beat, writes both about the game’s creation and symbolic meaning.
https://www.viz.com/vizmanga/chapters/rai-rai-rai — Naoya Matsumoto (author of Kaiju No. 8 [2020]) might have a legitimate case of copyright infringement to bring against Rai Rai Rai (2023). Yoshiaki borrows liberally from Matsumoto’s premise, as well as from Chainsaw Man (2022) and Dai Dark (2019). If it’s not criminal to liberally rip-off the work of peers released less than five years prior, it is at least in poor taste.
When it comes to taste, though, Yoshiaki is unimpeachable. Rai Rai Rai is derivative in every respect except for the footwear of its characters. The manga’s combat suits have Instapump Furies on their feet. And Yoshiaki also draws realistic (possibly infringing) Jordan 1s and Jordan 8s for his characters.
RIP Ryan Duffy.
Event Calendar: Still Here, Still Sincere
There’s a movie marathon on Discord on New Year’s Eve hosted by yours truly. The schedule, as ever, is below.
Then, Sunday, AGDQ begins. Oh yeah.
Until next time.
Love the newsletter header!