Snapcase
Designs for Automotion (Victory Records)

About this hardcore thing you've really got to be binocular: screw up one eye and behold a sealed playground for thugs, runts, drones, and demagogues, a grim halfworld where preening skinheads endlessly rehearse their primordial dramas—faces distended in purist rage—tendons coiled in a sweat-sleek forearm—massed salutes—repressed seekers after the love of men—music that twitches like the vestigial tail-stump it truly is—etc. Screw up the other eye and it's folk music, a tribal beat, a still-necessary set of moves, nothing less than a full-force belief system in noise. Depends who's playing, I guess.

This band Snapcase, I would say, are currently in charge. Designs For Automotion is their third LP and you can tell by that kraut-ish and quite awesomely humorless title that they are not fucking around. "Automotion" is of course an HR coinage—to rhyme I believe with "super-potion!" from "Don't Need It"—which means that Snapcase are specifically referencing the frothing, jabbering, pre-Rasta religiosity of Bad Brains at their freshest and most foam-furious, before apocalyptic herb-clouds covered the land and the bass lines of righteousness boomed. Automotion is what? Self-starting, if we take it literally: inner movement. Less literally, it means the heart ablaze, the gift of life not squandered, and all the visionary advantages consequent thereupon. For Snapcase, like many fundamentalists, punk rockers, and pre-medication nutcases, are in love with a new way of seeing—new men new world new life, as Kenneth Patchen once cried. Break into clarity via, in this case, a scission of guitars. No more frail epiphanies, no wasted revelations. YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Do so, then look back, and oh my God—the halitotic hell-imps of disgust will waltz around. Most of what we eat, watch, read, think, work for: garbage! Yes, with these songs we are in the company of vegans and haughty straightedgers, through-the-looking-glass people. Can you... Feel your heartbeat? they scream in "Energy Dome." Are you living?... Well shit, AM I? I will not flinch from these sermons, from this burning identity-probe—not while the music is this good.

Lest I become too artsily obtuse further down the page: this is GOOD. This is shit-hot. One guitar carves out the riff, the other rises, reaches, toward some kind of high-security frequency where only the vitalest news is. Yowled exhortations to consciousness. Hardcore metal, if you want to nail it down. But no fancy macro-metal maneuvers, no double-bass-drum tattoos or whistling spirit-twists of geetar. Snapcase's hardcore is metallicized inasmuch as it trades accelerative energy for the weight of the DOWNbeat—piledriven inward, right to the root of the nerve. Mystical adhesion to the principle Gerard Manley Hopkins called "sheer plod"—gravity, age, struggle—crash, crash, and crash again. A moral value: the nobility of effort, of life kicking up sparks against eternity. When Black Flag were pioneering/experimenting with that throbbed, slowdown stuff around My War the heads at SST dubbed it "the socialist groove," meaning every beat carries its load, power shared from kick to snare, equalization among the instruments. It's in Snapcase frontman Daryl Taberski's singing, the roared syllables in identically stressed sequence—like BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!—except it's not blah, it's the wake-up call: You need to rise up and revolutionize your thin-king! This is no arse-twitching dancefloor delight, in other words—you, you little disco-biscuit, might find the Snapcase groove to be stiff-armed, sex-drained, all but funkless—but it does hit, over and over. And it's not without its own ingenuities: you just can't do this stuff nowadays without being a real practice-pad technician, and this crew can stop, start, chop, change, attract, repel, suck and expel, do all that keeps us locked in. Since their last album Progression Through Unlearning (ouch!) they have even acquired—how to put it?—a sort of plangency, a wistful sense of the pop hook that skims and flits about in the hind zones like an unemployed angel. Not that this is "popcore" (nothing like it, thank Christ) but between the cathedral chords of "Ambition Now" and the barked, rhythm-pumped antiphonies of "20th Nervous Breakdown" we have genuine higher-brain impact—melodic uptake.

The motor, of course, is outrage: a keen, crisp sense of world-reversing wrongness (and—crucially—the technics to back it up). The media! The entertainment industry! The whole fucking shooting-match! It feeds the senses/Subconscious lies!... It makes us want/What we do not need!—jack out, the music says, jack out, you user you target, out of that whole seething, dazzling grid of shame and desire, and jack into THIS. No more the love-bombings, no more the educations in exquisite self-contempt, this is the power of all truth. New volts, new jolts—can you take it? One type of energy replaces another, it's like some piece of electrical engineering, and indeed there is something denatured in Snapcase music: in the steely, unglandular rush of it, the scalded invariant voice hollering its prophecies, the flick-of-a-switch fury, the sonic impeccability—something, I really think, fascinatingly mechanized about it. It acts on you with all its pistonry, it processes you, it dramatizes oppression even as it busts you venomously loose from it. "Are You Tuned In" erupts from a simmering vat of technological blip-and-hiss, rants wildly, and then recedes two minutes later into a strange womb-of-all synth-pulse, as if it's been swallowed by the machines that made it. I'd like to see the band taking this further, techno-fying their trip a little more—obsessed as they are with the battle for identity, it would make sense to get more of that post-human noise in there: the hummmmm of the enemy-mind.

Of course it's hard to step into the new life without going all pop-eyed and earnest. From the official band Web site we learn that "all of the members continue to take things in stride, day by day, while appreciating and enjoying everything that they have been given and have accomplished." Aaaah... feels like a cheap shot to even quote that. Or this! "Outside of the band, four of the five members are receiving advanced, scholarly degrees while four of the five are also employed in jobs ranging from computer, record, and health food store employees to building race cars. When asked how the band manages to balance such a wide and divergent array of activities, [drummer Tim] Redmond sheepishly smiles and quips, 'I really don't know.'" Jesus! Latter-day saints they may be‹quipsters they are not. But it's all part of the great equation: what looks like mere callow earnestness in other realms becomes, as soon as they pick up their instruments, a deep and heavy seriousness, which is the almost-lethal strength of this music. Only you can save your soul! It doesn't get much nearer the knuckle than that. And near the knuckle, surely, is where we—my brothers and sisters—need to be. RIGHT?

Richard Meltzer
A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings Of Richard Meltzer (Da Capo Press, 2000)

"A whore just like the rest" indeed! Let's get it straight: if Richard Meltzer is a whore, then I'm a coin-in-the-greasy-slot-for-thirty-seconds-of-low-production-value-porn machine. Or to put it another way, if I am said machine, then Meltzer is the guy who—sacramentally unsqueamish, too holy for shame—comes in afterwards and cleans it up. ("It" being the rank seed of the late capitalist psyche as it disintegrates into shards of burning lust and so on). Meltzer reckons—insists!—he invented rock criticism, its epistemology and phenomenology and all that. I dunno, did he? First rock writer I ever read was Jack Kerouac, and he was writing about jazz... and before him there was Otis Ferguson... But this is by-the-by: if Meltzer wants it, he can have it. Personally, I invented Jenny McCarthy (see my profile of her in British Esquire, February 1999). No, what matters most to me in this book is the blow-by-stinking-blow account of a life in paid-by-the-word prose, decades of wild underfunded scatterings—none of them whorish—that when piled together become a monument of epic scale to integrity... perversity... call it CHARACTER.

To rewind a little: before this nice fat volume of his Music Writings, what was Meltzer to me? A name, of course—often flourished by elders in a Lester Bangs/fathers-of-rockwriting connection‹but little else. There was my unhappy two-page encounter with his Aesthetics of Rock, which managed to make me feel both stupid AND intellectually affronted (nice one!); and there was the time I caught Meltzer's none-too-dignified appearance in the Angry Samoans' True Documentary, as singer for the ghastly Vom and wetbrained punk theorist—"I figure once I've learned how to play a song properly... why play it again?" (Crazy!) But basically I was a Meltzer virgin. And now I'm sort of a Meltzer slut, a fiend for his allure. I've even gone back to that Samoans video and found him, yes, darkly charismatic... fascinating... And I've discovered we share the same birthday (May 10, fellow Taureans! Happy 55, Mr. M!) As a stylist he masturbates in the very finest sense, whipping up the scum of frenzy to precipitate whatever he can (and doing it habitually, like he can't stop). He cultivates, too, that his-breath-in-your-face nearness, that unstable presence which has been termed gonzo. No one does it like him. No one overdoes it like him—jagged, private, obsessional to the point where you feel you've been buttonholed by some garrulous bum or burnout, the drizzle of muttered arcana spasming suddenly into surreal uppercase foghorning: rrrr... my childhood qua jazz... life-as-dealt... pair of all reet butthalves SPOKEN IN TONGUES WITH SO-CAL'S DEMONS OF THE NIGHT... ssss... bleh... my fucking novel... the trans-idiomatic shuck known as folk rock... situation deteriorating PROVES BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DUCK... All of which you might creep away from were it not for the bits where he holds you with his skinny hand like the Ancient Mariner, grips your sleeve and speaks his soul with burning-eyed conviction: "LISTEN GOOD. What I write, on music or anything, is not narcissism—NEVER!" or "Do you have any idea how degrading it is at this stage of my life to have to beat my own drum? What such a dance does to my 'dignity'?" I fear thee, Ancient Mariner! I fear thy freeform spleen!

But this is but one of the Meltzer voices. He is also a poet, and some sort of philosopher, and a humorist on a par with the greats, with true flow and timing as well as an incidental genius for fake names, fake diseases, fake soup flavors and the like. The '96­'98 "band profiles" he wrote for the San Diego Reader are as cleanly out-there as Flann O'Brien's Irish Times columns. O'Brien (who was really Brian O'Nolan) wrote those columns under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen—a pseudonym of a pseudonym. Meltzer, a babble of personae himself, has waltzed across the page as Borneo Jimmy, (Not the) Audie Murphy, Jr., Fort Gray O'Hunky, and the Night Writer (Writes Only at Night), be he never—thankfully—gets far from his own riven, foreworking nature. Thankfully because otherwise we would have lost the privilege of seeing a supercharged talent at war with its calling, its environment, its education (booted off his Yale philosophy course by un-rock professors!), everything. Plus as the years and articles pile up the aliases crumble, all trace of ludic detachment is burned off, and you get the feeling that there's no way this crabbed, histrionic geezer could have been anything but what, or who, he is: a man makes his own fate, after all.

And this is the whole story—30 years of features/reviews/interviews, reams of fustian and harangue, and in between them these introductory/exegetical passages that tell you how he was feeling and who he was sleeping with when he wrote this or that, and how he feels reading it now. Along the way our man settles some old scores with his celebrity subjects, strangely lambasting the rockstars for being too rockstarish (Lou Reed was rude to me! Patti Smith ignored me!) but things really heat up when he starts in on his professional life. Because with this collection Richard Meltzer has reached a reckoning: this is payback, pal, this is the freelancer's revenge, the moment when the oiled rags of indignation wadded deep in his hungry gullet finally ignite and he hits his editors, his sub-editors, his copy-editors—all the "jackjills" and "jerkingtons" who ever crossed him—with broad and scouring blasts of mouth-fire. You are NOT forgiven! Peers from the rockcrit biz get it full force: Robert Christgau—"what a prig," "what a dogfucker"—Greil Marcus—"a breast-beating square," "stuffed shirt," "King of the Proprietary Cooties." Truly a mad and wondrous spectacle, this clinging to ancient grievances, miniature slights (Greil Marcus never sent me a copy of his book! I had to call his publicist!)—the maniac Meltzer devotedly tending his vials of wrath. Now I don't care what anybody says, Greil Marcus is a bloody good writer, but I love to watch this fur fly because—for those of you who don't know—this is what a writer (freelance be blowed! ANY writer) actually feels like much of the time. Show me one writer who doesn't spend at least 20% of his/her day in an impotent whirl of recrimination and I'll show you a liar. Meltzer is not a liar. Washed-up? Let's say amphibious, a creature between states. He's a bitter old bastard. He's a genius. He's a hundred-foot pillar of flame before which all sad hacks, sacked heads, and had-it sacks (and I mean me) should be a-kneeling.

Five Style, Jeremy Boyle
Miniature Portraits (Sub Pop Records) and Songs from the Guitar Solos (Southern Records)

Instrumental stuff for your many moods. Five Style is the Grateful Dead finally trash-compacted into something useful, bouncing and gibbering 'twixt ska, calypso, freak-funk, and Tortoise-like finger-wiggling. But don't let that put you off! A very charming barrel of monkeys. Jeremy Boyle has named his Songs "Kiss," "Sabbath," "Van Halen," and so on, like he's working from samples, but I'm fucked if I can pick up even a flicker or trace of mega-rock in these somber, ethereal droneworks—which leads me to suspect he's playing a masterly trick on my guitar-encrusted sensibilities, as I yearn and strain for the familiar and am rewarded with many layers of strangeness. Beautiful, at any rate.

T-Model Ford, Robert Belfour
She Ain't None of Your'n and What's Wrong With You (Fat Possum Records)

More absolutely fundamental, bumping-across-the-floors-of-sound shit from Fat Possum—what a label. Of these two patriarch bluesmen T-Model rocks the harder, landing with a bowel-rattling crash while Robert Belfour summons the spooks, moans, and grinds, all wasted love and crepuscular overhang. To quote the prophet Daniel Higgs: "Woke up this morning! The blues were coming down! Like lava... like bibles... like grand pianos!" Essential in every sense.

Spot, Wretch Like Me
Unhalfbaking (Upland) and Calling all Cars (Owned and Operated Records)

Spot, the man who produced the Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, and Black Flag, has got more lore and wizardry running in the grooves of his brain than the pottiest Amazonian shaman. So he says NO! to rock and stages a jungle-retreat into violins, banjos, and whistles, acoustic notes that ring like the green flare of sunset, and babbles hermetically to himself in couplets of psycho-sarcastic brilliance—"spirits push invisible brooms/Round the unmade beds in the hotel rooms... ." Birds roost upon his shoulders, organic essences are gorgeously distilled. Something of a masterpiece, I'm serious. Back in the world, Wretch Like Me continue to push their brand of insanely stacked punk tuneage right to its heaving limit, to the very lip of breakdown/mutation—in the middle of "Desperate" the music actually starts to eat itself. Heroic.

Milligram, Scissorfight
Piscetaqua e.p. and Hello Motherfucker! e.p. (Tortuga Records)

Two classics from Boston's home o' th' hits—anyone else notice we're enjoying a Golden Age here? Milligram's first release is a goddamn ultimatum: 17 minutes 10 seconds of teeth-grinding thrills, base rock hardcore—purified, bong-metal meeting its Higher Power, fucking anthems—"got to get some/more done!" Not a SECOND of pissing about. Scissorfight—as you should all know by now—are the pagan kings of geophysical domination-boogie, with man-eating comic esprit and a low end like a volcanic core. On this one Ironlung takes us over the top, a sun-blocking shadow at the head of the attack: "How much shit should we take?/The time is right‹to smash the corporate state... OUTMOTHERFUCKER THE MAN!"