Tomorrow

Meet Me On The Equinox

Jesus-fucking-piss-christ this song is good. As a rabid, new material hungry fan of everything Death Cab spawn I'm most probably biased towards liking this song. It's just a shame the primary audience for this three minutes of sensual movement in the dark will be the mewing, pre-pubescent, kiddy-crap bandwagoners. Ben Gibbard has if anything punched a hole through the overly literate 'kid next door' voice and demeanour that pop culture seems to have plastered over him. Instead he gushes sagely about the fragility of life and the importance of compromise. Heavy yet beautiful stuff.

Lepers to feed the Lepers

I'd probably go as far to say that Trash Talk - Plagues is one of my favourite recordings of all time. You might think that's a bit transparent what with there being a good thirty years of punk backed up in the catalogues before the Sacramento outfit released that EP, but it is just so fucking unruly. Pieced together with so much hate and bile, it would out-evil the childsnatcher.

"For the path of the pale horse leads not astray. I wrote a song I hoped the world would hate as much as I hate myself today"

It is the resulting regurgitation of an absolute fucking recoil by four men and their mindsets fixed firmly against normal existence. I suspect most of you movers & shakers ingratiated within the international hardcore scene will know exactly what I'm talking about. For everyone else, spin Plagues to death like I have most nights for the past year, and knock your head against the wall. I really cannot say enough about this 5.2 minutes of sheer blood spilling, bone breaking, neck snapping hardcore.

A previous Trash Talk post can be found here.

Would this playlist woo a young lady?

Or am I missing something?
Also expect a post on Kidcrash soon enough, as they are 100% spectacular and I am falling into an emocore sticky love with them.

Jail Bait Core by Dana Goldstein

Check out the entire set here. Dana Goldstein is so fucking good, these inspire me no end. Can't remember where I saw these first but they came screaming back to me in a Vice magazine Hannah had.

The Receiving End Of Sirens

The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi

Forget everything you know about the show pony jangling of today's preened teens of post hardcore, and start again with Boston's The Receiving End of Sirens. In 2005 they released Between The Heart And The Synapse and the resulting onset of bandwagon kids who had somewhat grown out of Jimmy Eat World rightly championed the band for their developed musical senses, at a time where a Blink 182-less Punk community was left licking it's wounds and awaiting the knock on the door from Fall Out Boy / My Chemical Romance.

Music has never been more of a commodity than it is now, some bands rush or are rushed by higher powers to machine build their albums and have them ready for distribution quicker than you can say 'major record label'. Dance Gavin Dance have put out three full lengths and an extended EP in just four years, I mean what on earth is that an attempt to do? Flood the market with their presence and just force a fan base into existence? Nevertheless I'd count myself a fan of their earlier work at least. But I digress...

The Receiving End Of Sirens released an album in 2007 through Triple Crown Records, under the title ' The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi'. Jam packed with so much tinkering and slight of hand you'd think Willy Wonka had a hand in it's production, it featured new vocalist Casey Crescenzo - a kid they picked up from California with a voice so lofty it could open the pearly gates themselves. The great umbrella of post hardcore is annoyingly fitting for 'Sirens style, as they fatten their spine of Heavy Rock with familiar Punk overtones and delicate pop sensibilities. They find enough room for bleeding veins of keyboard driven experimentations into their sound to boot.

I definitely recommend this album, even if it's just to dispel the haze of bands in 2009 that have tore chunks of sound out of 'Sirens still warm corpse.


Download Here

Some Girls

I met a nice girl who listens to hardcore punk, proper hardcore punk and who has introduced me to so much already, I can't even begin to tell you. She reminds me of Zooey Deschanel in a big way, all I want to do is make art with her. When I'm not with her I want to be with her and I want everyone to know that I'm with her.

Oh My God - Wesley Eisold Career Reductive

Some people are born, headfirst into a cradle and never really escape that blanket security. Grow, eat, job, no time for life? They will always keep their cards and their souls close to their chest. The best experiences come from offering it to someone else altogether. Wes Eisold probably clawed his way out of the womb for fear of wasting his allotted time. The man, the musician, the poet, is a distillation of pretty much everything the counter culture has to roll out. Pageboy haircut tops a mind tank-melting pot of hardcore primitives and poetically twisted affectation.

The rolling panzer of American Nightmare / Give Up The Ghost defined for many kids, their flourishing adolescent glut of angst. The second wavers still paraded the likes of Gorilla Biscuits and H2O on their big apple shoulders, dashing the hopes of all but the truest punks willing to hark back to the '88 revival sound. I've never understood why the crew cut youth of yesterday are so unwilling to open up and embrace whatever mutant sounds the apple mac generation are crafting - without dismissing it as spurious faux-punk on first glance.

Equal Vision put out the insanely heavy, insanely mosh inducing debut LP 'Background Music,' which, after the self titled EP & the 'Sun Isn't Getting Any Brighter' EP stirred the mortar that would go on to cement Give Up The Ghost's place in modern hardcore culture. I am in no doubt that when they whipped out the likes of Am/Pm in whatever back alley sweatbox they were playing in, bedlam would ensue.

We're Down Til' We're Underground' continued the lightning war, yet saw Eisold & co. feel their way through the mesh of hardcore limits as a more realised sound coalesced into being. This album is an outright fucking tirade, a professionally orchestrated outing with the grime, grit and self reflection that hardcore punk can frame so well.


The heartstrings that lashed such a volatile band together eventually gave way, with a fallout that was felt throughout the listening community. They were just so incredibly good, so strong but equally listenable - along with The Suicide File they had inflamed the north eastern scene and beat it's chest raw. A collective driftwood of available musicians flooded the talent radar and one by one they each found new projects by which to ply their trade. Tim Cossar now flies the flag for metallic hardcore heavysets The Hope Conspiracy, and Jarvis Holden united with post-hardcore king Daryl Palumbo to birth the power pop snaps & crackles of Head Automatica. Wes pretty much just wiped the snot from his nose and threw himself head first back into the swarming mass of young bloods thirsty for the next chapter.

Some Girls congealed together rather naturally, as Wes joined forces with Justin Pearson of The Locust (and a plethora of other bands), to thrash out a more rudimentary, light speed soundtrack of warped destruction. In late 2003 they kicked out an LP All My Friends Are Going Death on Deathwish, which has subsequently I hear been remastered, mixed and issued along with some sweet etching, all on limited edition colour vinyl. Some Girls' unbridled fuck-you-we're-gonna-play-our-way coupling of attitude and sound flipped the coin completely. The union of past Unbroken, Tristeza, Holy Molar and Give Up The Ghost members was a rabid formula.

The second full length dropped in 2006, this time Epitaph swooped to put it out. The writing for 'Heaven's Pregnant Teens' was a maturing process for Some Girls. They kept their animalistic message crystal clear, and left no stone unturned in their quest to reach the desired ear slaying caterwaul.

Some Girls died a death unfitting of a band made up of such live wires. The band was 'quietly put to rest' in October of 2007, freeing up Wes once more. The rolling stone that gathers no moss had hooked up with the incomparable Chauncey and others as a side project before the Some Girls split, the cacophony resulting from forcing hardcore punk into a kinship with danceable electronica beats rattled the cages of even the staunchest 'punk as fuck' kids. The preppy long island new wavers most probably had their J-Crew socks blown off by the likes of XO Skeletons



XO Skeletons went on to record 'Bored By Heaven' in a series of sessions, later releasing it free to download.

In post Obama victory America Wes has spread his runners further left field, founding and currently running Heartworm Press out of Philadelphia, PA. Heartworm is a collective escape for talented punks and other such scene luminaries who can write better than the average dirtbag and have more than half interesting stories to tell. Some of it, if not all of it is genuinely brilliant, well crafted drug enduced stumbles through the inner workings of a teenager's horomone bank.

Musically hes moved even further into the darker corners of the electronic world with Cold Cave, concocting devilishly sombre slices of experimental synth-noise / no wave / dark wave. Whichever tag of the week is going through the hip-kid processing machine applies here. I think tagging Cold Cave as 'Cold Wave' is one step beyond the borderline of ridiculousness. Nevertheless some of their bites make me think of what Faithless might have sounded like if they had an even bleaker outlook on life and wore trenchcoats indoors, or had played jaw crushing hardcore for ten years prior. So check out what some people called the 'catchiest twelve minutes of 2008', The Trees Grew Emotions And Died

For The People That Died

Someone has introduced me to Heartworm Press, It is pretty fucking defining. For those who are blind to their prose genius - get involved at The Heartworm. Wes Eisold is a multi-trick pony, Even Fall Out Boy steal his eloquence. It's not just Wes, the contributions come from far and wide - and to me they spread the seed of the healing powers of Punk, along with the fucked up delights of America's scratch & sniff urban underbellies.

"From there I saw myself lying in bed with 'that girl' sharing and comparing all past crimes and misdemeanors to the sounds of crystal hearts colliding, and in that moment I saw colour for the first time. I lost my soul. To be honest, it was hers from the very start"

- Max G Morton, 'Indestructable Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard', Heartworm Press