Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Upper Crust

It's springtime and I want something that hits as heavy as metal, but can still make me move and get into it like good hardcore punk. To satisfy this craving, I've turned to crust punk.

Crust, which blends hardcore punk and d-beat with metal style riffing (drawn quite a bit from early black metal like Bathory and Hellhammer), is a genre obsessed with anti-establishment politics, primitivism and ecological / animal / human rights issues. It draws these influences together in a melange of fast paced hardcore punk replete with extreme riffing and thrashing passages of mayhem.

My listening has led me to quite a bit of more “popular” crust bands, such as G.I.S.M., Aus-Rotten and Amebix. Of these, G.I.S.M. has clicked the best with me. In fact, I spun the track “Endless Blockade for the Pussyfooters” at a party this weekend and one fan went so out of control that he put his foot through the wall.

I've found myself more entranced with more contemporary bands, whose use of metal riffage becomes even more extreme. For instance, I'm drawn to bands such as Wartorn and Black September (both of whom I got to see at For Real Fest last year and have been in love with ever since), Dishammer (whose black metal-meets-d-beat sound and name are composed of two trends: “Dis-” and “-hammer”) and, most recently, Nux Vomica (who combine crust with jawdropping technical metal shredding).

Before anyone asks, I'm not just jumping on the crust bandwagon because of Lady Gaga's jacket. I don't know if that's actually going to happen for young crust punk fans, but I can't imagine that a scene full of anti-capitalist black bloc-ers will be too into their look and bands being bandied about on MTV as a hip name drop.

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