To listen to, enjoy and truly engage with certain types of noizy hardcore punk, it could be argued that you need to be, at least, a little masochistic. I mean, in theory no sane person likes to be aurally punished by purposefully brutal, relentless and loud noisy music. I remember well the combination of utter dismay and genuine concern for my mental health on some of my (non-punk) friends' faces when I played them Extreme Noise Terror as a reply to the rather innocuous question "so what do you listen to these days? Still into punk-rock?". Of course, relativity is of the essence here. If you listen to a lot of that kind of punk like myself, some vintage ENT in the morning will sound like a reward, a gratification and not like an unfair punishment inflicted by a soap-dodging weirdo. Hence the parallel with masochism. Are subgenres like cavemen crust or crasher or stenchcore musical forms of masochism? Do we like or need the pain to get into these? And if so, where would goregrind be on the scale of masochism? Shagging someone who just ate four pounds of stale garlic sausages? Such questions do make one shiver.
Another memory that immediately comes to mind in order to illustrate this theory is Sete Star Sept's gigs in Paris in 2014. It took place in a genuinely depressing and miserable-looking bar (that also served mediocre pizzas) located in a rather rough Parisian suburbs whose landlord, a friendly Sri Lankan man, once agreed to host a punk gig in order to attract some punters as his bar was almost always empty after 6pm. Following that fateful decision of his, he ended up having punk gigs regularly, sometimes several times a week, and bands like Destino Final, Fleas & Lice, Morne and even Dropdead and The Mob played there. I don't think the landlord ever got the appeal of punk music but, up to a certain point, he managed to bear the pain stoically. That Sete Start Sept gig stands out because of how emphatically chaotic and noisy and just incomprehensible the band sounded like (I mean, even I struggle to go through a SSS record). The look on that poor man's face was one of utter disbelief, composed incredulity and fatalistic pain as he witnessed the band's performance. What unlikely chain of events, he must have asked himself, led to me owning a cheap bar hosting what could be best defined as an impenetrable wall of nasty sound that some people inexplicably seem to enjoy? SSS is a rather extreme example, his worst night maybe, and fortunately for him, not every gig were that much of a sonic bollocking. But still, as I watched the grindcore freaks relishing in the savage noise and the landlord's resilient agony, the paradox was evident. Some loved the punishment while others endured it.
Wheel of War can be said to be an absolute scandicrust bollocking, one that is unceasingly intense and furiously harsh, one that could easily repel meaningful sectors of the hardcore punk world, one that could even be considered as being "maybe a bit much" by fans of d-beat and raw punk. And I would not entirely disagree with such a statement actually as Wheel of War can sound a little hard to bear. But it is still patently one of the best albums in the crust category of the 2010's and most likely the best in the scandicrust subcategory. For some reason, the MTV Music Award went for Ed fucking Sheeran as artist of the year in 2017 and Napalm Raid were not even nominated. In fact, the knobheads don't even have a Best Crust Artist category. Shameful really.
Wheel of War is so good precisely because it sounds so punishing. Whenever I play it, I excitedly anticipate the coming kicks up the arse, I know what's coming and am looking forward to it. The Lp reminds me of D-Clone Creation and Destroy, or Framtid's Lp's, or Flyblown's, or Atrocious Madness', or 3-Way Cum's Ep's, or Hiatus' Way of Doom, or Doom's Peel Sessions, not because Napalm Raid sound just like them (although the Canadians are certainly not dissimilar to some of those works) but because their Lp possesses that level of madness-inducing sonic aggression, of uncontrolled anger, of unhinged power. The battering does leave the listener exhausted but happy. Or it can lead to him or her leaving punk-rock in order to live an existence of silence in a monastery somewhere in the arse-end of nowhere.
Napalm Raid (which we will call NR from now on) are from Halifax, Nova Scotia, a dynamic Canadian town that has produced a vast number of top crust and hardcore bands (and extreme bands in general from I gather) in the past fifteen years, some of which I rate very, very highly. There will be further opportunities to talk about those in the future of Live by the Crust, Die by the Crust. I first heard of a Halifax crust scene through Contagium in the late 00's but upon preparing that dantean series I realized that the seemingly immortal System Shit are also from there and, uncoincidentally NR did a split tape with them in their early years. NR caught my attention in 2012 when I bumped into their video of "Why" (where does that come from) on fucking youtube (I have to say I am generally not a big fan of music videos but this one is pretty basic, just the band playing in the studio, nothing cheesy). I was of course impressed with the band's solid, hard-hitting knowledgeable take on the 90's Anti-Cimex/Driller Killer sound but I was particularly fond of the deeply deranged echoing reverbed vocals. At the time, not every band and their mum used such effects (Destino Final obviously did, a lot) so that it sounded a little different. Because I was absolutely skint at the time, I could not buy the Mindless Nation Lp though.
Two years after, I read about NR's new Ep Storm, a record that I instantly got into and promptly got hold of. While the band kept a significant Cimex käng backbone, they added a distorted Japanese crust sound to the music and, in an emphatically loving move, reinforced the early Doom influence especially on the vocals and the animalistic cavemen atmosphere. Thanks to a massive crashercrust-styled production, Storm was an absolute crusher of a record that indicated a strong crustification of NR's music. I love both Wheel of War and Storm but I would understand why one would rate the latter higher (I think I do, because I did not expect it to be that good). I literally could not wait for the followup and when Wheel of War came out I already knew that it was going to be a collection of intense scorchers but wondered if the album was going to sound like a meaning-enhancing cohesive whole as opposed to just like an assemblage of songs that sound good separately but do not really work together. Was it going to be a collection of short stories or a proper novel? I would have been fine with both but to pull out a genuine great crust album you do have to think about how your songs echo and relate with each other, how specific changes affect the overall narrative. Quite a challenge really as, in the world of crust, recording a great Ep is not the same as writing a great album, the stakes are just different.
Thankfully NR managed to write a magnificent second album that does not relinquish any of the band's awe-inspiring crushing power and still tells a good story and has a solid plot with enough changes of paces and executions, enough introductions and transitions to make the album memorable. Don't get me wrong, it still sounds like a demented grizzli bear giving you a right bollocking and not like a boringly pretentious German post-hardcore project but I appreciate when records really tell me something (well, shout mercilessly something at me in this case). The sound is a little different to Storm's, maybe less distortion-oriented however the drums have never sounded so powerful, like an endless shower of crust pants-wearing meteors crashing on the listener. Heavy shit. Wheel of War opens with the eponymous song, a metallic filth-crust number - with those hyperbolic howling Doom-like anguished cries that personify the band - that sounds like a rabid row between Brum's finest, Driller Killer, Framtid and Disturd. The next two songs are faster and more direct distorted scandicrust songs that just pummels the shit out of you while "No law" is more has more of a mid-paced distorted 00's stenchcore with a thrashing groove, you know what I mean? The next two are more short sharp shocks of crasher-käng and the final number of the first side is a heavy and dark mid-paced Cimex-styled beefy conclusion. The second side does not let the pressure off at all and keeps assaulting your senses. The highlights include "Wounds" a massive distorted groovy tribute to Doom's cover of Black Sabbath - it really is a tribute to the tribute and multilayered referentiality for careful crusters - and "Untold reality", a kind of melancholy and long Wolfpack-inspired käng ballad. Who said d-beat could not reflect morosity?
Wheel of War is pretty much flawless. I have friends who cannot get past the hyperbolic version of Doom vocals but I definitely think they are an element that makes NR so good and recognizable, which is not so easy in the crowded Dis-crust genre. NR are also somewhat unique in that they occupy a liminal position, the boundary between beefy Anti-Cimex käng, neanderthal Doom-worship and manic crasher-styled Japanese crust. It's like chopping some 90's Cimex, early Reality Crisis, early Driller Killer and Disturd with a knife sharpened with classic Doom, then cook it in a Distortion Records pot, spice it up with some Framtid and Bombanfall, then serve it to a rabid Swedish bear and hear the fucker roar through a distorted microphone in your ear. This album sounds massive and unstoppable. You've been warned.
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