We're in early January, you still have a vague but persistent headache from New Year's Eve. Your body is not the seemingly forever youth machine you thought it used to be and for some reason someone you haven't seen since middle school has bombarded you with inane selfies on the 31st - hopefully it was just a matter of texting the wrong person - and the realization that you will be one year older by the end of the year slowly dawns upon you. I have never been one to enjoy partying hard on this annual occasion since some inebriated stranger dressed as a penguin vomited on my Hulk Hogan costume some years back. This shameful incident involving unsolicited bodily fluid being excreted over my beloved copy of the 90's WWF championship belt significantly scarred my self-esteem and I have not been able to look at a penguin in the eye since.
Fortunately this year did not end in such a traumatic fashion and therefore the morale is not worse than usual which is already good enough and I feel light and breezy with the prospect of a new year which will inevitably bring the usual amount of ruthless bloody wars, massacres and right-wing wankers somehow getting into power. And of good records too, hopefully. 2024 will see us go through more split Ep's, from the noughties first, ten of them like for the 90's, and probably some from the 2010's (I already have a couple in mind). But let's start with the opening year of the new decade: 2000.
In 2000, my own preoccupations were rather insubstantial as I was bent on scoffing at anyone at school who did not listen to punk music and The Casualties (the two were strict synonyms). As a man on that admittedly puerile mission, I did not have many friends as a consequence but "integrity", as I would call it, was what mattered in punk-rock I had been told. It could have been worse though as a lot of adults seemed to be obsessed at the time with the coming collapse of civilisation because of the infamous Y2K problem and I can remember my dad running around the house in panic because he didn't know shit about computers and antivirus. While I was busy being a self-righteous arrogant nuisance convinced of his own self-importance to "normies" (my rivals would that this has not changed that much), real punks were doing important work and I see this What's right split Ep between Polikarpa y sus Viciosas from Bogota and Defuse from Osaka as a humble but meaningful piece of punk history.
I talked about it before but DIY punk made my younger self realize that if the actual world was big indeed and seemingly torn apart, the punk world was small and connected. Browsing through distro tables in the early 00's I became aware that, not only were there punks all over the place in countries I couldn't really place on a map, but that there had been punks there for two decades already. In an era when people only listened to American or English music beside our own local pop dross in French, the realization that there were bands delivering the goods in Peru, Slovakia or New Zealand came as a shock that was electrifying, stimulating as it opened new horizons and allowed me to feel superior to my brethren on a whole new level. "Oh, so you haven't heard of Venezuelan anarchopunk? What are you? Some sort of cultural imperialist abiding by the United States' hegemonic culture?". At that same time, it also struck me that there were apparently a lot of women involved in punk bands, far more than I thought, just screaming angrily at our world's madness and gender roles. Contrary to what my sexist upbringing taught me, girls also played fast and aggressive punk music and rightfully protested in the face oppression. This got me mum very worried.
This Ep is absolutely wonderful because it combines both aspects: it is a collaboration between two all-female bands from opposite sides of the world. The significance of such a project certainly transcends the actual value of the record, which does not mean however that their output should not be looked at critically, like any piece of art. To completely ignore the creative content in the name of this significance would be somewhat disrespectful and implies that it does not require critical thinking and engagement. This is a sad tendency of our time. To be positive and supportive does not mean to be acritical, quite the contrary. To not critique (when it is done respectfully, knowledgeably and constructively) implies the denial of a work's identity as art.
Alright let's cut the critical theory and let's get to punk-rock. Polikarpa y sus Viciosas (they took their name from Policarpa Salavarrieta, an important political figure in the resistance against the Spaniards during the 19th century who ended up executed) are a band from Bogota formed in 1994 and they are still active. If you have been to gigs in Europe on a regular basis you have certainly bumped into their name since they have been touring several times in the past 15 years. In fact, they were probably one of the first Colombian punk bands to even tour in Europe. Since the incredible success of Muro in 2017, a lot of bands from Bogota gravitating around the Rat Trap Collective have been able to tour internationally but before that few Latino bands could afford to tour so that the idea was unrealistic to start with (Brazilian bands have been an exception to an extent because of their long-lasting ties with the European and North American scenes). The achievement of Polikarpa in that respect, and a little before of Apatia-No or Doña Maldad, cannot be overlooked especially since the band started out musically as a fairly straight-forward angry punk-rock band with that raging Latino punk flair.
The three songs on Polikarpa's side are fairly unpolished which confers a genuinely pissed off vibe and a sense of urgency that reflects their own political, social and national context. Raw Latino punk (and punk in Spanish in general) has become quite trendy since the 2010's but at the time this kind of sound was still something of a novelty for a lot of us, not because the songwriting vastly differs from your usual spiky punk songs but because the overall raw and direct sound and the primal urgency sounded fresh from a European perspective. These were punks that had lives that were much harder than in the North (it brought to light the North/South paradigm while from the 80's to the mid-90's, because of the Cold War, the focus was more West/East). As I mentioned earlier, there have been top punk bands in Latino America in the 80's but to see acts like Apatia-No, Doña Maldad or Migra Violenta touring in the early 00's certainly opened the gates to a new generation of bands and created new connections. You should see Polikarpa from that same perspective of Latino bands touring in the 00's rather than the next generation of Bogota bands. As I said, meaningful times.
Polikarpa's sound could be described originally as a fairly typical Colombian punk style reminiscent of classic Medellin punk-rock bands like IRA, Fertil Miseria or Kontraorden, pogoable tupa-tupa punk with angry vocals and a direct approach. I would argue that on this particular recording Polikarpa showed more of a raw hardcore power, it is more focused than on their previous work, and I like how the tunefulness of the vocals on "Denuncio" adds catchiness to the otherwise fairly basic song (not unlike Vice Squad). Pretty furious stuff that works perfectly with the Ep format. Punk as fuck indeed. The lyrics deal with Colombia's culture of political violence and the need to break free from it all.
On the other side we have yet another Osaka band after Victims of Greed: Defuse. I cannot think of many Japanese crust or hardcore bands with female members beside the fantastically primitive all-female Crusade and their quest for cavecrust in the early 90's while Mental Disease also had a girl on vocals. For some reason that may escape me, it looks like there just haven't been many women involved in bands in that part of the scene in the 90's while the decade was favourable to more inclusion and diversity in many other places globally. Defuse were certainly an exception in that respect and next time your racist sexist uncle claims that women suck at playing loud music during a dreary Sunday lunch, feel free to blast the band at maximum volume, if anything just to keep everyone from listening to his gammon bollocks. And then show some sympathy and proceed to euthanise the poor bastard.
Defuse did not initially start as a crust band though and if their 2017 Ep Cry of Roar (yeah, they are not exactly the most prolific band) proudly carried the (chaotic) crasher cavecrust banner, this first vinyl appearance sounded far closer to the Japanese tradition of Confuse (I mean, they are called Defuse for a reason), Gai, Kuro and the likes, an aestheticized punk noisiness that has come to be known as "noisepunk", a convenient if anachronistic term in this case. The classic Kyushu noise had not vanished in the 90's and some bands still abided by the "let's maximize the 80's Bristol thrash punk sound" like Order and their snotty take on The Swankys or the brilliantly Confuse-loving Dust Noise and their impeccably distorted fuzzy sound. Of course the tremendous overarching influence that Gloom had then in terms of raw distortedness and aggression, especially in their hometown of Osaka can also be felt here, but more in terms of intensity and bass-driven heaviness than songwriting. You could that Defuse tried to evolve between these three bands as they had Order's punkiness, Dust Noise's obnoxious noiziness and the Final Noise Attack scene. The faster hardcore thrash song "Don't conform" also showed that Defuse could speed things up with great efficiency.
Before this Ep, the band had recorded a demo tape entitled What's Right - Don't Conform demonstrating that Confuse and The Swankys were the band's primary influences indeed and the first four songs of the tape were re-recorded for the split Ep. I wish that Defuse had the opportunity to record a full record with the production they enjoy on the Ep as the sound is perfect, raw but hard-hitting and really emphasizing the fuzz and distortion of the guitar (the sound engineer Koichi Hara also worked on Gloom's Recomendation of Perdition and Framtid's first Ep so he knew the job). I like the vocals too, not forced, just angry and snotty with sometimes some hoarse high-pitched demented screams for good measure (it is Osaka in the 90's after all).
Overall this is a very enjoyable split Ep that can appeal to spiky punks as well as distortion and feedback junkies. This was released on Answer Records in 2000, a label that also released records from Reality Crisis, Demolition and even a reissue of CFDL.
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