Oliver Sheppard is a DJ, writer, sometime-musician, and otherwise professional luftmensch currently in Texas. He ran Cultpunk.com, the radio show Radio Schizo, and currently DJs the “No Doves Fly Here” postpunk event night in Austin. His work has appeared on Z Magazine’s website and in lots of anarchist/socialist magazines.
Last year, Lost Tribe received an impressive degree of buzz for a punk band. The dark, apocalyptic quintet play a unique mix of ’80s California punk, deathrock, and UK anarcho-punk. Lost Tribe’s discography so far consists solely of cassette and vinyl-only releases. So, whence the notoriety? I asked the band what they think about all the buzz. And I got them to spill the beans about their upcoming tour. (More…)
Tanzkommando Untergang herald Europe’s new dark punk. Combining a guitar-driven deathrock sound with grim, black and white visuals normally associated with radical hardcore, the politically-minded Berlin band is very much of its milieu, and its moment. (More…)
In “Diary of An Anarcho-Goth-Punk Fiend,” Alistair Livingston, a member of the British Kill Your Pet Puppy collective, records the transformational year of 1983 in terse bursts of prose. In clipped entries, he describes how 1983 began with him listening to bands like The Mob and Blood and Roses. By 1984 – the year of punk’s (and Orwell’s) apocalypse — he was trying ecstasy and getting into Psychic TV. (More…)
It’s common punk wisdom: Republican presidents suck for America, but they’re great for punk. The Reagan Administration proved to be an ironic boon to hardcore. And so was Dubya. What follows are some of the best moments from hardcore punk’s second great era: 2001-2009, the Bush/Cheney regime. (More…)
Greece is in the middle of a Great Depression. Overall unemployment stands at 22%, while unemployment among young workers is at 50%. The far right has made a return to parliament in the form of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, who openly use Nazi salutes. Anarchist riots occur almost weekly. Enter the fiery hardcore punk of Sarabante. (More…)
A new crop of deathrock bands has reclaimed its punk roots and is pushing the music in a new and compelling direction. According to to Louder Than War goth “music in the nineties was largely dire, possibly due to the scene’s popularity at the end of the eighties bringing in a lot of people without those punk roots” that had originally invigorated the music. (More…)
Tragedy’s new Darker Days Ahead LP is the band’s first album in six years, and their fourth overall full-length. On the new record, the tempo has slowed considerably, and the atmosphere is incomparably thick and heavy. Almost as remarkable as the album’s music, however, is Tragedy’s growing legacy as pioneers of a new style of hardcore punk. (More…)
Some punk bands, like Wire or Fucked Up, get bored with the genre and experiment. Others, like the Cramps and the Ramones, double down and refuse to budge. Long-running Swedish hardcore band Wolfbrigade are firmly in the second category. Their new LP, Damned, is a perfect example. (More…)
Conventional histories of deathrock dry up around 1986. There’s good reason for that. The orthodox approach to the subject is to describe it as a specific moment in Southern California punk. As a style of music, however, deathrock has persisted into the present, with interest and activity waxing and waning as the years have gone by. (More…)
As the first wave of punk evolved into hardcore, no wave, postpunk, and a variety of other subgenres, a singular strand of the punk explosion developed in Southern California: deathrock. (More…)
All of Killing Joke’s LPs have been meditations on the apocalypse. Throughout their thirty-three year career, and with every release, singer and frontman Jaz Coleman has prophesied the end of the world. Ominously titled MMXII (that’s “2012” for those of you who are Roman numeral-challenged) the original lineup of Killing Joke has delivered another sonic missive squarely in this fiery, millenarian tradition. (More…)
Poison Idea, like Black Flag and MDC, are one of the big guns of American hardcore. Founded in Portland, Oregon in 1980, proof of Poison Idea’s importance can be found in the fact that by 1986 they were calling themselves the Kings of Punk (the title of their 1986 LP) — and no one argued. (More…)