GraveSpitter – Written For The Small Screen
Genre: Punk, Doom Metal / Sludge
There were kids across the world who loved gangsta rap who created their own crews of tough guys and cosplayed their way into aggressive gang violence sprinkled with rap. On the other hand, hardcore punk had a similar effect with seemingly every musician in this genre, across the known world, pretending to be a tough guy ready to beat anyone up just for the thrill of it. Modern music is, often, fantasy roleplaying.
Sure, things can get absurd, and, rarely, stupidly violent. But, doesn’t any gathering of people risk heading that way? As a lifelong football fan, I am convinced that the reason why terraces and hooligans are permitted and even encouraged is so that these people don’t take their frustrations elsewhere out in the world.
With that in mind, hearing punishing music that sounds like setting fire to villages at night is the kind of fantasy some of us, Alt77’s team included, need. The sludgy riffing provided by punk group GraveSpitter checks those boxes. Written For The Small Screen sounds like the sound most normal people will hear in their heads when frustrated with the world around them. Fortunately, for most folks that, and in the music, is where the aggression stays.
Friend – Animal
Genre: Punk, Garage Rock
Fight Club is author Chuck Palahniuk’s best-known novel. The book and its movie adaption are best remembered for the scenes depicting DYI boxing circuits set up by people with lousy jobs and general dissatisfaction with society.
What might, perhaps, get overlooked sometimes is the clever way in which Palahniuk describes modern man’s desire to belong to a club. The characters aren’t just stomping on each other’s faces out of a fetish for violence. No, they want male friends with who they engage in typical male activities. It just so happens that they take it to the absolute extreme.
Rock songs have often been the refuge of male fantasies. Frankly, I’m not sure this is a bad thing. I wouldn’t dare criticize it too much, just like I wouldn’t suggest anyone playing first-person shooter games should be locked out in an asylum for violence.
Perspective is good, however. Friend’s Animal, a song inspired by Fight Club, casts its eye on toxic masculinity, or, rather, on the worse aspects of it. People are, usually, at their worst when they travel in groups as the songwriter here remarks. Over a barrage of fuzzed-out guitars and yelled vocals, Friend emerges as a powerhouse punk-rock unit with a bone to pick with modern society.
