Review Summary: A retrospective on what turned out to be a phase, mom
It’s almost funny revisiting this album with the perspective that years of exploring music carries with it. This was, after all, one of the early albums I discovered through sputnikmusic, when my teenage self was still riding high on visions of liberation through subculture, smoking the crazy idea that a punk scene could manifest a real social shift, a movement towards a better world. After all the stultifying effects of my upbringing, what could seem more romantic, in the grand sense, than declaring independence from it all, the hypocrisy, the greed, the exploitation, just saying no to all except that which was essential to a free and flourishing life? So, naturally, head full of Thoreau and Kropotkin, I fell head over heels with the idea of crust-punk, that thrashed-up, scuzzed-up, ferociously uncompromising iteration of hardcore that would leave your speakers reeking of BO and cheap weed if left playing too long. Few at the time were as far up on my list of idols as NY giants Nausea, who, along with bands like Discharge, Aus-Rotten and Dystopia, formed the backbone of both my music habit and my nascent political development.
So with all that perspective of passing years and a slight cringe at the earnestness of my quest for a punk-rock utopia, I put this on again, and let memory take me back. And the first, the most immediate impression that struck me was just how much this reminisced of crust godfathers Amebix, a connection that in hindsight should have been obvious even in the early days. I’d been into them too back then, but how did I never make the connection between those metallic riffs, the clangy, if relatively quality production, the snarled vocals, and the generally filthy, hopeless atmosphere? How could it be so obvious now? The second was remembering the absolute infatuation I had back then with Amy Miret’s voice, with the idea that, yes, girls
could do harsh vocals, yowl and snarl with the most fierce of them, an idea that was so novel to my teenage self that I sought out any and every punk band I could find with female vocals. Why did I find it unusual or intriguing that there might be women who’d gravitate towards a scene dedicated to aligning itself against hierarchy and injustice?
Hindsight’s 20/20 of course, and whatever I might think now about crust being mostly either a poor man’s hardcore or a poor man’s thrash dressed up in the most stridently self-righteous politics since Robespierre, it’s obvious that Nausea were both deeply sincere about their beliefs and more intelligent in their expression than the likes of, say, Agnostic Front or others in the New York scene at the time. And it’s all expressed in that dystopian 80s New York idiom that’s as tough to pin adjectives on as it is to solve war profiteering through a punk rock comp. Something in the guitar tone, a trebly, piercing resonance that touches on thrash, the drums that are totally indebted to that style, the guttural snarl of the vocals, both male and female, a sound that just
feels of its era and place without anything tangible to put it there. It’s a sound that, while relatively composed and polished on this album, just reeks of the punk squats and DIY venues of the Lower East Side, a sound echoing out into trashed streets and neon-lit alleyways.
The synthesis of Amebix-style apocalyptic gloom and glower, and the breakneck hardcore being pioneered in the US makes for potent brew, as clangy, somber riffs back up Al Long and Amy Miret as they swap snarled slogans and bitter polemic against government, religion, the military, every possible box in the list of targets for punk invective being checked one by one. Guitarist Vic Venom pulls some heavy duty in the construction of their sound as well, stacking furious hardcore riffs and an impressive talent for atmosphere and solos that are just a *hair* too good for your typical crust punk album. If those 4-chord riffs and hollers get a little too one-note, a little too recycled at times, there’s always that adorable little reggae break in Sacrifice to act as a palette cleanser, a moment that seems to have inspired Choking Victim’s entire career. But then of course, it’s business as usual for all the mosh-heads, as the album crashes through piece after crusty piece until each-and-every social issue has been tackled and sloganed to death. And really, regardless of whether the punk histrionics border on the grating, it all absolutely
rocks.
In the wake of my adolescent quest for some kind of ideological purity, for a way of life free of hypocrisy and mealy-mouthed compromise with the system, I’ve come to realize that the cloistering of oneself in a given subculture is more or less to close oneself off from the rest of the world, to engage in a kind of arrogance that declares itself too good to dwell within the sheep, the kind of arrogance that can too-easily be harmful. The ideals of the punk movement, the actions of such organizations as the ALF and Food Not Bombs are to be admired and supported, but as has history has shown, subculture is hardly the safe-haven it once believed itself to be, that all the relentless polemic against the system could serve to obscure the issues festering within. But after all, a blackened dove is a dove the same, and what Nausea and the rest of the scene were trying to do was just what many of us are trying to do today: to navigate an unjust world with a little piece of their integrity intact. Happily, in their brief but blazing career, they managed to rock out with the best of them while doing so.
