Travel light

If you think about it, many of the things that make you feel miserable in your daily life are a direct result of some deeply rooted inertia, a lack of energy combined with fear of falling out of the blue open sky in midflight, while also being completely conscious about everything you're missing out on: the feeling of accomplishment after a reckless adventure, the mental or physical touch of a stranger that strikes you with such warmth that you feel it for weeks, months, lifetimes to come, the memory of a warmth that has abandonned you, and you're not sure if you'll be able to ever relive it. It's like hearing the rythm of your favourite poem in your head, but forgetting the words and the meaning in time. Everything fades into a blur, and you see yourself in the centre with a million eyes fixed on you, filled with expectations, their image of you nothing but that: an image, a shallow 2D representation reality, with no regard to how you move, how you sound, what goes on inside and brings you to your everyday expressions. How easy it is to forget oneself when turned into the object of their gaze.



It's never easy to stop the train of thoughts, especially when it's derailed and seems to be going nowhere, an aimless projectile, bound to hit something really hard, really soon. Sometimes it just takes a beautiful day and a genuine smile, encounters with people that move you, inspire you and make the future seem worthwhile. Change is something that grows from the inside out, sinks into everything that surrounds you and makes sure that nothing ever looks the same.
It's summer and I want to live in this forever.

I want to conclude this little rant with some words that I stole from the site of a French screamoband called Baron Noir. It has everything and nothing to do with what's written above, but it somehow seemed appropriate. Either way, I never came across a better description of what this type of music and community means to me.



Conscients que la musique ne pourra jamais suffire à changer quoi que ce soit, c'est pourtant elle qui nous permet quotidiennement de cracher ce qu'on est obliger de retenir, la rage intime qui nous constitue plus que ce que le monde nous impose. C'est à cette rage qu'on reconnaît les nôtres et c'est sur elle que se fondent nos rencontres. On la braille dans un micro pour toucher ceux et celles qui s'y reconnaissent et se renforcer mutuellement. Parce que les seuls espaces de liberté possibles sont ceux qu'on prend, vole ou crée. ça ne va pas plus loin que ça. baise les artistes.

Basically we're fighting for the same cause..

There's a new issue of Kino available. I have to admit that my part in this project seems to diminish with every issue, but for this one I mostly blame the fact that it kind of revolves around Silas' mild obsession with Japanese culture. The guy spent a month in Tokyo with a girl he barely knew, putting most of us couch-adventurers to shame by pure guts. Anyways, the result is nothing less than awesome I think, with a trip report, the usual socialy-aware columns, interviews (Heaven In Her Arms, Birth, Envy and the not so Japanese-like Zann) and a couple of reviews (some of which I actually wrote!). If you're interested, please pick one up: Kinozine

Also, pick up one of these if you have the chance. There's an awesome article about monsters in it. Plus some other elitist-hardcore (or not so) rambling. Tales Of Shatou

Anne

"From the window in that room, facing out the backyard, you can see the rear windows of a house where Descartes once lived. There are children's swings in the yard now, toys scattered in the grass, pretty little flowers. As he looked out the window that day, he wondered if the children those toys belonged to had any idea of what happened fifty years earlier in the spot where he was standing. And if they did, what would it be like to grow up in the shadow of her room?
To repeat Pascal: "All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room." At roughly the same time these words entered the Pensées, Descartes wrote to a friend in France from his room in that house in Amsterdam: "Is there any country," he asked with exuberance, "in which one can enjoy freedom as enormously as one does here?" Everything, in some sense, can be read as a gloss on everything else. To imagine her, for example, had she lived on after the war, reading Descartes' Meditations as a university student in Amsterdam. To imagine a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years.

Paul Auster: Collected Prose

This Is Real

Fundamental - Demo 2009
If you would've asked me six months ago what I thought about this band of youngster from my local area, I probably would've given you some cocky answer about how 'some kids just try too hard', and how they would probably end up playing the local youthclub for the rest of their carreer. In spite of what I aim for, I can be awefully prejudiced at times. Let's say that I did not really like the idea of another Black Haven/Rise And Fall-ish band emerging in the scene, plus some personal stuff that kind of got in the way of a good understanding. I'm mentioning this because I want to make clear on which foot I started to follow Fundamental, which was obviously the wrong one.

Only a couple of weeks before their first show (and a rather bad rehearsalsong they put on their myspace page), Levy (the singer) asked me if I was interested in playing bass for them. I was completely taken by surprise, and because of my reservedness towards the band and something concerning former lovers, it never happened, but the result was that by talking to this guy I was forced to acknowledge that he wasn't half as clueless as I thought he would be. Anyway, my curiosity was triggered and I decided to attend one of their shows in a local club. Plagued by the growing pains of starting band, they nevertheless managed to leave a lasting impression on me through their unrestrained enthousiasm and the apparent seriousness with which they were approaching the whole thing. You could tell that they meant it.

Several months later, Fundamental finally released their first demo recording, which finally brings me to the point of this 'review'. Where Rise And Fall needed an entire song to condemn all the liars and fakers to oblivion, these kids manage to do it in a one and a halfminute intro. A simple, but horribly effective stroke of the bass builds the tension, until the rest of the band comes in, leaving just enough breathingspace for the singer to scream "this is real!" from the top of his lungs. Three words and nothing remains to be said. 'Valor' is the first real song. Simplicity and effectiveness, spiced up with some really cool ideas, remain the keywords throughout. For kids as young and unexperienced as they are, they manage to avoid a lot of pitfalls that are fatal to most starting bands by sticking to the magic formula of putting only a couple of good ideas in one song and not stacking up one mediocre and too far-fetched riff upon another. 'Whole' is more melodic and straightforward in its approach, almost catchy. The song never manages to achieve its goal (whatever that should be) but it gets really damn close. Final track 'Ill-Fated' starts of with a bassriff that makes me want to punch myself because I didn't come up with it. Only thing I don't really like here is the 'dun dun'-stuff in the verse, but that's just me. The ending is as epic as you would expect it to be (nice, slow burning riff, topped off with passionate and almost heartfellt screaming, you know how it rolls).

You can tell these guys have not just been worshipping their influences imagining how cool they would look like on stage playing this kind of music, but they have obviously been listening carefully and that is giving them a headstart towards competition. En plus, they are the prototype of a real hardcoreband: not pretending to be groundbreaking, but taking what they know and doing what they can to give that anger and frustration inside a voice and a let-out. And most importantly, despite some minor flaws, pulling it off. One can only hope they won't be the next band in line to call it quits before ever having the chance to come into its own, because if this recording figures as a herald for things to come, chances are they still have a lot more in store.

Myspace
thanks to whoever took the picture

Today Is Green And Tomorrow Is Blue

Last night I went to the Glasses show in Ghent. I had arranged to do a short interview with them for the ultimate hipstermagazine in the Western world, so we met in some kind of souplounge no too far from the venue a couple of hours before the show. Since the band arrived way to early there was plenty of time for some silly pictures and sillier questions.
It's always a gamble when you really like a band and then you have to interview them. You really don't want them to turn out to be assholes, since it would get all that good music tainted. On the other hand, it's always nice to meet the people behind music that touched you in any way. Luckily, these guys and girl were among the nicest people out of Germany I ever met. The interview went smooth and afterwards we went together to the best place in Belgium to eat French fries, De Frietketel. They played a memorable floorshow (you have to love the spirit behind that) at the Frontline too that night. Check out the next issue of vice-magazine for the interview.

Glasses myspace

The Body Writhes and Twists

A TAAS appreesh-post
I don't really get how they do it. I hate all the ingrediënts - an overload on keyboardtunes, anachronical 70ies vibes, spastic nonsense and stupid long songtitels about trains, drugs, chickens and whatnot - yet the final recipe manages to send shivers down my spine over and over again. Take for example the part in 'Mescaline Eyes', where the music comes to a sudden halt and Snere yells '..and in all there's nothing left' over the unexpected opening abyss below. Or the machinegun-bass that kickstarts 'The Shit Sisters'. That's only what I can recall from the top of my head right now.
The first time i saw them live was two summers ago at the Flufffest in the Czech Republic. It was the evening of the last day. Almost three days of good and bad hardcore, dirt, filth and laughter had gone by, the sun was setting and there was this orange hue all over the place. Some member of the band had stepped into some dogshit, and by the time the second song started, the stage was covered with it, with the singer rolling in it shirtless. How's that for intensity and punk-spirit, you designercrusts?



These Arms Are Snakes is one of those rare bands that makes me want to dance and singalong when I'm listening to them on any kind of public transportation, or that makes me want to halt strangers and say 'listen to that part right here! Isn't that just fucking genius?'. Luckily, shyness is my saviour.

Come Down In This World

Oathbreaker - s/t MCD (2008, Holy Shit Records)

About a year ago, a friend of mine asked me out of the blue if I wanted to go on a roadtrip to Germany with his new band. The plan was to drive for 12 hours, play one 30-minute show in an obscure punk club downtown and return early next morning, another 12 hours back.
I have to admit that I didn’t really care that much about the band, that was then called No Recess, since I wasn’t at all in a hardcore ‘mood’ at the time. Also, these kids seemed to be the very epicentre of the local hardcorescene then, and when confronted with such vast amounts of ‘coolness’ I almost automatically cringe. Throw in the fact that their frontman was in fact a girl – not a dirty and smelly crust-girl, but a ‘real’ girly-girl – and maybe you could understand why my point about this band was already made before I heard a single note. Yes, I can be that narrow minded at times.

But in the end, I did end up in their van, because sometimes I can see past the horizon of my own little world and understand that my prejudgements are not necessarily true ALL the time. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have started this review with this stupid little story if they were, because it just wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Fact is that from the moment our absurd little trip started, I had to adjust my view radically. In short, these kids were living the hardcore dream all other 17 year olds vicariously lived through worshipping bad local metalcore bands. And it wasn’t as if they had to force it or something, it just came naturally. Also, their singer wasn’t at all the arrogant little ‘look-at-me-i-sing-in-a-hardcore-band’-scenegirl I took her for, but really nice, and kind of putting my own inner arrogance to shame. Plus, she baked ridiculously delicious vegan cookies for the trip.



Not too long after that, No Recess ‘disbanded’, throwing a memorable last show in the smallest venue in Flanders, on the beach, in front of a sweaty and crazy crowd, only to rise from its ruins a couple of months later as Oathbreaker, sporting a new drummer and a seemingly more ‘professional’ approach. Another couple of months later, their first self-titled 7” and MCD is a fact.

I’m pretty sure they won’t like to be compared to No Recess, but really, it’s kind of inevitable. Although better on all fronts, there’s little denying that Oathbreaker has No Recess at its very core. I don’t see why that should necessarily be a bad thing. It only means the youthfulness and recklessness hasn’t yet gone to waste while upgrading to ‘smarter’ riffs and overall better songwriting.

The album starts of with long layers of feedback that recall euhm, almost every hardcore record that came out in Belgium for the last two years. Soon though, the guitar starts doing this cool tapping, building up tension towards a nice mid-tempo riff. The lead on top of it is nice and well executed, but I would have loved to see how it could have developed into a full song, instead of a short intro.
Next song is ‘Shelter’, which can also be heard on their myspace. No doubt the best song on the record, musicwise and lyricwise. The intensity and anger is all over the place, finding anything but consolation in the cathartic breakdown at the end.
‘Ashes’ is an interlude that starts of with some clean picking. Something strange happens here though. All of a sudden there are 50 seconds of silence before the next song. I don’t really see the point there.
‘Downfall’ and ‘Mirror’ are two very good and enjoyable tracks, with some standout guitarwork, though they never reach the same level as 'Shelter'.

Overall, Oathbreaker doesn’t seem to hold any pretension of breaking new ground here, just delivering 3 pieces of above par quality hardcore in the vein of Rise And Fall and Disfear, but delivering it with a conviction that makes them stand out of the heaps of similar sounding bands coming out nowadays. I’m really stoked to see what the future will bring for them.

Oathbreaker Myspace
Holy Shit Records