it's funny that those are the only ssd records still in print, aside from a bad "greatest hits" cd.

yeah, i've heard stories that like al put them together and refuses to reissue the earlier stuff, and when things come to a head, people asking him why the crap recordings are in print, he blames it on springa. hahahahaha.

pussy galore is overrated. neil was lucky as fuck to bail on that no vision mick jagger wanna be jon spencer and start royal trux, who were a thousand times better than PG and pretty much 95 percent of all other bands (including the entire after 1990)

nation of ulysess was amazing. thrashy post hardcore with a trumpet actually played good, a maniac lead singer, and a political agenda far more radical than any other political band! how in the fuck are these dudes boring to you? you know im the type to respect opinions but i just dont understand that claim...

and they sound nothing like the cows!

1. the singer dude sounds completely fake.
2. the trumpet sounds like they heard the cows early on and thought of ripping them off but not knowing how.

i was seriously giving them a second chance but they sound too tame and boring to me, maybe i needed to see them live to appreciate them.

It's not that you have an opinion, it's that you find him 'boring'. I find you have to know someone to find them boring, when speaking about their personality. You could think Fugazi are boring because you've got numerous albums to make that decision of, and because it's music - entertainment - art. But if you find Ian boring because you don't agree with his politics, then that's more of a disagreeance than anything, and then you could probably classify many as boring, especially someone like Steve Shelley who 'doesn't say anything'. But then saying nothing can often be intriguing, therefore not boring.

Inconclusion, you can find Ian boring if you want.

But I find him very interest, and in the brief moment of interaction with him that I had, he was far from boring and didn't seem to be boring to anybody else at the venue either.

Ian Mackaye is definitely someone who is shrouded with misconceptions.

Nations of Ulysses are fantastic.

From that list, you're obviously more into the earlier 'Hardcore' stuff. Which I like too, but they're not the bands that I love the most from Dischord.

Right now I'm actually listening to El Guapo's album Super/System. Fantastic album.

Antelope's Reflector album and The Year in Seven Inches comp is also sitting infront of me.

Nation were interesting enough but I wasn't always excited to listen to their "I-hate-everything" swagger. Love their lyrics, though I hate their vocals. Love the song that goes "Ain't talkin bout Beatles songs written 100 yeats before I was born." and one of my mix tape staples, "You're my Miss Washing D.C."... one of those bands that's hard to listen to a whole album, but not bad in small doses. I always think Refused kind took what NoU did and better'd it.

My favorite Dischord bands were Minor Threat, Faraquet, and the first Q and Not U record.

Fugazi.. "the Argument" is a great album.. I actually think they kind have gotten better as they went along... like, I don't really like "13 Songs" at all. I dunno, it's pretty good stuff. Nothing to get excited about.

I like bullet points.

1) Whatever follows is by no means the opinions of someone who's ever enjoyed hardcore. NOU are one of my favourite bands, and I can just about stomach Refused but the vast majority of it, at best, leaves me bemused.

2) NOU had a very arch humour. I always liked to imagine that lines like "who's got the real/ anti-parent culture sound?" were rhetorical and parodical - that is to say the alleged 'I hate everything' swagger was undermining the narrative of punk music's 'nihilism'

3) NOU's sleeves have more contradictory ideas than a million bands. It wasn't rhetoric in the sense of 'I know some words - if I write them, people understand me'. They understood writing as a device for persuasion and confusion - destabalising the 'truth' notion of 'pure' music - to me they're one of the few 'hardcore' bands who introduce an intelligence that is, lamentably, absent a lot of the time. I'm not saying this is true of every hardcore band - it's more often boorish and puritanical if it is present though (cf Ian Mackaye).

4) To Mr Neurotic - NOU do sound fake; but something like 'today I met the girl I'm going to marry' is something like a garage/ doo-wop sentiment over a (pseudo-, I suppose) hardcore backing. Ian Svenonius has, in most of his career since, made an outstanding job of undermining and parodying genres without pitying and hating them; a fakeness born of love if you will.

5) Somehow NOU avoid being anything like a 'postmodern' band.

6) These words are my own, and not terrifically important.

no, it's not that i like hardcore better, it's that they were the best bands in the label, best bands period. void alone can take any band in the label, they can even take minor threat and fugazi combined, musically. i thought of putting swiz or soulside or ignition in there but decided to leave jawbox because they were an amazing band.

i ned to give a chance to el guapo, i remember they were so so, same with lungfish and circus lupus.

the first year in seven inches is fantastic.


yes, thank you! (about the refused comment).

ahh yes, faraquet too, need to give it a chance.

and fugazi, again, yes i prefer minor threat, but i do like fugazi. i too don't care much for both eps in 13 songs, repeater is a great album, so is red medicine. my favorite is probably in on the kill taker.


ian is (was?) in weird war, right? that band was (is?) good. i understand the garage doowop and the parodying of the genres. it sound embryonic and a bit lost with ulysses, though.

but are't nation of ulysses a post-post modern band, by your own definition? taking the piss and parodying while walloing in those same terms?

Lungfish have some decent stuff. I don't even think I've listened to them this century though.

refused are alright, but i find their the shape of punk to come album hit and miss. actually most of their albums are hit and miss. they were the best metalcore/victory records band from the 90's.

i can tell refused wanted to be a harder version of nation of ulysses so bad. it's funny the singer of refused next band (international noise conpiracy) ripped off the make up. i guess he has a hard on for ian.

Yes to Weird War.

I don't think they were taking the piss - I'm on very shaky territory here, but I've always had the impression they were parodying hardcore by obviating its latent pop content... but also opening up hardcore to other ideas. Or, to my mind, injecting some sense of 'other' influences into a genre that, at its very worst, is nothing but self-congratulatory, repititious, a-musical shit. 'A-musical' isn't, in itself, a bad thing - but hardcore very often (to me, as a self-confessed non-appreciator of hardcore) seems to repeat the hallowed classics for no ostensible reason. I should qualify this - as a social phenomenon, hardcore is a great deal of fun. I've spent an amount of time at local hardcore shows, and as a live thing I can't fault it. I don't always enjoy hardcore shows musically, but I nearly always do for the social 'coming-together'. But that's entirely different to its existence as an 'art-form', in which capacity it bores me rigid, most of the time.

I think the Refused comparison is spot on - Refused have had a massive influence on the hardcore scene, mostly for shape of punk to come (I have heard This just might be the truth, by the way) which took a handful of ideas from other places - nothing avant-garde, nothing too weird, nothing exceptionally ground-breaking by comparison to someone like (ur...) SY - but a handful of ideas and somehow broke through the tepid anti-creativity of hardcore. Maybe I'm hearing the wrong hardcore (although if anyone other than Mr Neurotic wants to tell me which hardcore I should listen to - don't, I've probably heard it) but NOU do do something which the majority of hardcore I've heard entirely fails to do.

Having said all that, if NOU don't float your boat, it's really not going to make any difference to anyone or anything.

i tend to enjoy early harDCore and the revolution summer era more than the later dischord stuff, but i enjoy about 90-95 percent of dischord's out put.

soulside is so underrated.

anyone like the warmers?

yes, i understood what you meant with the parody without the higher ground and stupidity. what i meant is that since they were a hardcore band that took a branch from the same tree most bands were taking their cues from, while at the same time opening it's musical doors seems like a better conscious, post modern concept, in a way similar (only similar) to sy's approach to classic rock and 80's pop. nothing wrong with it.

but then, you're talking about contexts and forms and well, i really appreciate mostly the finished product instead of the process so that's probably why i don't dig them.


Having said all that, if NOU don't float your boat, it's really not going to make any difference to anyone or anything.[/quote]

what i think refused excel in wasn't their "radical" musical explorations or their "radical" ideologies and lyrics. i think they excelled because they wrote damn good songs in a variety of styles, making (in the shape of punk to come) a very solid album from start to finish, also something i feel ulysses lacked. the proof is that so many bands have taken ideas from that album and that band and most of them are conformists within their genre and scene.

and uhler; the international noise conspiracy are laughably lame, they probably heard the hives were going to sign to a major label and thought of jumping on the bandwagon at the same time. i'm still amazed it's the same guy in both bands.

I don't consider Nations 'Hardcore'. I know, I know, they were obviously influenced by the genre, but their music doesn't really indicate that, to me. Like Refused, Nations were far from 1-dimensional, which 'hardcore' is. Even though it's never been stated by either band, I too see the similarities between Refused and Nations, not necessarly music. and one was was a parody (if you will) band (like, I think Glice said), and the other was more serious with their politics (Refused, if that's not obvious enough). The Shape of Punk to come stands alone, no band sounds anything like that album and no band ever will no matter how much they try to mimick it, and many have (I'm more refering to the comment I saw in this thread where Refused were called 'metalcore', which is really bogus). And I know that many classify The Shape as 'Hardcore', but with that album they tried to strip themselves of that label, they hated that scene and the people in it, which is ironic that 10 years after they broke up that is again the scene that tries to own them.


Oh, no. The Hives don't even compete with the Noise Conspiracy. I've seen footage of the Hives and actually been lucky enough to be at a Noise Conpiracy show, and the latter slaughter them live too. The Hives have some catchy songs, but noise Conspiracy are so much more than that.

have you heard pre-shape of punk to come? their stuff back then sounded like they loved earth crisis and snapcase a little too much.

I own all Refused albums. I'm more a fan of Shape, why? Because they stepped out of them 'hardcore' shackles (although Songs to Fan... was a sign of things to come for them). But there's no hint of 'metalcore' in their catalog at all.

The purist 'hardcore' and it's fans can be really fucking boring.

to me all refused albums are equally good. i used to love them a lot, but my love for them went down over the years.

i do agree that they weren't your typical metalcore band when they released the shape of punk to come. i don't know how you define metalcore, but when i started to listen to metalcore back in the 90's, the reason we (hardcore kids/people) called the more metal sounding bands metalcore was so people didn't confuse the bands as more punk sounding bands. yes refused were/are a hardcore band but they are also classified as a metalcore band. i'm not putting down the band calling them metalcore.

i guess you can say that refused were metalcore at a time when it wasn't so bad to call a band metalcore. just like rites of spring were emocore at a time when it wasn't so bad to call a band an emocore band.