Timebomb - The Full Wrath of the Slave cd

Easily on of the ten best metallic hardcore albums of all time, right up there with Integrity's mid-1990s unholy trinity, Kickback's Forever War, Catharsis, Ringworm's debut, All Out War's For Those Who Were Crucified, Gehenna's The Birth Of Vengeance 7". Rarely has hardcore sounded so majestic and with a sense of mournfulness and desperation, created by the masterly executed black metal-inspired riffs and blastbeats over the hardcore violence. 1998 cd on CrimethInc.

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Blacken The Skies - Blacken The Skies cd

An anarcho-punk band from North Carolina featuring Stef of Catharsis. They play intricate and melodic neo-crust punk with influences from Ashes Rise and mainly The Dagda, along with some more experimental screamo influences. 2003 cd on CrimethInc.

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VA - In Our Time LP (CrimethInc. Compilation 1997)

I've mentioned how important CrimethInc. records and its bands were in politicizing me as a teen punk/metalhead. Its mid-to-late-1990s records of Catharsis, Gehenna and Timebomb were integral in the consolidation of the metallic hardcore genre, and more specifically the "holy terror" subgenre, along with Integrity, Ringworm, All Out War, Kickback and a few more American and European HC bands. The Inside Front zine run by Brian Dingledine - singer of Catharsis and key figure of the label/collective - opened my eyes to so many hardcore punk bands and features important articles about politics, anticapitalism and self-organization. Over the years CrimethInc. kind of became irrelevant to me politically as I moved towards more Marxist viewpoints but I still go back to read some of the stuff.

Anyway, this LP features seven tracks, one each by Belgian thrash-metal-influenced straight-edge/vegan legends Congress, Italian political metallic hardcore Timebomb, deathcore barbarians Systral from Bremen (check out their split 7" with Acheborn), more old-school hc by Refused side-project Final Exit, nightmarish sludge/punk by the incomparable Damad, technical mathy hc by Jesuit (members of which were Brian Benoit of Dillinger Escape Plan and Nate Newton of Converge/Old Man Gloom), and the highlight which is the absolutely evil, scary, infernal and apocalyptic medley of "Testimony/Divine Rewards" by Gehenna, one of the most savage and destructive hardcore punk bands ever. Even though all tracks here are absolutely awesome, they can be found elsewhere in the respective bands' releases, but this track, consisting of a jam of "Testimony" from their classic 7" The Birth of Vengeance and unknown track "Divine Rewards," hasn't ever been released anywhere else, not even in the re-release of The War of the Sons of Light and the Suns of Darkness.

Apart from the rich booklet containing lyrics and interviews/texts of the band plus a second booklet analyzing the strategies of standardization and uniformity in Western advanced capitalist societies. This is an essential release of 1990s political hardcore, so you must get it. 1997 LP on CrimethInc.

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Ire discography + two texts on Palestine

Taking cue from yesterday's Palestine post, I'm posting the discography of one of the most important metallic hardcore punk bands of all time, the legendary Ire from Canada. Fronted by Radwan Moumneh, a Lebanese national who also participated in other top-notch bands such as Cursed and The Black Hand and who now plays as the postmodern Arab music project Jerusalem In My Heart, Ire played forward-thinking hardcore with technical mastery, loads of darkness and well-thought lyrics about incarceration, the oppression of women, religion and politics. However, they are mostly remembered for "Atfal Al Hejara," one song of their first release, in which Moumneh extols the first Intifada, a position that gained Ire the hatred of part of the hardcore scene, who considered them antisemites.

As a plus, I'm linking two great articles about the Palestinian/Jewish question; the first is by Jewish academic Ilan Pappe, who has worked extensively on deconstructing the myths of Zionism, and it's an article he wrote on the day of the massacre suggesting that we shouldn't be talking about a Jew-Palestine conflict, but Israeli colonization. The second one is Edward Said's timeless "Identity, Negation and Violence" in which he discussed the right of Palestinians to violence. Unfortunately I couldn't find it anywhere on the web (fuck New Left Review for not publishing articles) so I'm uploading it here.

1996 - Adversity Into Triumph (Ellington Records)



Fierce metallic hardcore in the vein of other legendary bands of the mid-90s like Catharsis and Ringworm, plus some amazing Morbid-Angel-like discordance.

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1998 - I Discern An Overtone Of Tragedy In Your Voice (The Mountain Collective For Independent Artists Ltd.)




Here they got extremely dark, as well as technical, playing a hardcore/sludge/black metal/mathy hybrid over tortured vocals and some of the best lyrics in hardcore

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1999 - What Seed, What Root? (Crimethinc.) 



Less hardcore metal, more noisy rock and a slight rock 'n' roll, but with the dissonance left intact and the cyclical riffing that made them so fucking great, plus an anthemic/epic quality.

Download What Seed What Root