col002: THE LIGHT OF AN ONCOMING TRAIN (or, an optimistic tape review column feat. AMEROL, ART, GUTTER OIL, PHENOMENA, SKALP & SPITE )
+++a column for the international DIY underground___
+++A REVIEW COLUMN IN 2025???___
“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the [PUNK] cause needs is the unity of [PUNKS]; not unity between [PUNKS] and the opponents and distorters of [PUNK]” — Vladimir Lenin, Unity (1914)
Quite the prescient fella, our Lenin. For months, I’ve been chipping away at two columns that I can’t muster the energy to finish: one called Corporate Rock Still Sucks Still, about re-drawing the dividing lines of the DIY realm in the face of 21st C corporate creep (hypocrisies be damned); and another called Nothing’s Incorruptible, about the wave of disputes surrounding whatever hardcore punk™ has been doing in the sponsorship mines lately. Can’t get the tone right. Can’t get the point across while dodging the counter-arguments in advance. Feels poisoned by substack brain. Feels like perhaps the culture and class war fronts of punk and DIY history have already been lost… However! Shifting to this review column lets me talk about things in the DIY mould that have carried the torch while the rest of us whined. Some “good things are being done” in very “bad things are being done” times, because it often feels more effective to recognise the contributions that aren’t full of shit than writing long, unwieldy screeds about the things that are. Back to Lenin’s point about worker/punk unity though: I reckon our times have shown that we’ve had enough poptimism and dollar apologism to last a century; that it’s okay to be the enemy of your enemy; and that the collective new (financial) year’s resolution has gotta be that it’s no longer cool to have your cake and eat it too. Say no to “the opponents and distorters of [PUNK]”, and come with me for a walk through six recent cassettes that made me feel like I wasn’t completely insane.
AMEROL - DEMO (CS, 2025)
I think it’s apparent to anyone paying attention by this point that Perth, Western Australia has confirmed itself as the punk capital of this island. Every time I fire up the computer phone and scroll through the sea of posters and gig clips, it seems assured that the only thing that gives me ‘hubba hubba’ cartoon eyes is footage from the Perth DIY scene. The combination of long-running DIY distro/label’s Helta Skelta and Televised Suicide seems to have coalesced into a healthy ecosystem with a nice punk sub-genre spread and a helluva lot of activity. Stalwarts of the Perth paradigm Ashley Ack and K-Hole (both of COLD MEAT, a band who, to my ears, have long been the best proto-punk styled band in the world) join forces with Morgin and Jay Hell to form AMEROL, the newest group to grace HSR’s catalogue. Hardcore of the US tradition done with the style and poise demanded by contemporary evolutions: Hell’s drums are impossibly fast, familiar but no less creative riffing efforts from the string section, while Ashley’s signature vocal delivery is at its characteristic best: “basic comfort’s a luxury”, “no merit for the martyr once the whistle’s blown”, “insidious attacks delivered privately” and “consumption of a fallacy that feeds your own destruction”, are just cherry-picked highlights of her lyrical turns. No need for another book of unread contemporary poetry on the shelf when you can unfold that A6 lyric sheet! Also, a perfect tape perfectly packaged: why not have a cover featuring a weary and dehydrated punker crawling out of an exploding toilet, and why not name your band after a medication used to treat diarrhea? This combination seems appropriate here, and I’m more than comfortable to make the claim that AMEROL has finally done the job of firming up the runny stool of Australian hardcore punk. By far my favourite cassette release of 2025.
ART - ONE (CS, 2022)
I’m stunned that it took until 2022 for a hardcore band to name themselves ART, but I’m glad that the first crew to do so were really, really good. Released on Total Peace (a DIY label that is as good a model as any for someone wanting to start a new imprint…please start a new imprint) and based out of Phoenix, Arizona (the joys of music from a US city that’s not a punk hegemon!). ART seem to have slipped through the cracks of the attention economy, but have been on high rotation at my desk since its release. The tape hinges around Ale’s sci-fi tinged vocals (“no future is now!”) and a band willing to fuck around with sounds, tones and structures for a vague smearing of genre signifers. Though it does seem like ART (nay, Total Peace as a whole) are scholars of the form on some level; as they say in their release primer: “It’s time we put VOID in the Guggenheim.” ‘Lobotomy’ is the highlight for mine, some real frantic guitar-playing from Alec that at one point strays so far from everyone else that it might as well be boarding a plane. A nice touch that this solo has an artistic interplay with Ale’s request for a noggin extraction: “take what you want / my loss is your gain.” The tape is bookended by two day-time TV audio collages featuring laypeople (plus Rollins, the layest of people) discussing the meaning of art, and a back-of-insert declaration of: “be warned, our anger and aesthetic will be your oppression”, so of course this tape was gonna be in my wheelhouse (I also like the little guy giving the finger on the cover: ICHIBAAAAAN!) Readers will know that I don’t care much for art, nor the singing of its praises, but if this is ART? Call me a believer.
GUTTER OIL - IX (CS, 2022)
Well, well, well, if it isn’t Perth again. As far as I know, GUTTER OIL broke up some time after this tape release in 2022, but I pulled it out of the racks because it’s one of the few recent releases that has made me laugh for a long time. 2022 was, as I remember it, a particularly humourless time for new DIY music, so I was very taken by GUTTER OIL’s dumb-yet-critical comedic bent of the DEAD KENNEDY’s school that I didn’t think was possible to pull off at the onset of Cold War II. The band — who are credited as Haydumb (“all the stuff on the recording that is good”), Bangus (“all the stuff on the recording that is drums”), and Jame (“all the stuff on the recording that is bad”) — have a bit of the ‘Ground Zero’ New York influence, but not in a way that feels like tribute. The tape is highlighted by one of the juiciest bass tones I’ve heard for yonks (must have been ‘Haydumb’), and while the four hardcore tracks on the tape would be hit stompers on their own, it’s hard not to dwell on the window dressing here. GUTTER OIL resist the urge that befalls most new punk bands to write six songs, record and release them with a little Ⓐ in the corner of the tape cover, and instead take the time to craft their package to imbue it with some feeling, even if that feeling is annoyance (the tape comes stuffed with irritating detritus; in my copy, a small prayer card about angels and a UFO-sighting clipping from That’s Life! magazine). Each side opens with a juvenile KOOL KEITH meets NEGATIVLAND skit that pulls the piss out of the profit motive (“I work to create massive wealth…for myself”) or the violence of imperialism (‘Operation Bomb Hospitals’), both of which bring to mind a kind of 2000’s sensibility that makes me think of GUTTER OIL as the ‘boomer shooter’ of contemporary hardcore. I know I keep banging on about everything other than the music here, but to be honest, when I first listened to this tape I felt a weird sense of relief in hearing something with a sense of humour that wasn’t some kind of holier-than-thou ‘this is art’ style posturing. If anything it’s the perfect antidote to that smug, industry-approved ‘satirical’ slop found elsewhere in this country, and I feel very indebted to GUTTER OIL as a result. With an honourable mention to the final paragraph of the release blurb: “There is no one else to thank. We did it all.”
PHENOMENA - DEMO (CS, 2025)
This one comes via the relatively new tape label and distro RIP Peace, who have been one of the core organisational centres of a new wave of the Meanjin/Brisbane DIY hardcore community in the last couple years. Hard for me not to fixate on the fact that PHENOMENA are fronted by personal favourite, Neil of TEARGAS and BJELKE-PETERSEN YOUTH (an interview with him here), in part because the tape came in the post accompanied by his new Adult Dreams zine issue on ‘Scary Movies’. I read that zine at a furious pace while listening to the tape and sniffling through a very annoying cold, then immediately watched Phenomena (1985) as a chaser. I was just zoned out enough to have scribbled ‘Neil as the Dario Argento of Brisbane punk’ in a notepad which carries absolutely no weight in hindsight, but I do reckon PHENOMENA would be sick to watch in a pitch black basement filled with bees. Of all the elements in the five-piece’s sound, Dan’s synth contributions are the great standout, giving a spiritual flow to the tape’s tracking while infusing each stomper with a nice sniff of the weird and eerie (maybe he’s the Argento of Brisbane punk). That’s not to take away from the rest of the band, who are a real cohesive unit here: another fantastic bass tone via Maddy, razing guitars through Ryan and a cymbal-heavy drum performance by Chris that speaks particularly well to the synths to my ears. No surprises that Neil turns in another A-grade vocal performance, with lyrical turns like “your future as furniture dictated by the lustre of your leather’ on ‘Human Chair’ (a song that may or may not be an office work anthem), and ‘compliments to the chef of the fertile silicon uncanny valley” on ‘Unheimlich Manoeuvre’. Both tracks yet again convincing me that these lyric inserts represent the best-written poetry in my house. I listened to this tape on repeat all afternoon and wished every band was like this; but I was also thinkin that it’d be cool if the chimpanzee in Phenomena could talk.
SKALP - MAI DOMI (CS, 2024)
Not too sure of SKALP’s status as a band in mid-2025, but regardless of what they’re doing these days, they really captured lightning in the bottle on Mai Domi, especially in an era when most tapes of this ilk are more akin to farts in a jar. SKALP has Edo’s vocals and Ele’s bass driving a reunited Facca (drums) and Luca (guitar) from SPIRITO DI LUPO. However, SKALP cuts back on the psych-infusions of that group, and more or less swaps out shrooms from the alps for a few shots of the ‘Milano coffee’; full-blown ragers recorded in one of the great Milanese squats, COA T28. Like much of the hardcore out of Milano, SKALP’s roots in the city’s famed lineage are clear, but there’s been some frequent flyer miles clocked to the UK and back too. While the vocals and drums in particular are gonna have you filing this as D-Beat, and the lyrical turns (in Italian: “more war, hunger and misery / more borders, torture and prison / what progress? what justice?”) will have you scribbling anarchopunk/crust sub-genre signifiers in the margins, I don’t think that any of those descriptions are useful anymore. Not sure if this thought holds any water on interrogation: but I think much of what makes Milanese hardcore so good compared to many of the UK exports (feat. 30-page ‘no gods no masters’ anarchist treatise as LP insert released ahead of a tour ‘presented by [glossy booking agency]’) is the off-the-page context: that the players in SKALP have been dedicated for so long to the city’s punk community (this was a co-release on DIY collective label Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni, with Giacomo of that collective interviewed here for added context), and that said community is so closely tied to anti-fascist, squatting and protest movements in the city, somehow imbues tapes like this with the kind of authenticity that many anglosphere equivalents try and fail to achieve time and time again. Maybe it’s the specific flavour of war, genocide and neo/post-fascism on every screen in the house that has me reaching for these kinds of tapes again, or the fact that the very conditions that created international hardcore of this ilk have cycled around to that late-70s paradigm, but SKALP feel like a good case study in blowing off steam with purpose and intent. When I saw Luca from SKALP on my last visit to Milano, he was saying: “can we please all delete Instagram and just be punks again” and his voice has been ringing in my ears ever since; a call to arms I have not yet heeded!
SPITE - FIRST SHOW PROMO TAPE (CS, 2024)
Somehow I’ve missed SPITE every time they’ve played. Their first show launched on the night of the 2024 NRL grand final qualifiers, and I was too dedicated to the scene (of rugby league) to see them. So I also broke the rules of this column by failing to actually get a copy of the cassette (if it exists at all). To quote the Chief Marketing Officer of Taco Bell Australia: “Australia is home to some of the most innovative and exciting emerging artists, and we’re thrilled to play a part in amplifying their music, both here and on a global stage.” I am also thrilled to play a part in amplifying the music of Sydney’s SPITE, because, thankfully, no free tacos from a fast food company on the BDS list appear to have been shilled during the making of this promo tape. The lineages of Sydney hardcore are many, and as much as I can’t help from falling for anything in the UBM line of which Garry (vocals) and Benny (drums) represent via TAIPAN to OILY BOYS to RAPID DYE and (*Fox Mulder voice*) “hardcore/metal-hybrid” DEMOLITION, there’s always something gained when the streams are crossed. They do so here via the riff factory of Pia (bass; also of HUNNY) and Oisin (guitar; also of RULE ON YOU). Yes, huge riffs in this tape that may entice you into bad behaviour, with just enough structural trickery to disrupt the ill-advised karate exhibition that has for some reason (TikTok) come back into vogue. A real short tape, but ‘Pleasers’ is the hit, and the ‘Outro/Definitions’ track is a blast: really allows Gaz to flex his chops on the mic. I love that, like all good hardcore demos, this sounds like it was played inside an empty paint tin left in a sharehouse shed, while the nod to the IRA in the accompanying artwork is a welcome rejoice for revolution among a world of willing collaborators. Go n-éirí leat!
Note: I think all of these tapes except for AMEROL and PHENOMENA are sold out, but I do recommend paying attention to these bands, their members and the labels and collectives helping to put them out: not the faintest trace of bull$hit here, which is very rare in a world where it’s sometimes best not to shine a blue light around the room. Here are the labels in an easy to click form, in order of appearance:
+++other updates___
___i heard you liked a little…commodity fetishism? decided to make a BARELY HUMAN t-shirt as a way to force myself to keep trying to do something with this thing in the face of DIY being turned to a genre hash tag by managers and booking agents and ‘good guarantee’ culture and such (would be embarrassing to give up post-shirt printing, no?). You can get one here, or reply to this email to arrange drop off in Sydney (or just to say hello). I’ll be putting the order in within a day or two, so if you’d like one guaranteed in your size, now’s the best time to secure it. $5 of every shirt sold will go towards mutual aid for a friend’s family’s efforts to rebuild their home after a recent house fire and subsequent robbery.
___the second edition of the BARELY HUMAN book has sold out (ha ha ha), but a third edition is coming soon. the files are currently with the printers, but if you still want a copy, you can order one here ahead of time, or arrange via email (also lmk if you’d like these in your distro or rekkid shop!)
___I’ve been wanting to find a way to get off Bandcamp and Substack which I think drag the worst instincts out of my writing and activities, so if you’re clued in enough and are interested in helping me to build a real website for reviews, interviews, webstore/distro stuff and the like, please let me know!
___that is all.