Carsmile Steve

Name: CarsmileSteve
Website: https://twitter.com/carsmilesteve
bandcamp collection: https://bandcamp.com/carsmilesteve

recommendations:




So, I've been listening to a lot of Very Loud music on bandcamp recently, mainly due to a bunch of wrestling-adjacent zinesters from America who keep recommending stuff on twitter that ends up in my wishlist. As usual, I'm a complete dilettante when it comes to this stuff, absolutely not claiming any deep knowledge at all into these scenes, but hey, it's never stopped me liking music before!

SØØN are Hawaiian femme-fronted hardcore and this is GET ØUT from what appears to be their first long-player, WHAT THE FUCK DID WE DØ TØ THE EARTH (long-player being relative here, 12 tracks in a shade under 15 minutes). I'm not sure if "Ø" is a legitimate letter in the Hawaiian alphabet, but I am sure that they make a bloody racket and don't hang about whilst they do it!

It seems that LARMA are somewhat of a Swedish Hardcore Supergroup, according to their bio. To me, there's definitely a line back to '77 (carefully avoiding the p-word) here, there's even, almost, gtr solos, or, at least, hints of where they should be. Apparently this is KANGPUNK which, I am assured by wikipedia, traces its roots back through Discharge to Motorhead and Buzzcocks, so there we go. Avståndets Psykologi is "Psychology of Distance".

VITAL FORCE (and, please, please, click through and have a look at the cover for this split release) are Russian and what I'd call Proper Metal, and yet they still zip through this in just under three minutes. I particularly like the pointy guitar bits.

Funny how sometimes you can picture exactly where you were when you first heard a particular song, isn't it? For FINAL STRUGGLE OF SELVES by TOMB MOLD (!T!O!M!B! !M!O!L!D!), I was listening to Nathan's always excellent Hot Dog Days Radio (which doesn't often go *this* hard) whilst walking down Holdenhurst Road in Bournemouth, my only ever visit to the town, walking past slightly sad looking student bars at ten in the morning...

I had quite a bit of difficulty picking a track from the CLOUD RAT album because it's banger after banger (the weird goth-piano opener excepted), but I think ROSEMARY is as good a choice as any! Hard grindcore stuff but not the overly guttural vocals that sometimes get A Bit Much...

I mean, you can't argue with a band called WEAPONIZED FLESH, can you? I wish I still made actual real mixtapes because a 53 second song called FUCK XMAS FEAR would be just the thing for that tricky end of side one gap. The rest of the EP is actually great, it's just this made me do a proper laugh out loud the first time I heard it, for which I do not apologise.  Feels like it might sneak into the lower reaches of a mid-90s Festive Fifty.

Also, I'm going to cheat and recommend Something Entirely Different as well, viz The North East Ska Jazz Orchestra, brought to my attention from Robert Newsome's excellent Navigator column, where he jumps from tag to tag around the world of Bandcamp. Italian Big Band Ska for the win! Would sound perfect on the West Holts field at Glastonbury, about half three on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I can smell the suntan lotion and taste the perry (but you can see why it doesn't fit in with the other six!).