The Firehose #5

Welcome to The Firehose, where a guy who listens to too much music recommends the best albums he heard. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already done so. Let's get to it.

The Most Important Thing

Dry Socket - Sorry For Your Loss

Sometimes a song will pop up that I liked 10+ years ago, and I'll think, "Oh shit, what happened to them?" Nine times out of ten, this is a thought about a defunct punk band that I liked in my 20s, and I'm curious about what they're doing now, music or otherwise. Half the time I'll find another sick band that some of the members moved on to, the other half I'll find the drummer on LinkedIn and now they have a Ph.D. in botany or something.

Probably 15 years ago, I saw Offsides at Championship, a venue based in an old auto-garage in the middle of the woods outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that may or may not still exist (their URL lapsed, but their Facebook was active-ish into 2023). They opened for No Harm Done, a melodic hardcore band from Florida, in the footsteps of Lifetime. No Harm Done ruled, but I really came away impressed by Offsides, who were less melodic and more pissed off than No Harm Done (which is interesting because, if they shared members). That coincided greatly with my "I only like bands that sound like Paint it Black" era, so I picked up an Offsides shirt and quickly ordered a CD and 7" of theirs whenever I got paid.

Anyways, that brings us back to today. Offsides' "With Great Honor" came on shuffle on a little MP3 player I use when I'm annoyed at Spotify. This is serendipitous because no Offsides stuff is on Spotify, and this was the only way I was going to be reminded of them.

I need to impress on you how much this song fucking rules. It's great late-00s/early-10s hardcore and shows off what I like best about the genre. After it popped up, I felt the need to listen to it seven or eight times in a row, which wasn't hard because it was just over a minute long.

So yeah, I was like "oh shit, what the fuck happened to Offsides?!" and put my detective hat on. It didn't take a ton of internet sleuthing, Discogs told me that singer Danielle Allen was now in a Portland, Oregon based project called Dry Socket and they dropped a new record in January of this year. Perfect.

Dry Socket is a pretty big departure from Offsides, Allen's vocals are as harsh as ever, but the music gives a lot more to chew on to the point where I'm consistently surprised that the songs are so short. Each track is overflowing with riffs and breakdowns that feel a cut above other modern hardcore projects. "Keeper," the most popular track from this record per Spotify (I guess I have to say something like that when a record doesn't have a single) opens up with stop-start guitars that remind me of 90s metalcore, and by the end of the song it swells into this bigass riff that just crushes your head. It's a great song.

Modern hardcore mostly passes me by these days. I spend much of my time wishing the bands I liked when I was thinnest would get back together, like any old head. Dry Socket has made me excited about the genre more than I've been in a long long time.

Recommendations

Cloud Nothings - Final Summer

A few years back, I went through the process of listening to everything Cloud Nothings-related. Before that, I had spent a few years listening to their 2012 release Attack on Memory, which was so good that I didn't see an immediate need to delve further. "Stay Useless" and "Wasted Days" were about as good as this chaotic indie-rock can get for me.

What I found was mostly a career of diminishing returns. Life Without Sound was pretty good! Last Building Burning was okay, but the sound was getting a little tired, and everything after that was meh at best. They'd show flashes of the band I was really into. "The Echo of the World" from Last Building Burning had its moments, but it felt like Cloud Nothings were finding their abrasiveness through vocals instead of the big crunchy guitar stuff I really latched onto.

Final Summer feels like a return to form, and a great one at that. It's the first record of theirs I've heard that wasn't begging to be compared negatively to Attack on Memory, instead balancing the stuff that worked on the later records with a feeling I could latch onto.

Maukka Perusjätkä - Ennen kolmatta maailmansotaa

The second I put this on, I thought, "What the fuck is this album?"

Somewhere along the way, something piqued my interest in 1980s Finnish rock, and I threw a bunch of artists on a list to check out one day. Maukka Perusjätkä ended up at the top of my list this week solely because of this sentence from his wiki:

He is especially known for his 1979 song Säpinää ("Breaking Away"), which included chainsaw sounds. Chainsaws became one of his trademarks.

Come on, I was always going to prioritize this artist. "Säpinää" isn't on Ennen kolmatta maailmansotaa, his most popular record, but I was curious about what fans of Perusjätkä were into.

I've always loved records from the non-English speaking world from the pre-internet age, especially as they access more obscure genres. Many of these records aren't as coherent as their American/British contemporaries. A bunch of influences are smashed together that you wouldn't see in the US. My guess is this is because getting imported underground music in the 70s and 80s overseas was a huge pain in the ass. While Black Flag or The Jam may have been a part of the communities where they pulled their influences from a lot of bands that sounded like themselves. If you were a budding artist in Finland you probably took what you could get, and your record will probably be a mishmash of those sounds. That is just a guess based on what I heard from this record. Maybe I'm way off, and there were 100 bands in Espoo that sounded exactly like this.

"Vaatteet (on mun aatteet)" hedges a little between a standard punk song and a new wave affair, with a female backing singer and saxophone breaking up the barking vocals from Perusjätkä. The next track, "Ska 4," takes a 180 and gives what it promises: 2nd-wave Ska. The rest of the album continues in this fashion. "Meidän raha" sound like Siouxsie & the Banshees. "Tsemppaa" sounds like the Talking Heads. "Herätkää" sounds like whatever the 1980 version of The World/Inferno Friendship Society was. "Koske mua" sounds like Cheap Trick. "Ska 2" is shockingly also ska.

Ennen kolmatta maailmansotaa is a wild experience throughout. I'm not sure I'd call it great, it was a fun listen. I think Perusjätkä's vocals hurt the experience the most. He has one mode of vocals that consists of punchily barking whatever he wants to convey to you, and that's about it. It would work great on a 20-minute Agnostic Front-style album, but with something this varied it wears you down. I also have to concede that if I understood a word he was saying it may have changed that opinion.

Now, here's "Säpinää" with the chainsaw if you're curious.

Pop Music Fever Dream - Songs for Promoters/Abraham Maslow

Eli Enis' Chasing Fridays newsletter hipped me to Pop Music Fever Dream and I've been pretty obsessed with them since. It's weird as hell post-punk that feels arty without feeling pretentious, which is a very nice change of pace in the post-punk that's been percolating up to me in the last few years.

"Control" sounds like if Parquet Courts' "Light Up Gold II" was recorded in purgatory. "Control" sounds like a Jay Reatard song played at half speed. "Control" sounds like my Lewsberg LP got damaged in the best way. "Control" is beautiful, organized chaos, and I adore it.

I also want to include their single "Abraham Maslow" below because it rules.

Music Adjacent Stuff I Liked

My ears are not oysters; an essay about music listening in 2024 Keith Jopling/Art of Longevity/The Song Sommelier) This hit me like a ton of bricks and gave me a lot to think about.

Spring Cleaning (Camellia-Berry Grass/Cammy's Well) This is not about music at all, but I read it about 20 minutes after the "My ears are not oysters" blog, and when combined, they gave me a lot to ponder.

Metal Isn't Metal Anymore (Anthony Fantano & Eli Enis/Fantano YT Channel) I'm expanding this section to include video since this was such a good chat. A good piece of ancillary material to Eli Enis' metal piece that was posted on Stereogum.

Here's a running Spotify playlist of everything I ever feature here.

That's it for this week. Take care of yourselves. Eat more fruit.