Framtid – Defeat Of Civilization (Black Water Records)
So this is about the time of year when every armchair music expert trots out their six-month best of list as if their impatience grants their opinions more gravity. Enough statements along the lines of “[insert album] by [insert artist] is certain to be the best [insert genre] album of [insert year]” have been made that, whether the opinion has been borne out by ensuing months, the phrase loses some of the punch that it might otherwise have if employed more sparingly.
Framtid – Defeat Of Civilization (Black Water Records)
So this is about the time of year when every armchair music expert trots out their six-month best of list as if their impatience grants their opinions more gravity. Enough statements along the lines of “[insert album] by [insert artist] is certain to be the best [insert genre] album of [insert year]” have been made that, whether the opinion has been borne out by ensuing months, the phrase loses some of the punch that it might otherwise have if employed more sparingly. So I’m not going to make some list in order to give Japanese crust band Framtid’s newest album a high-ranking spot, nor am I going to directly postulate that it could easily be the best punk album of the year.
But holy shit is it ever amazing. Whether it ends up being trumped by anything in the subsequent six months, Defeat Of Civilization is a perfect punk album, one whose rapid succession of venomous blasts of abrasion represents a band that has steadily improved with each release, ever so slightly dialing back the jarring noise of their earliest releases in favor of material that allows the songs’ structural elements to shine through. This isn’t to suggest the band has gone soft, but in the spirit of the old Scandinavian bands from whom they’ve taken so much of their sound (Mellakka, early Anti-Cimex, and to an extent Svart Framtid, apparently enough of an influence to warrant borrowing half their name), there is a method to the madness, or at least more of one than in many of the noisier bands currently popular in this particular subgenre. This is aided by occasional moments–the end of “Never Surrender,” for instance–that engage in the sort of low-end pummel favored by the rawer practitioners of the Tennessee/Oregon variants of the style, the sort of almost-catchy breaks favored by Deathreat or No Parade.
The end result comes off like the audio equivalent of a train wrecking into a nuclear weapons facility during a tornado. It’s engaging and explosive in the way few punk albums are, a harnessing of everything rawness can do right and everything structure can do to help it along without standing in its way. It’s difficult to say whether anybody within the genre could come up with a more potent distillation of this style’s strengths, but perhaps it’s better not to over-think it. Framtid once more offers a wave of apocalyptic energy in which it’s better to lose one’s self. It further proves that they’re among the greatest active punk bands, capable of delivering megaton blasts of sound that sidestep every trend and cliché permeating the style. This is the real deal shit, and anybody who likes any music along these lines would be foolish not to acquire a copy of this immediately.
