Sectarian Violence – Sectarian Violence EP (Grave Mistake Records)
I’m not necessarily going to suggest that it’s a great thing for artists to attempt recreations of the past. I mean, Louis Armstrong was dangerous and exciting ninety years ago, but trying to write the next “Basin Street Blues” at this point isn’t the surest way to seem relevant. But one of the things I love about punk rock is that even when a band sounds pretty much exactly like a lot of other bands from decades past, it can still be a really compelling, interesting, and solid listen.
Sectarian Violence – Sectarian Violence EP (Grave Mistake Records)
I’m not necessarily going to suggest that it’s a great thing for artists to attempt recreations of the past. I mean, Louis Armstrong was dangerous and exciting ninety years ago, but trying to write the next “Basin Street Blues” at this point isn’t the surest way to seem relevant. But one of the things I love about punk rock is that even when a band sounds pretty much exactly like a lot of other bands from decades past, it can still be a really compelling, interesting, and solid listen. Case in point: the recent release by Sectarian Violence, a band whose members are spread between the U.S., England, and Sweden, and whose sound spreads itself to encompass pretty much any time in the past three decades when life’s trials and tribulations reach the point in which an individual can do nothing else but pick up an instrument and build from the foundation laid out by S.S.D., S.O.A., D.R.I., (early) C.O.C., and pretty much any band that could truncate their name into a three-letter abbreviation.
The members have done time in Never Again, Stay Hungry, and Coke Bust, and it would be hard to say that this falls outside those bands’ aesthetic perimeters. It’s the sort of fast hardcore that immediately comes to mind when descriptors like “fast hardcore” get thrown out – some parts that are, as mentioned, fast, alongside some parts that are somewhat less fast. Which may seem like the least descriptive description ever written, but it’s the most accurate summation of what bands like this do. Even if it doesn’t tread on any new ground, though, it’s a solid release that speaks to the members’ abilities to incorporate a comprehensive understanding of hardcore punk’s past thirty-odd years. There are songs that will surprise nobody who’s heard this sort of band before, but will likely appeal to pretty much anybody who has.
But for all the wheels it doesn’t reinvent, it’s a killer record. It engages the inequities and oppressions of the world in the blunt, accusatory manner of the best hardcore bands, and does so with a vicious, frenetic energy. There are very few styles whose adherents can invoke their genre’s ghosts without seeming anachronistic, but Sectarian Violence demonstrates that, with a solid understanding of what one’s forebears did right, tribute can be paid to the spirit of the music, its immediacy and relevance, and not only its sound.
