The Namesake Series: "I Abstain"

To keep himself occupied during those tedious tour bus rides (when the keyboardist wasn't playing video games, at least), David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap fame subscribed to the Namesake series of cassettes. The hook was that a celebrity would read the works of some author with the same last name (though why Dr. J was reading the works of Washington Irving remains a mystery).
More than just a throwaway gag during the credits of a 30 year old flick, the notion of namesakes really resonates with me. When you come from a general musical world that revolves around hate, misery, death and pain, it shouldn't be a surprise when two different bands strike at the same image or idea. It's a pretty limited pool you're working with. Nonetheless, I'm always intrigued to see two divergent groups of musicians reach the same point from different directions.
Case in point, in a three year span both Napalm Death and Converge hit upon songs titled "I Abstain." I can't see any other correlation between the two bands and two songs other than that they both decided on the same phrase at about the same time. One doesn't seem to be a reference to the other, as far as I can tell. Intriguingly, both bands slotted it as the second track on their albums
First out the gate in 1992 was Napalm Death with Utopia Banished. After a pointless bit of noisy/industrial folderol, Napalm get their death on with "I Abstain."



Short of my personal favorite, "Dementia Access," I'd say "I Abstain" pretty much typifies both the album and Napalm Death's better post-Mick Harris output. With the only consistent presence and principle songwriter on their first thee full lengths defenestrated, guitarists Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintado shook off the deathly (but respectable nonetheless) rust of Harmony Corruption and started penning pretty much the kinds of songs you'd expect from the guys who anchored Righteous Pigs and Terrorizer, respectively. Just ignore that run from Fear, Emptiness, Despair through Words From the Exit Wound and dive back in with Enemy of the Music Business and the continuity seems to make more sense.
Two years later sickly talented Massholes Converge were lighting the fuse on a hardcore powder keg with their debut Halo in a Haystack (conveniently collected on Caring and Killing with bonus goodies for those of you who don't want to spend a rent check on a piece of hardcore trivia). There at track two is old faithful, "I Abstain."



The plodding menace of the song's deliberative tread is about as anti-grind as you can get short of going all drone doom on our asses. But from the start, "I Abstain" flashed the poise, creativity and pure technical chops that would define Converge, especially once they encountered a young lady who will forever be known as Jane Doe.
Two very different bands within the space of three years write songs with identical titles. So who owns it best? Don't ask me. I abstain.

Rotten Sound

A good grindcore album is the nexus of two parallel and occasionally competing characteristics. Great songs get you halfway there, but if they don’t have that energetic audio pop, you’re left with a mediocre experience. It’s that interaction between great songs and that abrasive, punky production that makes the greatest grind albums: think of that explosive jolt you get from Abuse, Horrified, or The Inalienable Dreamless.
I think more than any member of metal’s extended family, grindcore lives and dies by its production values (or deliberate lack thereof). Even more so than trve kvlk black metal’s refusal to cave in to niceties like listener’s enjoyment. Given that grind albums are often two or three dozen songs that barely crack a minute each, keeping that emotional energy coming is a must. An album of average songs with a great production is a perfectly acceptable guilty pleasure; an album full of good songs hampered by half-assed production just feels lacking.
In fact, I own a whole stack of albums that I enjoy despite their often wearying, enervated production job. Not surprisingly, Today is the Day’s Steve Austin gets production credit for a statistically significant portion of them. They range from simply being disappointing, The Parallax View’s thin, demo-worthy sound on Destruction of Property; the reedy, hollow guitars that mar Ablach’s Aon, through the outright unlistenable, Joe Pesci’s sonic abomination of At Our Expense! or Converge’s nigh unlistenable When Forever Comes Crashing. Each album sports perfectly acceptable, sometimes extremely enjoyable songs that are weighed down by their horrid production like a Lamborghini towing a horse trailer.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of power they would have conveyed had they sounded better (in Joe Pesci’s case, the band apparently will send you a better mix of At Our Expense! if you just ask). To a lot of bands’ thinking, the album only exists to put butts in the pit they next time they play Waukegan and then hopefully sell enough to pay for gas to Cheboygan. If that’s the case, then recorded music, particularly in this era of digital cornucopia and media overload, should be the best advertisement for your band possible. Chances are you’re not going to get a second chance to snare people’s attention.
Here’s a sampler of some of the unloved and weeded out articles in my collection that fell just short of sonic brilliance. Enjoy.

Where do you draw the line between intelligibility and enjoyability and can they be easily demarcated?

Ablach – “Obar Dheathain”
Kill the Slave Mater – “The Orchestration of Sodom”
Complete Failure – “Gross Negligence”
Converge – “Towing Jehova”
Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation – “Tied Up”
The Parallax View – “Name: Last, First, MI”
Shapes of Misery – “Something to Believe”
Joe Pesci – “Plato Complex”
Torture Incident – “What’s That Mean of Capitalist”

False Flag Attack

I guess I was never what you could call a very orthodox punk. There were plenty of bands that were considered canonical that I just never could get into. Cases in point: though many would have dubbed me straight edge throughout high school and college, I despise Minor Threat (though “Filler” is a damn fine exception) and think Ian MacKaye is a self righteous prick. I also hate the Misfits and take an immediate loathing to the kind of toothless meatheads you see in pretty much every mall Hot Topic sporting that goofy skull logo.
Likewise, Black Flag was a band I struggled with for many years. A lot of it is because the whole Henry Rollins persona irritates the shit outta me for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
I eventually made my peace with Black Flag much later in life, backing my way into the band through the music of those they influenced. But I still thank Damaged is painfully overrated, particularly in light of Greg Ginn’s later masterworks. Ginn is simply the greatest punk to ever sorta tune a guitar and it was hearing his atonal template trickle down through the next few generations that brought me back around to the original.
Here are three bands that radically altered by thinking about Black Flag.

Sick of it All
If anybody can claim Rollins’ caterwaul/catharsis crown, it would be hardcore stalwart Tim Singer. Dude had a band called Family Man, f’fuckssakes, but most of you probably know him as the guy popping forehead veins in Deadguy. Now I loved Deadguy just as much as the next 'banger, but, for me, Kiss it Goodbye was always the most interesting and cathartic of Singer’s bands. And if I’m going to reach for one song by Singer, it’s going to be the titanic drone of “Sick Day,” which has helped me come to appreciate the B-side of My War more as I get older. In fact, I doubt this amazing song would even exist without that polarizing Black Flag album and the sepulchral misery of “Nothing Left Inside.” It defied the “play faster” ethos of the era by daring to get down with the doom. Hell, this was an era when Saint Vitus and Black Flag shared a label, something that still astounds 20 years later.

Fuck Yeah
If any band in recent years has fully embraced Black Flag’s proposition that punk is a process and not a product, it would have to be Canadian audio provocateurs Fucked Up. With a swing like Class of ’77 Brit punk band, Fucked Up also channeled Black Flag’s unique blend of down and dirty punk and elevated aspirations from the transitional Slip it In and Loose Nut albums with a toe tapper like the scorching “The Black Hats.” It sends a shout out to that era when Black Flag was coming out of a crippling lawsuit that essentially sidelined their efforts but gave them the space they needed to nurture a sound that just couldn’t be contained by the strictures of what passed for punk at the time. A song like “Bastard in Love” still had one Doc Marten firmly planted in Los Angeles’ grimy underbelly, but Ginn and (sigh, yes, even) Rollins were beginning to grapple with the expanded possibilities of lyrical narrative and sonic dynamism.

Harmonic Convergence
As I said, Black Flag’s more e/in-volved later albums are far more interesting to me than their early generic punk works, and nobody in hardcore has really pushed the songwriting aspect as much as Kurt Ballou and his co-conspirators in Converge. Converge’s quiet mastermind has fully embraced the notion of abrading traditional song structure with a scouring pad of atonal awesomeness filigreed with amazing single note runs that jolt me into immediate attention. In fact, it was songs like album of the decade contender Jane Doe’s opening “Concubine” that lead me back to late catalogue goodness like In My Head’s title track, which shames all of the Flag’s narrow minded three chord contemporaries for its shifting tempos, textures and trills.

Here’s a quick comp of the songs that lead me back to an appreciation of one of punk’s finest practitioners. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, this is my list of other supposedly classic bands that don’t do shit for me. What classics can’t you stand?

The Beatles
Black Sabbath without Ozzy
Cannibal Corpse
Death
Deicide
Dio
The Exploited
The Germs
Judas Priest
King Diamond
Led Zeppelin
Minor Threat
Misfits
Morbid Angel
Ozzy’s solo material
Pantera
Venom