A Bastard Noise: Power Violence Lives on in a New Generation

“No Comment! Manpig! Capitalist Casualties! Man is the Bastard! West Coast Power Violence! Let’s fucking go! Kick ass!”
And with that, the term power violence entered the hardcore lexicon. The loose confederation of California bands had little in common stylistically beyond a penchant for brevity. They certainly didn’t set out to spark a musical revolution. But 20 years after Man is the Bastard shouted the term into existence, a host of up and coming bands are taking what was once an inside joke to brand outcasts in the California hardcore scene and turning it into an ongoing and constantly evolving musical movement of its own.
Though the term power violence has been “commodified and bastardized” in the two decades since its introduction, Robby Komen of Sea of Shit still sees the spirit of that first run of bands in the wave of contemporary practitioners.
“It was definitely a time/era specific thing in its original incarnation (just like anything, it has to start somewhere), but I do believe there are contemporaries that earnestly share the same ethos and ideologies that unified these bands in the past,” Komen said.
Attracted by power violence’s aggression and malleability, a modern wave of neoviolence bands are taking short shocks of hardcore festooned with prominent bass and exploring all of the possible permutations, keeping it from going stale and extinct. Sprawling across the globe and adapting to fit new musical ecosystems, power violence is more vibrant and fertile than Man is the Bastard and their cohorts ever could have imagined.

G&P Review: Greber

Greber
Hometown Heroin
Bandcamp
When he’s not forcibly fucking your facts, bassist Marc Bourgon (and his collaborators from The Great Sabatini) must be getting down to old Man is the Bastard records because Greber, their new project, is all about the power and the glory of the bass. In fact, the four stringer elbows every other instrument to wings on debut EP Hometown Heroin.
Jettisoning the obligatory intro/outro, you’re left with six songs of low end aggression that sounds like the bastard child of the power violence progenitors and Australia’s bass-heavy experimental sludgesters Halo. Even if the some of the songs, like the mercurial “Cavedwelling,” which 1s and 0s between half time blasts and troglodyte trudge, could have used a trim, it’s still a tidy package. When Greber is on, the songs are ponderous monstrosities that dominate the landscape. The serpentine, sinuous “The Saddest Joke” knits in plaintive guitar drones with the bass, briefly letting another instrument grab the spotlight. “Carriers,” the strongest groove of the lot, slowly winds down to entropic stillness like a clock with a broken spring.
While there’s a bit of sameness that creeps in to some of the songs, Hometown Heroin powers through with incredible sound and a singleminded commitment to the bass-forward sound they doggedly pursued.

[Full disclosure: the band sent me a download.]