1/23/2024 0 Comments Gorilla biscuits![]() ![]() I’ve been waiting on a Buggin record for a while, and this song speaks to a whole lot of coiled energy that’s about to unleash itself. That confidence doesn’t dip when Jordan Moten, from fellow Chicago band Kharma, comes in to yell some shit on the breakdown. ![]() Buggin’s sound isn’t complicated, but they play with bounce and and conviction, and there’s so much swagger in Bennett’s delivery. One of the reasons that I gravitate to hardcore is that it’s an underground DIY culture that’s still full of gigantic, larger-than-life personalities, and Buggin’s Bryanna Bennett is one of them. The Big Escape by Blow Your Brains Out Buggin – “All Eyes On You” Maybe you have to come from outside the English-speaking world to pick a name like Blow Your Brains Out, even if that name functionally means the same thing as “End It.” Instead, I hear primal Cro-Mags knuckle-dragger music, with vocals bellowed hard enough that I wouldn’t have even known the lyrics were in Japanese if someone didn’t tell me. Japan has its own traditions of psychotic, dangerous hardcore, but I don’t hear any of that in Blow Your Brains Out. A Tokyo band in 2023 somehow channels the spirit of ancestral chest-beating fuck-you-up NYHC. In its own way, that Gorilla Biscuits show felt wholesome - an image of a subculture that reveres its elders but doesn’t feel beholden to them. A band like Gorilla Biscuits brings people together, and that, in and of itself, is a net positive. But there’s also an important place for a band like Gorilla Biscuits, a group that’s old enough that entire generations of hardcore have matured since they came along but spry enough that they can still put on a fun, exciting show. That’s why it’s cool to see big festivals, like last year’s Sound And Fury, where almost all the bands are young and hungry. Hardcore, like every genre, can put too big a premium on nostalgia. Older people drawn back in by a familiar name might get to see End It wreck a room. Younger people get to sing along with songs that have been passed down to them, generation by generation, through routes as indirect as a Fall Out Boy cover in a Tony Hawk game. Still, I like the way different hardcore generations interact at shows like this one. Older crowds might not get up for a band like Truth Cult. A whole lot of the people in that room probably hadn’t been born when Start Today came out, but it was still an older crowd. Legacy hardcore bands tend to sell more tickets than up-and-comers, though that’s changing. Maybe that’s the danger of a reunion show like this one. ![]()
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