I've been thinking about hardcore (yes, in the vague and wide-ranging way that is implied by that phrase) more than usual lately because I've been listening to the Axe to Grind podcast more than usual. A recent episode that focused on Comeback Kid's second album Wake the Dead had me thinking about both about my experience liking Comeback Kid when I was younger, and getting into hardcore as a genre, as both the two are intertwined.
I feel like my transition into liking hardcore happened over a little more than a year. I saw Set Your Goals open for Less Than Jake in 2006 touring on Mutiny! and there was enough pop-punk in the band for me to like it.* Shortly after that I started to listen to Strike Anywhere and Lifetime, both whom seemed to have enough "punk" in them that their versions of hardcore was still palatable to me. By the end of my first year at university I had accepted that I like hardcore, something I would have never imagined as a ska kid, and I was ready to get invested in some bands.
*In hindsight, they are much more of a pop-punk band than hardcore, but it seemed like the opposite to me at the time, because hardcore as a genre was so foreign to me. That being said, I still like to think of Reset and Mutiny! as cool things happening in hardcore, rather than cool things happening in pop-punk. Make sense? Probably not. Also, the two singer thing sure hasn't great, eh?
My friend Chris' first recommendation was Comeback Kid's second album Wake the Dead which was a huge thing in Ontario after its release. The band Canadianess made them more accessible to me and I had a bit of local pride in them, despite the fact that they were from Winnipeg. The album is definitely a "hardcore" album, but it's recorded in probably the most presentable way that they genre possibly can be for new listeners (re: The Blasting Room). I was one of those and took to it immediately. Breakdowns! Apparently they were great along!
After getting in Comeback Kid, I figured that the next thing to do would be to go to a real hardcore show, which seemed scary and violent to me as some who spent their high school years skanking. Shortly after I started listening, the band announced the Through the Noise Tour in Canada, a super bill featuring them headlining with Misery Signals, Shai Hulud, Bane, Grave Maker, and Outbreak as support, and a date in Guelph, where I was going to university. I had heard of Misery Signals and Bane, but everything was new to me and I was excited to take all of it in.
I only knew one person going to the show and she spent most of the show hanging out with other friends, so I spent most of the night on my own. I was nervous about what shirt to wear to the show because I didn't really have any hardcore merch, so I wore a plaid shirt over an Aggrolites shirt to hide my ska-ness. In hindsight, why didn't I just wear my Strike Anywhere shirt? I felt like an outsider at the show and found myself watching the bands and people there closely to learn what being a hardcore kid was like.
The show was such a different experience from what I was used to a ska and bigger punk shows. It felt more tribal and it seemed like most of the people there knew each other and this was the main thing that they did. There was also more posturing and ego than any other show I had been to. People clearly had a particular aesthetic that they stuck to, which was something I hadn't really experienced before. There was an air of silent judgement in the room and that was both scary and alluring to me. I equally wanted to fit in and keep doing my own thing. As much as I did, and still do, hate that judgement, it also felt related to the fact that everyone went absolutely crazy when the bands played, yelling, moshing, and stage-diving.
Though I was intrigued by the first two bands, neither of them made a huge impact on me in the moment, though I came to really like Grave Maker's album after the fact. Before the show, I was most intrigued by Bane, whose shirts and hoodies I had seen everywhere and whose name I thought was extremely cool. Though I had checked out a few songs, I found that I really wanted to get into the band more than I liked their songs.
Once the band had finished setting their gear up, frontman Aaron Bedard got onstage looking completely different from everyone else in the venue, grabbed the mic, and said:
"You know sometimes touring can get a little boring when you're as old we are. But then you roll into some small college town you've never heard of and there's 300 kids ready to get buck-ass wild. This song is called 'COUNT ME OUUUUTTTTT' "
The kids did indeed buck-ass wild and though I had a huge mix of feelings up to that point in the night, the negatives were immediately erased, I became a hardcore kid instantly, and knew I had found something I would love for life. Bane became the first hardcore that felt like "my thing" and that feeling still lingers today. When I think back on my experience with the genre, Bedard immediately capturing the entire room like that is "hardcore" to me, because that's what brought me in.
