I Found My Way Out

 A habit of mine is saving a huge list of podcast episodes in my queue on my pod app to listen to later when I don't have any other good stuff. I pulled Frank Carter from Gallows getting interviewed on Turned Out a Punk out of that list to listen to recently and found it to be an enjoyable episode. Less so because I was huge Gallows fan, as I liked Orchestra of Wolves pretty well and had a good time seeing them at Warped Tour in the late 00s, but more because it was nostalgic trip back to 2005-2010ish, which were my late-teens and early-20s, when I was going to shows constantly and, especially toward the early part of this, when I was realizing that I liked hardcore.

In my early teens, I had a tonne of baggage around the idea of liking hardcore because VFW metalcore at its zenith and that was something that a lot of scene kids liked. As discussed in the recent ASOB post, I defined in opposition to that sort of person and I turned hardcore into something I was not allowed to like. The exception to this was 80s hardcore like Black Flag,* Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, and, especially in my case, Dead Kennedys, who I saw as being legitimate and something that scene kids didn't like. That fast and aggressive hardcore punk was miles away from 00s metal in my mind and I was way more interested in skanking in the ska way, not the hardcore way.

*Funny anecdote of me being an insane poseur is that I wore a Black Flag shirt I had bought at Black Market to the Toronto Warped Tour in 2004, my first ever show. I knew who the band were, and knew they were intense and hard, but Damien spent the Friday before Warped downloading Black Flag songs, including "Spray Paint" on Limewire just in case anyone asked me about my shirt.

I have a funny memory of seeing Gallows at Warped Tour in 2007, when the Orchestra of Wolves hype was in overdrive, where Pat said "Holy shit, how are they fucking up so much?" to Chris and I and we said that no, their riffs were supposed to be that dissonant. We listened to the record a bit, but what I find more interesting is that Gallows, through being on Epitaph and being the hardcore band that got the nod from normie punk for a stretch, was the omnipresent band during the time when I started to get really invested in hardcore as a genre.

In that spirit, I thought I would share thoughts on a few songs that were instrumental in introducing hardcore to me as an 18-year-old.

Strike Anywhere, "Sunset on 32nd"

An important element to me wading into hardcore music was that I was reading reviews on punknews.org every day. While I might bemoan that behaviour pointing toward the most mediocre, entitled fake punk from the suburbs for a decade, it did mean that I was curious about org-backed bands like Strike Anywhere and Paint it Black. I gathered tracks from comps and then I saw the band with Pat and Chris, the real show homies from this time, at 102.1 The Edge's strange and short-lived punk-themed awards night the F-U awards. Strike Anywhere fucking slayed and I bought Change is a Sound and Dead FM shortly thereafter. I cared so much about politics in punk at the time and Strike Anywhere was an important band to that union in my mind. 

Set Your Goals, "Goonies Never Say Die"

While I wish it was all Strike Anywhere and Black Flag is my history, I was unfortunately a popcore kid. I saw Set Your Goals open for Less Than Jake in 2006 and suddenly breakdowns made sense to me. To give a band that now seems insanely corny and a relic of the past some respect, while this reads as straight ahead pop-punk by today's standards, the Reset EP was absolutely, 100% part of hardcore subculture in 2005. Mosh warriors were beating ass to the breakdown in this song back then. I guess it's fair to bemoan the long tail on this band in pop-punk because over the next two years a million blink-182 fans made "being into hardcore" their whole thing, and I am, unfortunately, part of that. But this was hardcore kids playing pop-punk, not the other way around.

Comeback Kid, "False Idols Fall"

I came back from my first year in university in April 2008 ready to dive headfirst into hardcore as a genre and being Canadian, it seemed like figuring out how much I liked Comeback Kid was the most important issue to tackle. I expressed interest in them to Chris and he gushed immediately, sending me each song from Wake the Dead over MSN Messenger, which took ages. Wake the Dead was big everywhere, but especially in Ontario. I think that if 80% of hardcore fans my age spoke honestly, this record would be the root of their tie to the genre.* Wake the Dead was just enough like Strike Anywhere and EpiFat to make the rest of the Youth Crew Revival/what kids call melodic hardcore now work for my ears and I was hooked. To Chris's credit, he also told me to get into Turn It Around as it was "more hardcore" than Wake the Dead and I now like that record a lot more. By the end of the summer, I had tickets to the Through the Noise tour for the fall with Comeback Kid, Misery Signals, Bane, Shai Hulud, Grave Maker, and Outbreak, which was my first real hardcore show.

*The actual answer there is probably Alexisonfire leading them to Comeback Kid.

Lifetime, "Airport Monday Morning"

Another interest thanks to the org, but the rough pop-punk of this song really appealed to me, and I was hooked immediately. I was the only person I knew into this band during my first year at Guelph and it felt so special. In many ways, they were the band that convinced me I needed to be into hardcore. I bought a blue American Apparel knockoff hoodie and black skinny jeans in the winter of 2008 at school because I thought it made me look like I was into hardcore, and I wore that outfit while listening to Lifetime's Self-Titled and walking around campus while the snow melted. Not just a favourite, but way more than anyone else listed here, a band that defined my personality.