MOST PEOPLE ARE NICER THAN US - Hard Ons (Chatterbox)
Saying there's life left in the beast is a monumental understatement. Ditto the revelation that this album is hard. "Nicer Than Us" is uncompromising hardcore and punk thrash. Downstroke delight. It's sounds so tough that death itself couldn't kill it. Why will be revealed soon, but first some perspective.
For a time in the late '80s, the Hard Ons were the essence of perfect punk pop. Hugely popular in Europe and blessed with a rabid following at home in Australia, attending (and surviving) their riotous shows was a rite of passage. It ground to a halt at the dawn of the '90s, but didn't we have a good time. Spin-off Nunchukka Superfly was a stunning by-product, and way too left-field for many of the old hands to keep up with.
Re-animated half a decade ago, the Hard Ons found their old fan-base had hocked their souls for mortgages. The kids were no longer such and had offspring of their own. So the Hard Ons did what any still vibrant and self-respecting punk band from the '80s would. They built a new following.
While a lot of us are guilty as charged on the mortgage-and-spawn-front, the Hard Ons have changed too. Keish's walked away from the drumming and vocal duties (although he rejoined briefly for a big run of anniversary shows) and his successor on the kit Peter Kostic brings a different dynamic to the band. Blackie handles guitar and most vocals. Ray Ahn remains the throbbing bass heart of the thing, his hair and his dervish head swirling antics both still intact.
I'm still playing catch-up on the recent back catalogue. I heard bits of the output but lost touch as the Hard Ons rolled out three albums before this. The first ("This Terrible Place") probably found them in no man's land and finding their feet, but consensus on the last ("Most People Are a Waste of Time") was that they were back to their pop-punk best.
Like a pendulum on an axis going in the opposite direction, "Most People Are Nicer Than Us" pushes the Hard Ons into hardcore territory. Emphatically so. And it hits with the impact of a 'roids raging National Rugby League forward on his way to his lawyer to settle out-of-court on the morning after end-of-season celebrations on Mad Monday.
"Bottom Feeders", with a bouncy Blackie guitar line and chorus to match, might be the most familiar touchpoint for old fans. But it's the naked attention-seekers - the spiralling, breakneck speed demons like "You Sir, Can Fuck Off" and "Making Money From Goths Is Fun" - that create mayhem. These two especially have that thing happening where the underlying harmonics feed to give the sound an unearthly quality.
"Carrot Top" is stunning thrash-punk. You can almost hear Ray Ahn's tonsils hit the studio wall with his vocal on "Don't Fear The Reeperbahn". Blackie's guitar carries the day on "My Style of Attack". The sole respite from this attack (if that's how you regard it before it climbs out of the sludge into a fully-fledged freak-out) is "Spent The Day In Hell, Was Bored") where overdriven guitars emulate a massed choir.
Blackie sings most of the album and occasionally veers just this side of death metal distortion in places, but did you really expect the Vienna Boys Choir?
The more you get into this record the more apparent it becomes that the lines between the Hard Ons and Nunchukka Superfly sometimes blur, to the extent that the bellyflop howl of "Two Laps in Serbia" could belong to either band. Truth be told, it's the Hard Ons who seem to be consciously moving their own goalposts around and not conforming (I'm hypothesizing that Nunchukka Superfly exists on its own because it has no goalposts, full stop.)
Hardcore, I can usually take or leave. Same with most of the trappings of metal. But the Hard Ons have absorbed them, transcended their limitations, and are truly carving a unique sonic path.
If I sound happily amazed that this album's so good it's for two reasons: I wasn't paying close enough attention. And it is. –
The Barman
