Plague of Strength

I’ve posted before about my endless lamentations over the death of beatdown hardcore as a genre.  It appears that the Krauts decided to find their fucking balls and get in on the game, however, and they’ve produced shit so brutal in the last couple of years that they should be up on charges in the Hague.  Luckily, I speak some German, so this shit is basically Rosetta Stone 2.0 for me- I get to hone my linguistic skills while crushing weight and screaming unintelligible German at the type 2 diabetes-cultivating xenophobes of the South.  Thus, I win several times.  Lest any of you linguistically-challenged fuckers out there fear music in a foreign language, most of this shit is in English, and the stuff that’s not probably wouldn’t be terribly intelligible in any language, no matter your proficiency.  Thus, you should just download this shit and enjoy it the way a dog enjoys drinking out of the toilet.  Just try not to get too German on the deal and drop four hundred pounds on your neck in a failed attempt at a snatch on international TV.

The Bands:

Butcher- I haven’t been this excited about a band in years, quite frankly.  Butcher appears to have collected the sum total of Germany’s remaining masculinity and jammed it into one badass five piece hardcore band.  They basically sound like Shattered Realm with half-German lyrics and a shitload of digital bass booms.  The breakdowns will liquify your bowels and make you shit yourself, if you happen to to be listening to them on anything with serious bass.  What’s more, these fuckers throw in a decent amount of rapped lyrics into their songs, which makes any toughguy hardcore band eleventy million times tougher.  It’s a verifiable fact.  If there’s anything more fun than death growling “Wir machen euch kaputt!” at the toothless hillbillies in this shithole city, I have no idea what is.

Hitler’s corpse spontaneously masturbates whenever a Butcher song is played within 100 km of his location, I’m sure.  Download “My Own War” here.

Words of Concrete- Pulling a very close silver in the Best New Beatdown Band event in the 2012 Olympics is Words of Concrete, and East German band that splits their lyrics up into English, German, and a couple of badass sounding Russian raps.  Basically, if much of Europe was conquered by a particular culture, they sing songs about being a hard motherfucker in the language of that culture.  Words of Concrete is equal parts E-town Concrete, Recognize, and Haymaker-era Throwdown.  Yeah, it’s that fucking awesome.  If you don’t want to learn Russian and German after listening to “East German Cold”, you’re a soulless pile of dogshit and your squat’s probably south of 225.  You get an extra 100 testosterone points just for downloading their fucking music.

Download “East German Cold” here and their split with Delusions of Lunacy and New Kidz on the Block here.

Beatdown Heavyweights MMIX- There are few split hardcore albums I’ve not liked over the years.  Prior to the advent of the internet, it was one of the best ways to find new music, because when a band you loved did a split with another band, you’d generally hear someone new.  That was one method for finding new bands in hardcore back in the day, as well as reading the “thank You’s” in the liner notes for cds.  You internet generation motherfuckers have no idea how easy you have it.  In the early 90s, all of the kids who wrote zines were vegan straightedge kids, and they had terrible fucking taste in music.  Thus, unless you lived in NYC or Philly, you were pretty well fucked finding new music without splits.  Beatdown Heavyweights brought that trend back, because I downloaded this after discovering the gigantic pile of blood-soaked German awesome that is Butcher.  The other three bands on this disc were just as fucking good, and managed to entrench themselves firmly in the same nubeatdown genre without completely aping Butcher’s sound.  Created Hate might’ve gotten a little overzealous with the digital bass booms and the ridiculously bass-heavy mixing, but their vocalist brings a different style to the party by rocking more of an early-90’s gruff shouted vocal style.  Balboa’s shit is definitely better mixed, and they go much more death metal on the vocals and music, making them basically deathcore beatdown.  Yeah, it’s fucking awesome- they’re basically what Waking the Cadaver should have become after they released their first two song demo.  The last band on the split has a fucking cool ass sound- imagine the singer from Coalesce in a late 90s Florida hardcore band like Until the End, and that’s what you’ve got.  They’re toughguy bro-core, in which they basically just yell about how their friends are their family and they’ll stab anyone who looks at them funny.  Download the split here.

Call For Blood- If you don’t recognize the source of their band name, you haven’t been studying your Hatebreed.  This band’s actually not German- they’re Swiss.  If I didn’t tell you that their singer was a broad, you’d have no idea until she fucking told you (she’s the one in the pic above).  Her vocals are harder than that poofter from Lamb of God and his effects-laden bullshit,  and these fuckers know how to write a breakdown, unlike LOG.  Not the greatest band on the list, but they’re notable if for no other reason than the fact that they’re the first (to my knowledge) female-fronted toughguy band, and because they speak Swiss German, which is fucking gibberish.  The songs appear to be in English, though her vocals are so gruff you can’t really tell what the fuck she’s saying other than “fuck” and “that’s right, I’m a bitch”.  Download their EP here to hear a broad tougher than you curse her fucking ass off.

Yesterday I Had Roadkill-  I got a bunch of emails about the rap song in the last video I posted, and that’s “Shicksal” off  YIHR’s disc.  This band brings together deathcore, toughguy hardcore, dubstep, and rap in one gigantic package of saurkraut-flavored “fuck yeah”.  Random as shit, and all that much more awesome for it.  I’ve had both “Insides Outside” and “Anthony Facepuncher” on my lifting mix for a couple of months, and they never get old.  “Shicksal”, on the other hand, is a 100% German rap song with one of the hardest fucking beats in rap sings Westside Connection stopped making music, in addition to death growls and a SICK breakdown at the end.  We’re talking rip your grandma’s spine out and use it to slaughter everyone at an old folk’s home brutal.  Download “Feast for the Hoes” here.

Slam Coke-  I actually checked out this band because I love the fuck out of Yesterday I Had Roadkill’s song “Insides Outside”, in which Slam Coke’s vocalist does guest vox.  That song is literally face melting, and pretty much everything Slam Coke does is beyond brutal.  Like Balboa, they’re deathcore beatdown, but more of their lyrics are auf Deutch and are hilariously nonsensical insofar as I can make them out.  For instance, their title track is “Fick die Bude kaputt”, which literally translates to “fuck the broken shack”, according to my dictionary.  I have no fucking clue what that means- maybe they hate the fuck out of squatters.  In any event, all of their songs are stupidly brutal and I’ve learned a decent amount of German trying to figure out what they’re growling about. Want awesome beatdown?  Check out Fick Die Bude Kaputt.

Awesome deathcore?  “Mosh for Zombies” is your song.  Better dubstep than most of what Skrillex has produced of late?  “Dub” is your shit- the song is ridiculously cool, and I’m not the world’s biggest fan of dubstep.  Download “First Cookie Fick Die Bude Kaputt” here.

Bench Press- This band is everything you would imagine a band by that name would be, and they’re actually American.  I realize that’s not in keeping with the theme of this post, but I didn’t want you fuckers to sleep on these guys.  If you can’t hit a PR listening to Hellbound or Stay Hated, you’re not going to.  These fuckers pretty much stick to the original Hatebreed format- songs all at or under 3 minutes in length, chock full of two-step parts and breakdowns, everything chorusless, and tough-ass lyrics sung in a gruff voice as opposed to growled.  The best of the bunch is definitely th title track, whcih in my experience usually isn’t the case, but these guys know what the fuck is up.  STAY HATED.  The breakdown is every bit as tough as you’d expect, and this is the perfect song to for lifting or fighting cops. “Broken lives and broken necks / this world forgives but it don’t forget.”  How the fuck could you not love lyrics like that?  For fans of Hatebreed, Throwdown, Lionheart, and old Bury Your Dead.  Download “Stay Hated” here.

It should go without saying that I threw these online here because they’re fucking hard to find and you cannot get them off Amazon for download.  As such, you should buy merch and support the bands- Slam Coke’s got some fucking awesome shirts available here if you like their shit, and WOC has stuff for sale here.