Music I Like – Punk

My musical taste is eclectic, but punk is not my genre. I love the idea of punk and most of the politics and aesthetics of the culture. But the music rarely does it for me. The list of punk bands I like is very short, and usually includes an interesting cultural backstory. So here it is.

Haram

I discovered Haram at a bluegrass festival of all places, but this band would have caught my ear wherever I found them. As all good punk bands do, they offend the widest swathe of narrow-minded people possible – first by being Muslim, then by being punk. I think Arabic might be even better suited to punk music than English is. I can’t understand the words on ?وين كنيت بي ١١​/​٩؟? ( “Where Were You on 9​/​11​?​”) but I’ve read that the EP deals with the unique trauma of being a New Yorker blamed for 9/11. This is what punk was made for.

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Otoboke Beaver

I’ve written about Otoboke Beaver before, breaking my rule about featuring whole albums instead of single songs because I loved their video so much. But Otoboke Beaver put a new album out in April. Itekoma Hits is everything the single promised and absolutely nothing you’ve been led to expect from Kyoto girls.

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And here is the video from that single again because it’s awesome.

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Bobby’s Bar

Okay, feel free to disagree, but I’ma call psychobilly punk. I mean, just look at that cover! And Shrunken Head Familia, the mostly instrumental album by Japanese psychos Bobby’s Bar, with it’s Dick Dale tones and audible smiles, makes me happy. I don’t know, maybe I only like punk when it’s cross-cultural?

{Fun Fact: In the tear-jerker manga Nana, the Black Stones were originally going to be a rockabilly band, but Ai Yazawa changed them to punks because she thought readers would be more familiar with the classic punk look.}

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Grrrl Gang

At the peak of the Riot Grrl movement, I was a college student two hours’ drive away from Olympia. I was vaguely aware of some all-female bands in Oly, but I had no idea what they sounded like. My engagement with the movement consisted of a couple dining hall conversations along the lines of “Hey there are all-girl bands in Olympia, we should do that.” I was good friends with a girl who played metal guitar. But my skill on the bass was limited to the 12-bar blues and the first part of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.” And our friend who said she’d play drums was known to have a, um, storytelling habit, but didn’t own a kit.

So it was literally decades before I developed a taste for jangly indie punk acts in the Riot vein. Truth be told, I tend to prefer more technical sounding music, and a lot of those bands sound the same, covering ground broken long ago. But Grrrl Gang is from Indonesia, where I suspect the path trod on Here to Stay is not as well prepared, and I think that counts for something.

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Big Bite

The Bandcamp page for Big Bite has only two tags: Seattle and punk. So they officially belong in this post. But to me, Big Bite’s album Trinity is good old grungy rock and roll.

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Facewreck

Compared to the shambolic sound of regular punk, I always expect to like the chug of hardcore better. But for some reason, it usually bores me. Every now and then, though, the chug comes with a bit of groove or something else that gets its hooks into me. Facewreck grabs me with some Pantera-like riffs and a growly scream with more texture than standard hardcore shouting. Sortin‘ Fools Out has the unusual tag “beatdown.” Maybe that’s a clue to finding more hardcore I like?

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The Suicide Machines

For a while there, pop-punk was a thing, and even though the trve punks despised it, to me it was one of the more palatable subgenres. The Suicide Machines‘ Revolution Spring strikes the same balance of pop and punk and ska as The Bouncing Souls – a band I used to be really into.