Saturday, May 24, 2008

Part 2: D.P.P.S & Nailed Down

Our second installment brings us back to Japan with DPPS. These psychos play a screaming mad, high energy grind/hardcore that is as tightly played as it is energetic. These ragers win the match on this split because they kick ass, and for reasons I'll explain below. Once again, sorry about the "Japanese Title" thing.

It has been said on another blog that Austraila's Nailed Down didn't release anything great since their 3" CD. This may indeed be the case. The tracks on this record are alright, but they have a certain listless, sloppy feel to them that led to ND losing some listeners. The band is obviously excited by eighties Japanese and Swedish hardcore as can be witnessed in their distortion, raw simplicity, and "pidgin" English song titles (eg. "Grand Order of Confuse Assasin"). The best track is a cover song (Mob 47), which is usually a fairly bad sign.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

many thanks for this, man! been looking for this ep for a couple of years, but it seems like it's pretty hard to find... as for quality of ND stuff - the "violent distortion" 3" cd is really hard to match, but they had different drummer on the dpps and dismachine splits, as well as on "leak of deadly bacteria" and "atrocious damnation". it was some young kid who could not handle his instrument so well, but to me all this stuff sounds really good - it has the raw wild energy of the 80s raw punk bands. same goes for the sound - muddy and distorted. i think kim is quite a wise guy - he surely knew that it would be impossible to make another "violent distortion" with this kid, so why even try? he just picked another fave subgenre, and ended up with quite good result. listen to a side of "perth wolfpack" lp - it has yet another, more technically skilled drummer, but it totally lacks energy. what i want to say is that it's not so importatnt if they play thrash or raw punk as long as they do it good. and they did it good for most of their career. at least in my ears... roman

Batguano said...

Roman, glad to hook you up with this, and thanks for your info and insights. You're probably right... it's not fair to compare "Violent Distortion" to NDs other stuff. I couldn't help but feel disappointed, though, when I first heard this many years ago. Anyway, thanks again.

Anonymous said...

yeah, i know what you mean. it happened to me also with some bands. but in this case i knew what's to come - i've read some reviews before i got to hear the records, hence no disappointment...i was prepared.
roman