ninehertz

Here’s a cool little record from Nepenthe, blackened crust punk from the Philippines railing against the injustice and oppression of their government, reaching us due to the good work at the New Misery label.

It is incredibly noisy, of course it is – but I mean blistered with several layers of uncontrolled noise. You could easily mistake tracks like Pasista for manic powerviolence, but entombed within this fug is something crusty, messy, hardcore-based and oddly melodic. It’s easy to be mesmerised by its masked charms as you try to unwrap the self-erected barriers protecting its core.

There’s subtle variations on the same across its brief six tracks – heavy, speedy, crusty metallic punk noise, head-nodding grinding goodness and that strange but excellent faint alignment of melodic with the nasty. Needless to say, the lyrical themes are all worthy – from anti-imperial to pro-Palestinian liberation.

As I’m hopping round my living room to the fourth listen of Arise! – crust that’s a few notches of pace down from grindcore and with a hell of a beat, I can’t recommend this enough for those of a blackened punk persuasion to check in here.