Pusrad– Dömd (Gaphals Records)
Anybody with much familiarity with old punk and hardcore likely wouldn't have a hard time pegging Pusrad based on their name alone. It's not too much of a stretch to extrapolate some impression of their sound based on a name that strongly suggests a portmanteau of both Brian Schroeder's artistic sobriquet and either some archaic skateboard terminology or any of the bands that affiliated themselves with such (McRad, et al.). And, while judging books by their covers is a largely disparaged practice, such an assumption about Pusrad's sound isn't entirely wrong. But rather than act as cheap nostalgia, the band, themselves punk veterans who've been at it for a quarter century, has distilled its members' experience into something jolting and abrupt in a way that few recent bands are.
Pusrad's songs most notably define themselves by their brevity, a truncation so severe that it's hard to imagine the material actually working. Prior to Dömd, the band had two EP releases, a body of work consisting of twelve songs total with a playing time that came within a hair's breadth of four minutes. In much the same fashion, their most recent doesn't exactly expand their oeuvre by much – its nineteen songs might loosely be termed a full-length, if only in comparison to their previous efforts, with the album clocking in at a little over six minutes. It's not that minimalism has been foreign to hardcore at all – especially the bands of the era from which Pusrad draws – but it has rarely been taken to such a length that it would make the average Minutemen song sound like “Stairway To Heaven” in comparison.
The periphery of heavier music is littered with bands that have crammed their albums full of ten-second songs in pursuit of some version of extremity – trying to be the fastest, the readiest to ignore conventional structure and tonality. Pusrad however, despite their brevity, seem like they're not really pushing anything to an extreme – on the contrary, they reduce their music to its barest essentials, emphasizing the “core” in hardcore rather than testing its limitations. The songs themselves aren't far removed from the abrupt stop/start style of snotty hardcore favored by bands like Koro or Die Kreuzen, only stripped of almost every familiar punk rock element – the intros and outros, the breakdowns and solos – until all that's left is a rapid succession of energetic blasts. But despite the choppy speed, there are actually songs present, with hooks that may not at first seem obvious (except perhaps in their slowest material – the 35-second “Errare Humanum Est” is something of a hooky pop song, at least by the standards of this album, not far removed from the Masshysteri/Vicious school of songwriting) but go a substantial distance towards demonstrating that Pusrad isn't indulging in short, sharp shocks for their own sake.
While it may be asking a lot to expect listeners to easily get past the absurdity of certain facets of Pusrad's music, what they do shouldn't be lightly dismissed as they demonstrate that, cliché though it may be, less can certainly be more in the right hands. And sure, songs like “Baresebäck” could have been more enjoyable had they been stretched out to a length greater than nine seconds, but the band's essentialist approach would be compromised. Hardcore, at its best moments, built something great out of trimming the fat from its aesthetic, and Pusrad cuts to the heart of that way of thinking, excising not only the excess but also much that is taken for granted as standard, leaving only a disorienting and weirdly exhilarating listen.