Various Artists – The New Hope (Smog Veil)
I’m not the first, and certainly not the most eloquent, to use the idea of punk rock in its earliest years as a counterbalance to the excesses and failures of the first hippie era’s tail end. What started as an earnest attempt to change the world for the better ended up with a bunch of self-congratulatory nostalgia, an elitist group constantly patting each other on the back because the public can now buy granola in the grocery store and tie-dyed shirts at the mall. The same group shot themselves in the foot by accepting the condescending half-measures offered by mainstream society and by treating subsequent generations of interested participants with distrust, as potential consumers at best. Punk was supposed to be more egalitarian. In the instances where that promise was fulfilled, you made your own noise where you were and you dressed and acted as you wanted, society be damned. While that ideal was rarely lived up to, there were moments when it seemed a palpable alternative to both society’s apathetic conformity and the failed idealism of past countercultural movements. That some of the best and most ferocious American punk and hardcore bands came from outside genre hotbeds like San Francisco, New York, and D.C. is testament to this ideal. All the frustration and ennui of small-town lives eroding under the weight of the era’s seismic economic and cultural shifts, channeled into ninety-second blasts overflowing with the sort of piss and vinegar that makes the fashionable nihilism of the bands’ better-known counterparts seem tame in comparison.
It was this sort of band that Tom Dark and Tom Miller compiled on The New Hope, a compilation of Northeast Ohio bands originally released in 1983, and recently reissued by Smog Veil Records. Bands too abrasive, too unconventional, and in some cases simply too young to record and tour were given an opportunity to carve out whatever niche they could. Many of the contributions constituted a band's first and only recording. The name itself is a good indication of the compilers’ idealist intentions, laying bare their hopes that the artists could provide some sort of jump start for a musical style that was supposed to be earth-shattering but rarely even broke its own conventions. The album was, and remains, a successful chronicle of a time and place. However, the reissue possesses a handful of elements which, while not detracting from the music, can leave a bit of a sour aftertaste–-at least, for those listeners inclined to pore over liner notes.
While both compilers did an excellent job in creating The New Hope, much of what they write for their retrospective contributions to the reissue borders on the sort of “kids today just don’t get it” attitude that was the downfall of the hippie forbears that punk sought to supercede. For that matter, it's also been the downfall of many of their disenchanted punk contemporaries whose contributions have fallen by the wayside. There is certainly nothing wrong with discussing the difficulties and rewards of creating independent music at a time when the practice was not commonplace. Recollections such as these contribute to the larger picture of a subculture and can help nip younger generations’ ahistorical self-importance in the bud. However, when the liner notes suggest that, after the first generation of bands and venues in the area dissipated, “the real hardcore was gone,” it ignores the subsequent quarter-century of excellent bands-–from Face Value and Integrity to the H100s and Gordon Solie Motherfuckers--that the region has produced. It also comes off somewhat dismissive towards the efforts of the label that reissued the album, as well as many others from Ohio’s past and present. While the liner notes take Stephen Blush’s American Hardcore to task for passing over the vibrant scenes in Cleveland and Akron, they often fall into the same trap that undermined that book’s relevance--the idea that any hardcore made after 1985 or so lacks any value worth mentioning, an idea proven wrong so many times that it really should have fallen out of favor by now.
Ideological differences and grumpy old man bashing aside, however, the album itself is absolutely essential for the legions of punks nowadays immersing themselves in the fringes of older punk. All the kids out there preparing to spend a few months’ rent money on a GISM album (which is going to be a bootleg) would be well-advised to shell out the fifteen bucks for this instead. Not that the bands presented here rely on psychosis alone. While bands like PPG or the Offbeats have somewhat of a melodic side, and while a band like The Guns-–possibly the best band on the compilation, and all of its members were fourteen and fifteen years old at the time of this recording(!)–-don’t sound far removed from fellow Midwesterners like The Necros or Negative Approach, other bands included aren’t so easily categorized. Bands like No Parole and The Dark possess a dissonant, unhinged quality that’s difficult to accurately explain. To even describe the bands in terms of notes or chords isn’t exactly accurate, as they often play parts falling outside of the conventional 12-tone melodicism upon which Western music has been based. Though not sloppy in a way that distracts from the music, bands like these sound as if the songs (and the performers, for that matter) are in the process of falling apart at the seams. While a substantial amount of punk pays lip-service to chaos and noise, very few bands actually step outside the iron-fisted boundaries of verse-chorus-verse structures to attain something more transcendently wrong. And unlike the handful of bands, especially in recent years, who actively attempt to sound noisy and disjointed, one gets the impression that these older bands were less self-conscious about it, pursuing their gnarled jumble of sound more intuitively.
While The New Hope is a compilation that belongs to a certain time and place, it’s more than simply a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Though it suffers somewhat from the bitterness of its retrospection, the music is left intact as a reminder of what can be accomplished by a small pocket of individuals possessing equal parts frustration and creativity, informed by themselves and their own experiences, more than a drive to conform to the ostensible nonconformity of their contemporaries. The bands presented are a reminder of what can make punk rock great: a drive to create something vibrant and individualist, in the midst of the erosion of subcultural identity and its incorporation into mass-cultural stagnation. Its inexorable link with the past is not validated by a “we were there when it mattered” attitude, but by the vivacity of the material contained therein.