Void – Sessions 1981-83 (Dischord Records)
There is a long-held and largely fallacious belief that hardcore is characterized by an embrace of a chaotic aesthetic. It's easy to see why – an unfamiliar ear might find the buzzsaw guitars and barked vocals abrasive. But abrasion doesn't necessarily equate to a wholly unhinged methodology. For every proponent of genuinely chaotic music there are scores more who would simply march in lock-step with genre orthodoxy (I haven't worked out the exact ratio though – a hundred Madballs for every Septic Death? A thousand Hatebreeds for each G.I.S.M.? Hard to say). It can't even necessarily be painted as a recent trend either (though the Victory Records's and Hot Topics of the world aren't exactly cause for celebration) as many of the earliest entries into the genre's canon were fairly pedestrian, revered now only because they were first. This isn't to say that the style's conformity is all-encompassing, or even that all the unoriginal bands were bad (there has been some truly visceral and life-affirming music made of the templates laid out by Messrs. Ginn, Wainwright, MacKaye, et al.), only that the style rarely rewards iconoclasm. Some forward-thinking bands marginalized themselves (for instance, Man Is The Bastard), while some were rewarded with larger acclaim (i.e. the Minutemen), but others achieved a degree of renown while still retaining an approach that has rarely been understood – an effective case in point being Void.
Existing from 1979 until 1984, Void helped push hardcore beyond the constraints that had begun to exercise a pernicious influence even in a genre so young. The band's contributions to the Flex Your Head compilation and their half of a split LP with Faith are the stuff of legend, simultaneously defining and defying many of hardcore's tropes. Earlier recordings had circulated, most notably as the Condensed Flesh EP, a 1992 bootleg release of recordings made a decade prior, but a substantial amount of their earliest material lay entombed in Dischord Records' archives until only recently. What ended up being unearthed was something of a Holy Grail for anybody interested in the band's legacy – twenty songs that had comprised their first demo, the ten that had been released on Flex Your Head and the Condensed Flesh EP, some out-takes from those sessions, and two live songs that capture the band in all their abrasive glory. Much of this material had circulated on unofficial releases for the past thirty years, but the recent re-mastering and inclusion of all the songs on a single release helps to give a clearer picture of the band's creative process.
Sessions 1981-83, the product of this archival rummaging, isn't the most concise distillation of Void's oeuvre, and may not be the best introduction to the band. However, it provides a fairly detailed examination of their development, from frustrated suburban kids pouring out their angst as hardcore empowered so many to do, to purveyors of something stranger and fiercer. Their development seemed to occur in fairly jarring leaps forward, an evolution best illustrated by the presence of multiple versions of the same songs. “Dehumanized” appears on three separate occasions, each time injected with slightly more deranged vitriol than the last, until it arrives at the final variant, which is among the most succinct summations of the band's sound that they ever concocted.
Theirs was music that fulfilled punk's discordant promise in a way that has rarely been equaled. There was no shortage of hardcore's breakneck thrash pace, but the band utilized the dual assets of guitarist Bubba Dupree and singer John Weiffenbach, whose frenzied performances both live and on record added the sort of frantic edge to which most hardcore has only paid lip service. Dupree's guitar playing is the most immediately noticeable characteristic of the band's style – he's most remembered for his ability to wring sounds from his instrument that call to mind an animal being violently dispatched from this mortal coil. It was an approach reminiscent of the most violent Ron Asheton or Jimi Hendrix performances, only distilled to a dense cluster of sound, a method of playing that helped Void diverge from hardcore's ahistorical tendencies and allowed them to move forward by drawing from the past. This isn't to say Dupree was just some pretentious noise-maker or bumbling savant – his rhythm guitar playing was certainly capable, and the songs' structures attest to an ability to construct memorable and, dare I say, catchy material. This latter point is most evident on the 1981 session, where songs that would later be overwhelmed by dissonant guitar wrangling are revealed in their embryonic form, as unruly but not yet unsettled hardcore.
Over this din, Weiffenbach spat his frenetic invective, and while he planted one foot firmly on each side of the giving-a-fuck/not-giving-a-fuck divide that runs squarely down punk rock's median, his was a rage that never directed itself towards a single target. Some songs reflected the band's origins in Columbia, Maryland, one of the nation's first planned communities – “Suburbs Suck” and “All White Neighborhood” were among their earliest songs, ones that didn't carry over into the latter stages of their existence. Some were based on the sort of angst unique to those in the throes of adolescence or not far past it, with songs like “Halfway Boys” and “Organized Sports” decrying (respectively) those whose involvement with punk rock was less than total and those who would participate in any sort of athletics. Some songs, “Black, Jewish, and Poor” for instance, reflected a political consciousness not far removed from the DC hardcore scene's burgeoning leftist sensibilities.
Others, however, reflected a darker direction. A song like “War Hero,” the chorus of which details the narrator's desire to die in combat, never clearly establishes its intentions. This lack of a stated purpose is unsettling. While the lyrical content could hardly be considered subtle (the song's refrain is simply “I want to die in a war”), it's difficult to discern whether the song is a critique of militarism, a nihilistic embrace of all-consuming violence, or some combination thereof. It's an example of the sort of approach Void would utilize more fully with later releases, one that explores the more damaged facets of the human psyche without the comforting veneer of the sort of judgment that most punk rock bands would cast.
If Sessions 1981-83 reveals anything, it's that Void should be remembered for their introduction of narrative chaos, of unreliable protagonists and tenuous grasps on reality that placed their stance far afield of their contemporaries. One of Void's lasting strengths is that many people simply don't know how to process what they created. What sounds like a jumbled ball of confusion reveals layers of methodical songwriting. What resemble misanthropic, nihilistic screeds to the darker ends of humanity's spectrum of experience possess a nuance that might seem incompatible with a guy shouting over top of an unholy racket. These songs weren't possessed of any appreciable joy, but they did propel themselves with a gleeful violence, as if the disharmony and irrationality that permeates the universe shot through the members like a lightning bolt, injecting them with ideas that would come to them faster than their bodies could interpret. It was a tonality all its own, a language difficult to learn, and a skeleton key that opened the door to music's potential, a distension of our prosaic concerns into something more terrifying and ultimately, then as now, more satisfying.