Poison Idea – Darby Crash Rides Again (Southern Lord Records)
The relatively recent trend of plundering hardcore's darkest recesses for the previously unheard and unknown can come dangerously close to the sort of necrophiliac nostalgia to which the music was supposed to stand antithetical from the start. It's an approach that assumes the greater listening public really needs to hear, say, John Porcelly's high school band; that bringing such things to light is a worthwhile endeavor; and that these documents have some sort of de facto authenticity, simply because of their age or proximity to something relevant or popular. This isn't always the case of course, a point notably demonstrated by, for instance, last year's Void reissue. There are hitherto obscure documents that are worth rescuing from history's obfuscating mists, recordings that may or may not have been understood thoroughly in their own time but have cast a light far afield of their origins, inexorably altering what would come afterward.
Darby Crash Rides Again, the first of the Poison Idea reissues released by Southern Lord this year, is such a find. Compiling the band's efforts from 1981 through 1983 – the previously unreleased Boner's Kitchen demo, the 1982 recording from which the album draws its name, a live set, and out-takes from the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes EP – the album casts a thorough eye towards the band's nascent stages. There is little of the metallic bluster that they would inject into their later releases (exemplified by the unholy triumvirate of Kings of Punk, War All the Time, and Feel The Darkness), only the sort of frantic thrash upon which most hardcore bands were settling at the time. This isn't to say Poison Idea's music was at all generic, however. There is a viciousness to their songs that was unparalleled by pretty much any of their contemporaries – it's hard to think off-hand of any band playing music so fast, aggressive, and heavy in 1981.
This relentless energy acts as a unifying force, lending an overarching veneer to the songs and consistently cutting through the low-fidelity murk of the recordings (these are mostly demos and live recordings, after all, so even the best re-mastering job can only work so much magic). The music works like a knife cutting effortlessly through layers of extranaeity to reveal only the most unyielding nucleus, as if the band were taking the term “hardcore” as literally as possible – but at the heart of their sound and fury lay a significance perhaps not readily apparent, but no less powerful for it.
While the stance that the band struck – one of nihilistic abandon, of dead end lives cast about by a universe that's at best capricious and at worst wholly apathetic – was not necessarily unprecedented in hardcore, few bands articulated the concept like Poison Idea. Theirs was a distinct vehemence, a meditation on darkness, and the sort of pure distillation of the frustration and self-loathing that shadows any failed attempt to pull ahead in this life, that would be difficult to duplicate by one who hasn't lived the experience described in the songs. And they definitely walked the self-destructive walk – the band's late guitarist Tom Roberts self-applied the stage name “Pig Champion” after breaking the 450 pound mark, and drummer Steve “Thee Slayer Hippy” Hanford was arrested after a string of armed robberies that landed him a king's ransom in Oxycontin – behavior that lends the songs' subject matter a little more weight (so to speak).
But the music possessed other notable properties, for all its unbridled gloom and loathing. Folklore from the British Isles details a figure known as the sin eater, a ritual magician who would take on the transgressions of one seeking absolution, relieving them of their trespasses by assuming their burden. And it often feels like Poison Idea's songs work in a similar fashion. Theirs was music that, at its heart, was encumbered with an understanding of pain that transcends the simplistic negativity utilized by so many of their peers. As a result, it is able to play an important role for a listener, acting as a sort of beacon when stumbling through the fog of all of life's helpless, worthless moments, a balm for psychic sores, a motivator in the most demoralizing of situations. It seems unlikely that the band would have intended it this way – their lyrics (and, quite frankly, the members' criminal records) tend to portray them as fuck-ups and ne'er-do-wells – but that makes this facet of the band all the more powerful. It wasn't a pose because it likely wasn't even intentional. But it also wasn't a static, one-dimensional approach – lyrics would occasionally boil over with righteous indignation, some outward-directed fury at society's oppressive machinations, ideas that couldn't easily be factored into anything less than the most honest of outpourings.
I would hate to make it sound like one has to really suffer to understand Poison Idea's music, or that anybody who's really experienced privation and despair would necessarily have some kinship with it. Suffering is a wildly over-rated prerequisite for both creation and appreciation, even for something so thoroughly imbued as these songs. But theirs was the sound of people who couldn't take it anymore, people who played not because they necessarily wanted to, but because they weren't going to be offered many other choices. The recordings present on Darby Crash Rides Again aren't indicative of the band's later releases, but it's unfair to really view them in that light. Just as a sketch for Guernica could hardly be criticized for an undeveloped sense of light and shade, and a rough draft of Ulysses wouldn't fairly be judged for punctuation errors, these early documents show a monumental band carving a unique approach from the mountain of bullshit under which each day threatened to bury them. It's rough and it lacks nuance, but it ultimately was a savage enough bellow to act as sustenance and guide on the road to a more clearly-articulated aesthetic.