Another Disaster is a re-release compendium that collects the early works of British anarcho-punks Legion Of Parasites. Collections of early works are commonplace these days, but they rarely have the gritty documentary feeling that Another Disaster manages to capture.
When I say “gritty documentary”, I should probably qualify that statement. Another Disaster contains the tunes from Legion Of Parasites‘ early demo tape and 12” releases, and held up against the sort of quality that the average month-old MySpace band can manage these days they are - quite frankly - dreadful.
But it has to be remembered that the lumpen sound was at least partly deliberate. Growing up in the bleak political and economic climate of the early eighties, Legion Of Parasites looked to Crass and the Dead Kennedys for their political and aesthetic inspiration, and bearing in mind how hard it was to get hold of decent musical equipment in the early eighties – especially for three angry teens from Pavenham – it’s a considerable feat of effort that they got anything recorded at all.
The opening seven songs on Another Disaster are historically fascinating, but as a musical experience they’re pretty bad. Legion Of Parasites display the sort of ham-fisted musicianship that makes Half Man Half Biscuit sound like the Yngwie Malmsteen Band, and they fail to articulate much political depth beyond railing at “the system” and those who have sold out to it.
The next five tracks on Another Disaster – some of which originally appeared on the Undesirable Guest 12-inch – show the first hints of musical progression. The drums are actually keeping pace for bars at a time, and Sean Houchin has realised his guitar can do more than the three chords from the back of that old album sleeve. Legion Of Parasites were on their way – such was the nature of the scene at the time that these tunes were enough to encourage global interest in the young punks.
The remainder of Another Disaster comprises the complete playlist of the band’s self-recorded Prison Of Life album, which is a stellar leap in quality and sound by comparison to the early material. The fast rattle-trap rhythms are holding together better, only collapsing at the end of the more ambitious fills, and that alone gives Legion Of Parasites the opportunity to build something a bit more serious on top.
There’s some production here too, but it does the material few favours as cheap reverb drowns the drums and the guitar chops out the classic wasp-in-a-jar transistor-tone distortion. But Legion Of Parasites have by this point realised that they can go further than simple terrace chants about fighting the system, and they bust out of the verse/chorus loop with Cian Houchin delivering a sort of schizoid gibber that suits the paranoia and of the songs, which in turn reflect the bleakness of entering adulthood through the archway of massive unemployment into a world that could at any moment be reduced to a nuclear wasteland.
But it’s here toward the end of Another Disaster that you can hear them developing a passion in the music for its own sake, rather than simply as a vehicle for their angst, and there are moments where you can hear the foundations being laid down for what today’s teens call punk. “War Hero” is probably the stand-out track, coming on like a speed-crazed British proto-Rancid.
As such, Another Disaster is a revealing document of the grass-roots anarchopunk subculture of the mid-eighties, and every snotty Blink-182 fan that bleats on about being “proper punk-rock” should be locked in an old tenement toilet with this album blasting through the door at high volume until they promise to sign some sort of agreement to never wear box-fresh baseball caps ever again.
But as far as listening to Legion Of Parasites for fun is concerned, I think Another Disaster will probably remain the preserve of the nostalgic members of the original punk generation and the most stubbornly retrograde members of the current one.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: anarchopunk, Another Disaster, Legion Of Parasites, protopunk, punk
