Few things give me as much joy as shouty vocals, tappy guitar riffs, assymetrical drum riffs, the Northern Indiana DIY music scene, and pro wrestling. So obviously, Wrestling Moves, the debut LP from NWI post-hardcore group Native, hits me square across the chest.
Unfortunatley though, their tenure as a band coincided with a period where I was sort of divorced from the local-ish heavy music scene. I’ve only gotten into them in the last few years—and that was mostly through frontman Bobby Markos’ current band Cloakroom. While there’s not a ton of overlap between the doomgaze of Cloakroom and Native’s jagged, angular post-hardcore, this project has way more going for it than as a footnote for a more famous act.
Read more at ayearofvinyl.com
No matter how closely I scour the various corners of pop music history, there’s always something I miss. There are countless bands that have fallen through the cracks of year-end lists from various journalists, retrospectives, and trends on the music charts. And many of those bands are actually worth several damns, despite how much or little notoriety they achieved in their time.
When Punk exploded in 1977, the dam burst so hard it left a crater. It didn’t take very long for the maelstrom of no-frills sonic intensity to suck up other elements. Post-punk emerged almost immediately, deconstructing punk into unrecognizable shapes. Post-punk in turn splintered into its own series of subgenres—most notably, new wave and gothic rock.
If it accomplished nothing else, God, Get Me the F*** Out of Here proved that shoegaze and hip hop aren’t entirely without overlap. Cold Gawd plugged their reverb pedals into their fuzz boxes and played with the spirit of hip hop. Only two years later, the SoCal outfit is back with a record that turns that concept up to eleven.