Subhumans (England)

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Subhumans
Subhumans.jpg
General information
origin Wiltshire , England
Genre (s) Anarcho-punk
founding 1980, 1998
resolution 1985
Founding members
Dick Lucas
Guitar , vocals
 Bruce Treasure
Herb
Trotsky
Current occupation
Singing, piano
 Dick Lucas
Guitar, vocals
 Bruce Treasure
bass
 Phil
Drums
 Trotsky
former members
guitar
 Steve Lucas
bass
 Grant Jackson

Subhumans is an English anarcho-punk band from Warminster , Wiltshire .

history

Singer Dick had sung with the band The Mental before the founding of the Subhumans and released an EP with them. Guitarist Bruce was a member of the band Stupid Humans, also from Warminster. He and Dick met at an Angelic Upstarts concert in 1980 and formed the Subhumans when their respective bands broke up.

The band Flux of Pink Indians released the first three EPs Demolition War EP , Reason for Existence and Religious Wars as well as the debut album The Day the Country Died of the Subhumans on Spiderleg Records from 1981 to 1983 . 1983 founded the band Bluurg Records, where they released their own recordings. The LP 29:29 Split Vision was also released there posthumously after the band split up in 1985. Before they split up, the band had played 262 concerts including several tours in Europe and two in the USA. Dick joined the ska-punk / reggae band Culture Shock and from 1989 played in the ska-punk band Citizen Fish together with Subhumans bassist Phil and Subhumans drummer Trotsky.

In 1991 the band gave two concerts. In 1998 Dick, Phil and Trotsky brought Bruce back and tried to reform the band. Since then they have toured occasionally and released a limited edition CD of old, unreleased songs called Unfinished Business . In April 2003, an appearance was recorded in Corona , California as part of a US tour that appeared as part of the Live in a Dive series on Fat Wreck Chords . As with Citizen Fish's publications on Lookout! and Alternative Tentacles , no contracts were signed, but the bands shared in income and royalties.

After the band reunited, it took until 2007 to release the following album, Internal Riot . Dick Lucas justifies this with the activities of her other band Citizen Fish as well as the moves of bassist Phil to Spain and drummer Trotsky to Germany in 2003, so that the band could only rehearse about three times a year and could only slowly finish new pieces. Trotsky lives in the country, however, where the band can rehearse without the risk of noise pollution, and through Pid from Contempt the band came into contact with a musician collective with a building with rehearsal rooms in a town near Phil's village. Dick Lucas' material was not created specifically for one band or the other.

style

Musical influences, according to Fat Wreck Chords, were a mixture of Sex Pistols , The Damned and similar punk pioneers, as well as older artists like King Crimson and Frank Zappa , resulting in a style with more complex structures than other punk bands, but without the energy and Losing momentum of punk. James Christopher Monger of Allmusic places the band in the middle between The Clash's political songs and " Crass ' experimental warfare". His colleague Adam Bregman compares them to The Clash and Conflict , although their music is different from that of these two bands in more ways than one. Like The Clash, the band experimented with ska and reggae beats, but the Subhumans' music was a bit simpler. The band was "always pretty easy". Often their songs sound the same. Victor W. Valdivia sees “nothing groundbreaking or particularly characteristic” in their music, but the band is not lacking in energy. Charles Spano, on the other hand, attests the band a characteristic and influential mixture of “sex pistols dirt, hardcore intensity and ska punk ”, the latter being perfected by the successor Citizen Fish. Her live album Live in a Dive proves the impact her music has had and how relevant it remains. He avoids naming politicians by name in songs, for example, since they would be short-lived and irrelevant a few years later, but war and exploitation would seem to be endless.

Dick's texts are shaped by social awareness and critical of social norms and contributed to the classification into the anarcho-punk niche of the growing British punk scene of the 1980s alongside Crass , Antisect , Conflict and Flux of Pink Indians . Monger describes Subhumans as "one of the more educated and musically athletic British punk ensembles between 1980 and 1985". The band challenged both the government and its people not only to rage against the world, but to improve it. Bregman writes that most of her albums have a general theme: how society lures people into the trap of obedience, wage slavery and conformity at a young age, as well as apathy, unity, revolution and religious wars as common themes of the subhumans. Unlike The Clash, the topics are almost always straightforward. Subhumans is eloquent compared to many other punk bands, but has often dealt with “black and white issues”. Dick Lucas himself commented on the new album that lyrically the point of view was updated, after 20 years not much had changed, oppression, war and social decline are still relevant. If the topic seems repetitive, it is because the topic is still important. The band's lyrics “consistently criticize that part of the population that blindly accepts the norms prescribed by society and the system and functions like a cog in a gigantic machine without will”. The band "supported the peace movement and repeatedly took a stand against the mania for armaments in their pieces". Wolfgang Sterneck counts the Subhumans among the "anarcho- pacifist oriented bands of the first hardcore generation". Dick Lucas, however, does not describe himself as an anarchist and stated that he did not study anarchism. The band willingly accepted low fees on tours in order to maintain their independence and to support various projects, such as squatted houses. In addition, she restricted the entrance fees to her concerts, avoided agencies and saw no need for a manager. Lucas commented, “You can't hope to get something across in a meaningful way when the band is surrounded by the mechanisms of the music industry that puts image over reality, profit over message, and the band over audience . "

According to Valdivia, the band sounds “hungry and full of energy” on the early EPs. Lyrically the band is not exactly groundbreaking, all songs are "Society-sucks-the-world-hates-me-songs" and the music is pretty standard punk without any complexity, but the band is capable of great melodies like in Animal and an occasional witty verse. Even the less unmistakable songs are played brutally and efficiently, and there are no failures. The EP-LP with the material from the first four EPs is a great starting point to get to know the Subhumans. Spano describes All Gone Dead from the debut album The Day the Country Died as "the Clash-esque", and mentions Nothing I Can Do and the "thrashy" Mickey Mouse Is Dead as highlights of the album. The album is considered a classic that sold 100,000 times.

In the live version of I Don't Wanna Die on the EP Time Flies But Airplanes Crash , Dick Lucas 'voice is stronger than usual. The track Susan, which is also included on the EP, is mainly based on Lucas' vocals and piano with only a little guitar and bass, Work Rest Play Die has a groove reminiscent of The Clash, according to Bregman . Susan tells the life story of a woman who “tries to follow the given values ​​and breaks inside. After graduating from school, Susan works in a factory because she cannot achieve her goal of becoming a secretary. According to social norms, she marries and soon becomes a mother without really wanting both. She tries to suppress emerging depression with pills, before the interpersonal coldness, the alienation and the lack of prospects she ultimately flees to suicide. ”Her family, in turn, uses the money from Susan's insurance for a vacation. Her grave is not visited and her epitaph is not read by anyone. Bregman writes on From the Cradle to the Grave , the lyrics deal with the usual subjects, but the problem here is the music. He describes the material after the second song Waste of Breath , which is not bad, as “punk- prog-rock ”. The title track, which takes up the entire B-side, includes a "messed-up reggae beat" according to Bregman and military-sounding drums. The sound carrier is long and difficult to listen to by sub-human standards. At Worlds Apart, he notes that apathy, business people and government leaders weren't exactly risky targets in the context of British 1980s punk. However, the music is relatively varied, with a lot of reverberation and more than enough recognition value. This is one of the best Subhumans releases, but most of their music sounds more out of date than other bands of the time. 29:29 Split Vision , according to Bergman, is possibly their most demanding release and is relatively varied for the band. He cites Think for Yourself as an example of what he thinks is generic lyrics, but the song rocks with his reverberant guitar and Dick Lucas' screams. Musically, 29:29 Split Vision is probably her most mature work.

Will not Ask You Again of Internal Riot directed against trusting that the government solve the created problems by himself. Never-Ending War Song is inspired by the Iraq war . Dick Lucas tried not to write a catchy anti-war song to sing along to, but to analyze the views of people involved in the war, in particular of George W. Bush and the USA of threatened countries and the state of mind that makes people suicide bombers , and the corporate mentality that the Rationalize production of war profits. Supermarket Forces and, to a lesser extent, This Is Not An Advert are directed against the identity of corporations that destroy localities.

Discography

  • Demolition War EP (EP, 1981, Spiderleg Records)
  • Reason for Existence (EP, 1982, Spiderleg Records)
  • Religious Wars (EP, 1982, Spiderleg Records)
  • The Day the Country Died (1983, Spiderleg Records)
  • Evolution (EP, 1983, Bluurg Records)
  • Time Flies But Airplanes Crash (EP, 1983, Bluurg Records)
  • From the Cradle to the Grave (1983, Bluurg Records)
  • Rats (EP, 1984, Bluurg Records)
  • Worlds Apart (1985, Bluurg Records)
  • EP-LP (Compilation, 1985, Bluurg Records)
  • 29:29 Split Vision (1986, Bluurg Records)
  • Unfinished Business (1998, Bluurg Records)
  • Time Flies + Rats (1990, Bluurg Records)
  • Live in a Dive (Live Album, 2004, Fat Wreck Chords)
  • Internal Riot (2007, Bluurg Records)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Crispin Sartwell: Political Aesthetics . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY / London 2010, pp. 108 ( google.com [accessed September 9, 2014]).
  2. ↑ Crispin Sartwell: Political Aesthetics . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY / London 2010, pp. 110 ( google.com [accessed September 9, 2014]).
  3. ↑ a b c d Wolfgang Sterneck: The Subhumans and the outbreak . In: Hardcore and Consistent Music . 1998 ( sterneck.net [accessed September 26, 2014]).
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Subhumans. (No longer available online.) Fat Wreck Chords , archived from the original on March 9, 2014 ; accessed on September 9, 2014 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Subhumans. Scanner Zine, July 2008, accessed September 23, 2014 .
  6. ↑ a b James Christopher Monger: Biography. Allmusic , accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  7. ^ A b c Adam Bregman: Worlds Apart - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  8. ↑ a b c d Adam Bregman: 29:29 Split Vision - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  9. ↑ a b Victor W. Valdivia: EP-LP - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  10. ^ A b Charles Spano: Live in a Dive - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  11. ^ A b Adam Bregman: From the Cradle to the Grave - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .
  12. ↑ Adam Bregman: Time Flies ... But Airplanes Crash - Subhumans. Allmusic, accessed on September 23, 2014 .