Stuck inside a broken stereo

I would have never predicted that, as a 24 year old person in the year 2019, I’d care immensely about cartoonishly heavy bands centered on mosh parts, gimmicky electronics, and unhinged crowd participation. After years of telling people to stop pushing each other (not even really moshing) at shows I played or booked, you can imagine my surprise and disappointment in myself. It’s difficult to quantify how visceral this music is, and equally hard to underestimate its power and ability to manipulate (me, specifically). In this moment — and now more than ever — I’m a sucker for random hand-claps. I'm a sucker for bringing the slow part back even slower. I'm a sucker for nonsense rhymes about numbers and data. I'm a sucker for the tension and hype of the most ridiculous mosh call. How’d it get like this?

Every time I watch the Vein set from This Is Hardcore 2017 I get this goofy smile on my face. I can’t help myself. For those unfamiliar, This Is Hardcore is basically a three-day music video shoot for heavy male-fronted punk bands, curated by a guy known as "Joe Hardcore”. Captured yearly in high-quality audio and video by scene documentarian Sunny Singh (hate5six), it’s arguably the biggest opportunity each year for these types of bands to establish themselves. If you’re playing the fest, you’re well aware of the pressure it carries: the experiential aspects of live performance (“you-had-to-be-there”) are clearly secondary to the hate5six video and how it represents your b(r)and in that moment. If you have something to prove, you'd better do it, and you'd better do it right. Code Orange (Kids) did just that in 2014: after solid unpretentious performances in 2012 and 2013, they showed up for year three with a gaggle of large men who swung towels above their heads, waved “Thinners Of The Herd” flags, and crowd-killed everyone in sight. Vein had a good deal of that energy during their 2017 set. But what they really had was The Windbreaker. Or rather, they had The Windbreakers. Plural. A swarm of The Windbreakers descended on the pit en masse, worn by their team of friends and key supporters from across the East Coast, and captained by Vein's lead vocalist Anthony DiDio.

Why was this performance more successful than others? Wearing your own band’s merch is an evergreen power move and the concept of a "crew” isn’t anything new for hardcore. But The Windbreakers were donned by a team with limitless violent enthusiasm, astonishingly keeping pace with Vein’s exhausting sonic continuity. In spite of the band having maybe 12 songs publicly released at the time of this set, the resulting video implies that they were already one of the biggest bands in their scene, when really it was just the beginning. They seized their platform perfectly and accomplished a key objective of music videos (live or otherwise): to make the viewer at home feel profoundly stupid for not knowing about the act sooner. “Some people get it, some people go deeper.”

Vein’s Errorzone LP was the album I listened to the most in 2018. I suppose that makes it my favorite record of last year, but I don’t like to admit it to people because I don’t think I could ever admit to myself that I’d choose it as my favorite record. How’d it get like this?

The album is simply undeniable. It’s 11 tracks of crystalline, absurd, metallic hardcore crammed with whammy pedal pinch chords, 808 drops, drum and bass breaks, and hyperactivity creating an uncanny collage of early aughts KROQ. It's a violent earworm, perfectly engineered to be deployed in a moment when everything around you is melting down, desperate yet necessary catharsis. Apparently Vein sounds like Converge - a band I have no familiarity with. But when describing Vein (and bands of their ilk), it's easy to identify some points of departure: nostalgia for the showmanship of Linkin Park, the technicality of Deftones, the charisma of Thursday when melody relieves atonal discomfort, and a healthy dose of back-to-basics Sophie's Floorboard skramz. Also, Slipknot.

I don’t think I’d like Vein as much if they weren’t relatively scrawny dudes with Yoshi tattoos and bleached Eminem hair — in other words, if they didn't look like they had been waiting all their lives to make this type of music. When I first heard the title track from Errorzone, I fantasized about them playing Projekt Revolution (and specifically Projekt Revolution — not Warped Tour and not Taste of Chaos). I can imagine these guys losing their minds on a side-stage in the mid-afternoon in a hot parking lot, leaving it all out on the field, winning fans by any means necessary. Their passion is evident through their non-stop non-denominational touring and unabashed development of a visual aesthetic / brand identity. Instead of sloppy "punk rock authenticity", Errorzone is devoted to polished precision and ugly conviction. It’s that precision -- an immense intentionality -- that keeps me from laughing when I looking at the nWo-esque distressed font on the back of The Windbreaker, on the cover of the album, on the enormous stage backdrop, on http://veintv.net. I see exactly what they're doing, regardless of how immature it seems at first glance. I cannot knock it at all.

Vein is living the dream when they’re climbing on the PA while they open for Every Time I Die. When a kid in Florida throws an entire garbage can into the crowd during their set. When people are starting fights at their shows during a crooning part. When they straight up have a guy on-stage cueing samples from an Ableton interface, wearing headphones around his neck doing some sort of Mr. Hahn / DJ Lethal cosplay. I want to live vicariously through them. I’m 24 years old. I don’t wear t-shirts every day anymore. I work in government relations. I pride myself on how often I’m at dance performances. A metalcore band is currently my favorite band, and this past October I bought $30 tickets to see them open for SoundCloud rapper Ghostmane in Brooklyn, just so I could shove random people and walk menacingly across a wide-open dance floor. How'd it get like this?