Christopher Nosnibor
Apart from a couple of dates earlier in the year, it’s been a fair while since OFF! toured the UK. This visit consists of half a dozen dates, taking in Dublin, Glasgow, Bristol, Brighton, and Pitchfork Music Festival in London – which makes York a real outlier. Leeds, you’d probably expect – having previously brought the noise to The Brudenell and Belgrave – but York? The Crescent has been going front strength to strength in recent years, and with some bold booking (notably, tonight’s show is hosted as a ‘Brudenell Presents…’ event), the 350-capacity venue has been bringing some impressive names to a city that for many years languished as a musical backwater.
OFF! certainly qualify as an impressive name. As a founding member of both Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, Keith Morris is indisputably one of the key figures of the original hardcore scene. Since hooking up guitarist-producer Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), they’ve built a supergroup that’s been tearing up venues since 2009. And the reason they’ve such a strong following isn’t because of who’s in the band, but because they deliver pure, back-to-basics hardcore punk: hardly any effects pedals, no gimmicks or banter, just song after song, most under two minutes long, played as hard and as fast as is humanly possible.
This current iteration finds them boating a powerhouse rhythm section comprising bassist Autry Fulbright II (…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead) and drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat, Herbie Hancock).
In tow, they have Washington DC punk duo Teen Mortgage. They shuffle into the stage crowded with kit (it’s not a tiny stage, but two big drum kits plus some beefy backline don’t leave much room. The singer / guitarist is wearing a Motorhead T and has patches of Misfits and the like on his jeans. He greets the crowd with a drawling “Whassuuup?” and then they’re straight down to business. The duo sound cheap, trashy and in places slightly thin by design: they’re not into the new trend of heaps of effects and splitting the guitar through two cabs or whatever. They’re doing it the old school way, fast and frantic, and with the drums dominating. The result is rather like DZ Deathrays with the addition of twirling drumsticks. Nothing technical or complex, just two guys making a racket and at fast pace. And it’s ace, because it’s so immediate. The crowd – and it’s a decent turnout – recognise this and the moshing gets going early on.
OFF! don’t piss about either. Again, there’s absolutely nothing fancy about their or their setup. Brown has the band’s name in strips of electrical tape on the bass drum. The kit looks battered, and there are just a few bottles of water and mugs of herbal tea on stage – and again, barely any effects pedals.
OFF!
Keith Morris may have started his careers as an angry young man, and now he’s an angry old man who still performs with the passion of an angry young man. This guy really puts so many bands a fraction of his age to shame. He’s now into his late 60s, but doesn’t stop for breathers, there are no instrumental breaks while he recovers himself: instead, he rants away as feedback streams from the stage between songs. The bald spot is now covered by a hat, and the dreadlocks are down past knees. But other than this, little is different from the times I saw them in 2012 and 2014: the hand-written setlist is still several feet long, consisting of half a ream of sheets taped together and they power through almost thirty songs in less than eighty minutes. Bam! Bam! Bam! Song after song, each one blasting in, bamalamalamalam and stop! The moshpit grows and grows, and the energy in the room is fantastic. And then they’re done: quick, clean, and efficient, this is hardcore at its best.
Aural Aggravation 