Clean Shirts
Marginal

Josh, Rich, Rob, Steve, and Tommy are five guys born and raised in the nineties in Harrogate, a city in the United Kingdom in the English county of North Yorkshire, also known as Harrogate Spa: Harrogate's main attraction, in fact, is the spa; its pride lies in having hosted the Eurovision in 1982.

Now, a spa center is not exactly the place that comes to mind for founding the NWOBH scene - a terrifying acronym that stands for the new wave of British hardcore - and indeed the scene does not originate in Harrogate, but far from octogenarians wandering in white robes and flip-flops from a mud bath to a sauna; and also at a safe distance from kids attached to the aerosol tube as if they were asthmatics clinging to an oxygen tube.

In Harrogate, however, the aforementioned boys, endowed with a healthy and robust constitution, abandon the spas to dedicate themselves to the wellness of rock'n'roll, and give life to the Clean Shirts.

The Clean Shirts are a hardcore band and, upon listening to their 2012 demotape, those stylistic coordinates represent them perfectly: obsessive and pounding rhythms, screaming vocals, no moments of respite.

However, the story is not as simple as it seems; and luckily, because if it were, it would certainly be less interesting.

The band's name, just to say.

«Clean Shirt» is the fifty-seventh album by Waylon Jennings and it’s precisely there that the inspiration to name the band comes from: to dispel any doubt, then, every time they take the stage, the Clean Shirts pay homage to Waylon with the track that gives the album its title: one might say they play and sing it to themselves, as if the Stiff Little Fingers opened each concert with «Stiff Little Fingers».

An ideal union between hardcore and country, in practice just a solitary hardcore.

Anyone missing that demo, whose title approximately reads as «Can We Play in Your Living Room and Sleep on the Floor?», doesn’t really miss much: zero elements of novelty, equally few points of interest.

Out there, there are people who have been playing hardcore for decades and play it for real, so the Clean Shirts are left with nothing but embarking on the road of grafting, in the sense that in the first four months they get a couple of gigs in Harrogate, then in a single month, they get booked for a date in Manchester and one in Liverpool, until they explode in the summer of 2013, when they play in London and three dates in Belgium.

In translation, it means the name is starting to circulate.

In fact, they get signed by a small label, Chud Records, and here the story begins to get interesting. Because, if it is true that they record just one track for Chud, which ends up in a charity compilation, that track is «Damaged Goods» by Gang Of Four, and this time the rendition, while remaining substantially linked to hardcore stylings, clearly showcases the attempt to go beyond a formula that could prove smothering over time.

If at some point Minor Threat became Fugazi, that must mean something. Which does not mean that the Clean Shirts reach the stellar heights of Minor Threat and Fugazi, by no means; it simply means that the story is beginning to show some points of interest.

Those points are confirmed by the first full-length work, the EP «Smart Casual», where the Clean Shirts sharpen with greater precision and accuracy the objectives they are moving toward: the primitive hardcore fury is here tempered by garage, punk, or purely rock'n'roll references, even wave, telling of a band decidedly matured compared to the beginnings.

Achieving maturity for a hardcore band is not necessarily bad; it’s not the grave in which to bury the wrath and ebullience of days gone by.

The Clean Shirts are aware they have set foot on the right path and persist in that direction, despite commercial feedback being nearly nonexistent. Having persisted under such conditions is to their credit.

Here comes 2016, bringing a signing with a new record label, Kids Of The Lughole, and a new work, once again an EP.

The album is titled «Marginal» and moves along the same coordinates as «Smart Casual», those of an "evolved" hardcore, if one can say so.

«Marginal» is a great album, in which the garage, punk, and wave components become almost predominant, along with a previously unknown eclectic vein: with much emphasis, it's as if the early Devo, at least those close to punk sounds, had slammed their foot on the accelerator and unhesitatingly raced down that road. Perhaps the most fitting comparison would be with the exceptional Shitty Limits, but nobody knows the Shitty Limits, so I won't delve further.

Little remains of hardcore in the strict sense.

More than anything the ideal homage to Circle Jerks in «Die Young» and «Wild In The Streets»; even if, to stick with the theme of tributes, much more impression is made by the plagiarism of the riff from «The Witch» which is suddenly perpetrated in «The Great Unwashed».

Great album, also among my personal favorites in the punk-hardcore-garage realm of 2016.

Give it a listen and support the band.