Feederz
Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?

One of the masterpieces of hardcore. Unmissable. An exemplary album of how, in rock, one can easily make up for academic deficiencies, relying on those small great virtues without which one cannot aim to produce anything artistically significant: intelligence, imagination, creativity, inspiration. Hardcore has taught how to achieve maximum expression with minimal means, to bend musical aesthetics according to one's moods, to dare unheard solutions always and in any case, ensuring to strike as effectively as possible at the vital organs: stomach, heart, brain.
Frank Discussion is an agitator, a situationist, a destabilizer. Now that he has learned to use the computer, unlocking its secrets, he confesses to having an extra weapon to wake up the American consciousness and make them aware of the true face of the economic and institutional system in which we are (?!) forced to live. But what has made him a Master of hardcore, in my opinion even surpassing his colleague Jello Biafra, is his ability to transfer socio-political criticism into a musical language that shines on its own (you wouldn't even need to read his fantastic lyrics: his music is enough to hint at his targets) and to transform it into vivid and heartfelt poetry. If his singing is a trembling and fierce string of dry heaves, his guitar is distinguished by a disagreeable yet captivating muffled sound, gutted, skeletal, a piercing chime sometimes able to disperse into disorienting solos. He is assisted by a gritty, biting, unbalanced rhythm section: Mark Roderick on bass and the legendary D.H. Peligro on drums.
Compared to their stylistically comparable contemporaneous bands like the Feederz, Frank Discussion's band neither has the Minutemen's technique, nor the Dead Kennedys' surgical precision, nor the horror spices of the Flesh Eaters. But it doesn't matter because all 17 tracks that make up their first LP from 1983 are memorable, ingenious, all far from conventions and trivialities. Rough tracks in appearance, actually resting on dynamics sophisticated in their own way.
The mockery perpetrated at Olivia Newton John’s expense, right at the start, with an awkward cover of "Have you ever been mellow" says it all: Frank is out of tune but nevertheless brimming with euphoria, sincerity, blind frenzy. It is, of course, not the only masterpiece of the record. There’s "1984", one of those tracks capable of honestly confessing the spirit of an era, but also casting an alarmed look at the fate of its generation. When the cynical mockery of the verse gives way to a refrain sung with tears in the eyes, a shiver runs down our spine. Then there’s "Jesus", blasphemous surf culminating in the famous lyrics "Jesus entering from the rear", accompanied by one of the most mournful choruses: behind the veneer of anticlerical sarcasm, one senses anger, dismay, and bitterness. The devastating "Games", for its part, transforms disgust into something majestic, with all the assurance of someone who knows they are on the right side. And we come to "Gut Rage", the most paradoxical moment of the entire album: a girl sings "vandalism is beautiful as a rock in a cop's face" with a soprano's timbre, only to vomit the refrain like a riot who has been through it all: ecstasy hand in hand with the most subversive impulses.
The Feederz, as instinctive as they are aware of the developments in alternative rock of their time, offer their exhausting version of new-wave in the creeping suspense of "Terrorist", cling to a vile garage-rock tinged with black in "Stayfree" and "Destruction Unit", develop, in "Dead Bodies", the discourse that the more evolved Germs (like those of "Richie Dagger's Crime") did not have time to explore, while the 30 seconds of "Day By Day", all spasms, jolts, and fractures, remind us of the immense scope of what Wire were able to do with their first late '70s albums.
We’re at the end, it’s time for "Love in the ruins": it presents itself as a tangle of aphony noises, a black hole from which not a single Ray of light leaks, until Frank Discussion stands up and screams:

"No more cops, no more work, no more bosses, no more money, no more politics, no more sacrifices, no more wasted time, no more mommies, no more religions, no more boredom, no more orders, no more bad jokes, no more of this shit"

What a beautiful thing hardcore is.