Nascar Aloe at Ruins

While bands like Wire, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat worked to rupture musical convention with practiced aggression, Nascar Aloe now reveals how limited this approach was by the humanism of its instrumentation. Here it is synthesizers, 808s and stiff machinic rhythms, rather than screeching guitars and trained grooves, that become the new engines of punk. The 808 is no longer just a bass drum, but a weapon for dissolving the gap between percussion and voice, for transforming the ordered logic of song structure into an uninterrupted stream of energetic violence. In the feverish video that accompanies the single, this energy is matched by unabashed punk; Nascar twirls butterfly knives and hangs from fences, looking halfway between Sid Vicious and Goku — but with face tats. The best hardcore music conveys a sense of demonic possession; the singer has left himself behind, his throat is nothin g but a vessel for the impersonal movement of sound. Nascar Aloe is at war with this beat, he whips it into submission as it sinks its teeth into him.

– undergroundunderdogs.com