Working through this bracket, digging back through this catalog. Unless you were there, I’m not sure you could really *get* how many times I saw rooms explode; how many times I legit thought the roof was coming off.

Finally filled this out. Round of sixteen to follow...

Kaospilot. I lived in Europe the better part of the 90’s, and saw firsthand how style crossed the Atlantic pre-internet; the pace at which it hit stride. Even the best Europe bore was a few years behind. Not so here. These guys came out of Oslo swinging.

Reversal of Man. To my knowledge, the band that kicked off the tradition of taking its name from a legacy act’s song titles/lyrics — in this case, a pro-queer blast of chaos by Frail. Also perhaps the first to feature two dedicated vocalists.

Saetia. Saw them play in an university *classroom* in ‘97. Desks were moved, they set up. I remember chuckling when they placed fresh cut flowers on the drums. A little *too* young/earnest. But went on to tap a vein with folks.

City of Caterpillar. By the time these guys were turning heads, I was into other things. Never saw them, despite our being ostensible neighbors. But when I circled back years later, their irreverence for conventions was world-shifting.

La Quiete. A friend who came up with these guys in Forli enlisted me to touch up her English translation of their lyrics for a record insert, back in 2004. It was wild hearing an Italian innovation on a largely US genre. Underrated Stateside in my opinion.

Notable that this band’s sound circled back and influenced US bands. Most notably, Florida outfit Frameworks. Less so in their more recent output, but their early catalog is an obvious homage.

Hassan I Sabbah. Think I saw these guys in a Harrisonburg, VA livingroom with @MatthewStrugar’s band Violence Takes Refuge in Virtue and Virginia Black Lung. An iconic evening. Flames, broken glass, and blood. In a livingroom.

Also, maybe @MatthewStrugar can confirm, but I think that night they were calling themselves Hassan I Sabbah & The Holy Hand Grenade? I remember thinking it was a fucking great troll of closeted white punk racism, but maybe I was reading too much into it.

Neil Perry. Part of a wave of bands that some of us slightly older saw as kids quaintly imitating earlier acts. Much to our discredit. As with contemporaries like Joshua Fit for Battle, they carved out totally new terrain and gave the sound staying power.

I’m not sure you even get to have bands like Pianos Become the Teeth without bands like Neil Perry, Portrait, etc kinda carrying the torch when many moved on to trendier fare.

Finally, my winner...

It was a real grind to put a lot of these bands up against each other. Not least because the march of mall-emo kinda gentrified the genre and virtually erased an entire musical history worthy of academic treatment. One wants to celebrate so much of it, just to bend things back...

And so I didn’t arrive at my champion lightly. They shook the air from my lungs the first time I heard them, before I even knew what they were about. A band who, despite general underground renown, are sorely unsung given what they represented and how humbly they did it.

From the album title(s), to the politics of race/representation that has been central to EVERY major turn in punk, to the unsettling urgency and clumsy chaos that made their records feel like a livingroom show careening off the rails... Yaphet Kotto is it.

Okay, so actually Round of Eight. But there are some bands that somehow didn’t make the bracket, and absolutely would’ve if I’d mapped it. So I’ll give them their due, here...

Probably *the* defining feature of this genre is one most people lack language for. But you hear it, even if you don’t know it — the fact that drumming can be *musical*. That it can be more than a rhythmic anchor, and can texture sound in radically diverse, emotional ways...

It’s an approach largely borrowed from jazz. Which isn’t an accident. A lot of punk drummers either came jazz families (Sam Siegler of Youth of Today/Judge game), or got percussion training in school band or private tutoring — usually jazz.

Two bands I’d have absolutely had in this bracket embody that cross pollination. Oddly, their rhythm sections contained the same two people, switch roles from one band to the other...

First, take in the first minute of Max Roach’s ensemble playing in 1964. Notice the musicality of the snare/tom work, the flam-crash-flam-crash at about :45.

I was lucky to do one of the only interviews I’m aware of with The Encyclopedia of American Traitors, in late ‘98. They were a band I wished everyone absorbed. I’ll say more about why in a sec, but notice the drumming from :35 on the first song here.

The Encyclopedia was such an ambitious intervention in the moment they appeared. First, their records were basically delivery systems for accompanying booklets featuring profiles of American dissident figures. Bill Haywood. Lucy Parsons. An actual Encyclopedia of “traitors”.