100 Greatest Songs of the 2010’s #59 Trash Talk – Monochrome/F.F.S

Released : 2014

One of the best things about the early West Coast hardcore scene is that there seemed to be people conscious enough to understand it’s importance and capture it. This has meant that whilst more outsider friendly 20th century genres have come and gone without much of a footprint, there’s a Decline of Western Civilisation, Our Band Could Be Your Life or screes of YouTube footage of Black Flag, Minutemen, etcetera.

Lee Spielman and Trash Talk came along much later, surfing a sixth or seventh wave of the aggressive despair which first prompted a break with the straitjacket of traditional punk rock. Their final album to date, 2014’s No Peace seemed to have run down the format to it’s logical conclusion, it’s impenetrability to the outside world presenting a never more opaque wall.

Full of paranoia and anger, Monochrome/F.F.S. is the band at their most breakneck and aggressive, modes that they would probably argue don’t suitably expose their half buried precision and intelligence. That however is a curse and a blessing their blurily recorded forefathers came to understand four decades ago.