Suicide File, The Palladium, 2005, Worcester MA

From the archives: The Suicide File was, I thought, pretty easily the best pure hardcore band going when they hit the scene a decade ago. Their rock-and-roll influenced licks were driven by a ragged cadence that caught hard in your memory; the lyrics were vivid and angrily self-righteous without being entirely self-absorbed.

Seven years after I shot these photos at their first “reunion” show (they had broken up the year prior), I’m not sure if their run was long or deep enough to earn the band a lasting spot in the hardcore canon, but the images themselves remain some of my all-time favorites.

— GET FOCUSED

Old Man Gloom, Great Scott, May 3, 2012, Allston MA

Photographing a band like Old Man Gloom is challenging: they’re supposed to be mysterious, the music a transmission from the simian beings of a distant planet. They aren’t really supposed to exist, much less be photographed. 

And then, once a decade, they’re on stage, and they’re an entirely known quantity: that’s Converge’s Nate Newton in front of you, that’s Cave In’s Caleb Scofield, there’s Isis frontman Aaron Turner. They’re playing the deliciously crushing Skullstorm; now they’re playing Zozobra, the twenty-something minute long drone dirge that you’ve fallen asleep to a hundred or two times. 

Their music doesn’t push, it envelops. How do you capture all that in an image? 

- GET FOCUSED

Against Me!, Expo 5 / KrazYFest, May 20, 2011, Louisville KY

Rolling Stone Magazine announced on Tuesday that Against Me! singer Tom Gabel is transgender, and plans to begin living as a woman soon, taking the name Laura Jane Grace.

I’ve revisited the bulk of the band’s later catalogue since reading the news, which grants a vastly new context to the records from Searching for a Former Clarity onward. To be honest, the knowledge has made those albums more interesting, and more enjoyable. 

Searching… was a concept album about death, and the lyrics of the following albums took a turn toward the narrative. But they were also marked by serious identity issues — of the band, of the characters, even of “confessing childhood secrets/ of dressing up in women’s clothes/compulsions you never knew the reasons to.”

Even when they were good, I thought that the songs lacked some of the naked honesty that had made Against Me! a favorite years before. Turns out they were more honest than I could have realized at the time.

How strange we think we know anything about those whose voices are on our records, or in our books — or about anyone, really. Everything is more complex than it appears, and for that, life is more beautiful. 

— GET FOCUSED

All Pigs Must Die @ Great Scott, March 11, 2012, Allston, MA 

All Pigs Must Die had me fooled for a little while. At first, I thought their full-length record was pure viciousness — which wasn’t out of the realm of possibility given that singer Kevin Baker has written and delivered some of the most biting lyrics in hardcore of the last decade. And honestly, that was fine with me.

But it took a few listens, and a few live performances, for me to start digging how dynamic their instrumentation is from beneath their hardened crust exterior. There is real movement in APMD’s songs; perhaps what I’m getting at is that I discover new things with each listen. They play again at Great Scott tonight with the elusive doom/noise supergroup Old Man Gloom. Let ‘er rip.

-GET FOCUSED

What Cheer? Brigade, Warehouse on Thompson’s Point, April 27, 2012, Portland, ME 

I had never seen the What Cheer? Brigade before they played a secret warehouse show in Portland on Friday night. They’re a raucous, renegade 18-piece brass and drum corps. Great fun. I’m a convert.

— GET FOCUSED 

Powerwolves @ Deering Grange, June 18, 2011, Portland ME

The Carrier and Former Thieves dropped this show, but Powerwolves came up and played with a few local bands anyway. I’m not going to say that they’re the most original thing going in hardcore these days, but they ripped through a solid set of slightly-metallic hardcore, and I would have happily stayed for more. I’ve been listening to one of their albums pretty regularly in the car ever since. And their single, You won’t find peace, is a blistering track that suits perfectly as the soundtrack to my summer angst: http://powerwolves.bandcamp.com/album/you-wont-find-peace-single

Lucero, KrazYFest, Louisville, KY, May 22, 2011

Last song of the weekend (except for a very intimate Jonah Matranga set just afterwards, to come later).

I thought Lucero was a perfect choice to close down the three-day festival: They’re from the south, they play a style that just about anyone in the great vast punk rock umbrella can get down with, and they’ve got a twist of sadness and nostalgia that permeates the rock and the drunk and the spirit of the songs. 

Bane @ Fantasy’s Island Lounge, Louisville, Kentucky, May 22, 2011

Bane just played an after-party show at a strip club down the street from the KrazYFest venue. Somewhere between two and three hundred kids crammed into a space that probably considers itself packed to the gills with 30 customers on a normal night. I don’t believe the strip club had the slightest clue what they were getting themselves into. End Of A Year, Fireworks, and Make Do and Mend opened, playing 2 songs each, and kids were going off. Some kid’s stage dive knocked my glasses of during Fireworks. I found them on the floor a few minutes later, flattened but intact. Thank god for plastic lenses. I shot the rest of the show unsure if anything was in focus— much of it wasn’t— but then I’m not sure you could really get a focus in that room, it was so hot and sticky, and the crowd was so tightly packed that you didn’t have any power to move of your own volition: you moved as everyone else did. I still came away with this shot though, and Bane played a perfect five-song set, all energy. It was just about the perfect punk rock experience— I didn’t even really need to see, because you could feel everything you needed to just fine. 

Samiam, New York City, October 2010.

GET FOCUSED is pumped to be heading to Louisville, Kentucky today for the revived KrazYFest, a punk and hardcore music festival that has been dormant for the last 8 years. It just so happens that a significant number of the headlining bands during the 3 day show are old favorites of mine: Samiam, Coalesce, Cave In, Bane, Hot Water Music, Small Brown Bike, Against Me!, and By the Grace of God among them. The music, the mosh, and the shooting should be excellent.

- GET FOCUSED

Peter DiCampo is the best dude. And he makes a good photo too.