High Vis Carry The Fire Across The Ocean

It’s so late. I’m so tired. So is Graham Sayle. The High Vis singer is happy to tell us about it: “I’m fucked. My voice is fucked.” (In his thick-ass accent, it’s more like: “Ah’m fooked. Mah vyce uz fooked.”) It’s Wednesday night. Technically, it’s been Halloween for an hour. Before High Vis came onstage, I sat in my car for a few minutes, internally debating over whether I should wait around or start the 90-minute drive back home. After this show, I’ll go home, sleep for three hours, and then wake up to take my kids to school. High Vis have a drive coming up, too; they play Baltimore tomorrow. Most of the people in this room will have to work tomorrow. There’s an election coming up next week, and it will not go well — not that “well” was ever even an option. We’re all stressed and worn out, but we’re here because we’re looking for something transcendent. High Vis will deliver.

High Vis don’t have to be here. They’ve already played tonight — a pretty great set at the Canal Club, a room where it’s not all that easy to play a pretty great set. (This is no disrespect to the people who work at the club, who all seem lovely. It’s just that the architecture of the downstairs room, with its carpets and its pillars and its overwhelming wideness, has a way of smothering enthusiasm.) High Vis are near the end of a North American tour with Show Me The Body that’s already lasted more than a month, and they’ve got the bleary thousand-yard stares that you sometimes see in musicians who almost never leave the road. But they wanted to be here tonight. This is Richmond. They know what that means.

News of the second show went out over social-media channels on the day before High Vis arrived in town: When the Canal Club gig was over, everyone should head over to the great local DIY hardcore spot — I won’t name it, but you can figure it out if you live near here and try hard enough — for something special. There, High Vis and Bib, perhaps the two most hardcore-identified bands on that Show Me The Body show, share the bill with Richmond treasures Division Of Mind.

I sincerely hope that you, the person reading this, have a band like Division Of Mind in your immediate vicinity. DOM are heavy-hardcore all-stars, and when they play out-of-town fests, people go berserk. They don’t leave town all that often, but they play in Richmond all the time. One week last summer, they jumped on the bill at three or four Richmond shows before jumping on a plane and headlining a festival in Glasgow. Out-of-town hardcore bands who know what’s up want to play with DOM when they come to Richmond. They know that those sets will go off.

Location quibbles aside, the Show Me The Body portion of the evening was sick. SMTB have done an amazing job at building this audience of young weirdos, and they assemble bills full of amazing bands whenever they roll through town. A couple of years ago, I saw them play the DIY hardcore space with Candy and Regional Justice Center. Last year, I saw them top a bill with Jesus Piece and Scowl. (I got there too late for Zulu, who I still haven’t seen.) Even if you don’t like Show Me The Body, there are always good reasons to check out these shows.

Those mixed bills don’t always work, though. I arrive at the Canal Club just as Omaha’s Bib are launch into their set. Bib fucking rule. They’re up there with Gel, Spy, and Gag in the pantheon of fast, feral new-jack hardcore punk bands with three-letter names. Their records sound a bit like early Agnostic Front, if those guys were weird stoners instead of tough skinheads and if they poured gallons of reverb all over everything. When Bib play the right room, people go bugnuts. When they play the wrong room, you get what you have here tonight: One guy in a skeleton costume intrepidly attempting to mosh around while everyone else stands still. Without getting desperate about it, Bib ask people in the crowd, sometimes individually, to come up front and move around. Eventually, it works. By the time their set is over, Bib get a decent little pit going. Still, those first few minutes were rough. You never want to be at a hardcore show where people aren’t moving.

Zelooperz fares better. The Detroit rapper is an X-factor on this tour. Black Noi$e, a Detroit rap producer and occasional Zelooperz collaborator, DJs between sets; it’s pretty funny when Bib finish up and he immediately throws on “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Still, this is not a rap tour, and Zelooperz is plainly nervous about how this crowd will treat him after so many of them were so cold for Bib. (In a way, this tour is the deeper-underground version of that recent Knocked Loose run where Danny Brown was added to the bill.) Zelooperz is funny and shambolic. He acts as his own DJ, awkwardly cuing up tracks on a beat machine. He keeps shouting out “sandpaper toilet paper,” which suggests that he’s currently in some physical distress, or at least that he’s been in some physical distress recently. He comes just shy of lecturing the audience for Bib’s reception. But when he sees that the crowd is having fun, he starts to have fun, too.

I’ve been listening to Zelooperz for well over a decade, but I don’t think I could name one Zelooperz song. That’s how it goes with some rappers. He makes janky, fun music that never lingers in my head. This isn’t even a complaint; it’s just a description. He doesn’t have songs that I know, and I don’t see anyone else rapping along, either. Still, his presence is warm and disarming, and he knows how to get people involved — an important thing at a hardcore show, where all the singers are judged way less on their ability to hit notes and way more on their facility with moving the crowd. On one song, Zelooperz gets the crowd to part down the middle and then to rush each other when the beat drops — not quite the full Sick Of It All wall-of-death experience, but fun. Then he does it three or four more times before the song is over, like a kid who’s learned a new magic trick and can’t stop doing it. Later, Zelooperz tries to get a Soul Train line going, which doesn’t work out so well. Still, it’s a good, weird time. I’d love to see more rappers jumping on more hardcore tours, or vice versa. It’s always a little awkward at first, but it’s always ultimately rewarding.

High Vis kick ass. Duh. This is a column about High Vis. I’ve got all these other bands I could be writing about, but I’m writing about them. This is the less dramatic and moving High Vis performance of the evening, so I’ll keep things rolling along. Show Me The Body, though? Man. That’s a live band. Whenever it’s been a while since I’ve seen SMTB, I’ll hear a new song and be like, “Oh, this is interesting and cool.” Then I’ll see them and be like, “Wait, is this band actually fucking incredible?”

Onstage, Show Me The Body really are that band. Kids lose their minds. Julian Cashwan Pratt always looks vaguely monkish, with his glasses and his bald head and his enormous hoodies, but he carries himself like an old-school New York goon, and he makes crazy-exaggerated faces. SMTB have started working cool lighting cues into their set, so that for instance everything will go red when they hit their first crashing note. High Vis’ Graham Sayle comes out for “Stomach,” their collab from the recent SMTB mixtape, and that’s a cool moment. Another cool moment: SMTB cover “Sabotage.” I’ve heard “Sabotage” enough times in my life to be a little sick of it, but when you encounter that song in an unexpected context, it can become new all over again.

Over at the DIY spot, Pratt hangs around in the back of the room. Maybe the other two Show Me The Body guys are here, too, but I don’t recognize them. Division Of Mind’s set kicks off sometime around 11, and the levels of mosh immediately exceed everything that happened at the evening’s first show. Bib finally get the reaction that they deserve. And then there’s High Vis. After I sit out in my car and contemplate skipping the second High Vis set and going home, I decide fuck it, I’m not getting any sleep tonight anyway. I walk in, and High Vis start playing “Talk For Hours” right away. (They might’ve started their earlier set with the same song, but I was moving my car, so I missed it.) I love “Talk For Hours.” It seems like everyone else here loves that song, too. I’m so glad that I’m here. High Vis are glad they’re here, too.

What is hardcore, anyway? Does a band like High Vis belong in a hardcore column? This is the kind of dumb fucking question that I generally spend way too long considering. I think we can put this one to bed. High Vis played a last-second DIY-spot aftershow with Division Of Mind when they were in the middle of their tour, and you only do that if you’re a hardcore band. Graham Sayle, the only High Vis member who speaks into a microphone all night, talks a lot about how much he loves this place, this scene, this community. He would know. From what I’ve been told, Sayle’s wife is a big-deal tattoo artist who used to live in Richmond. High Vis have played this room before, doing another last-second aftershow when they played LTC Fest last year. Tonight, Sayle speaks emotionally about all the things that Richmond has done to support the family of Brian Bruno, a tattoo artist who died of brain cancer earlier this year. Sometimes, Sayle sounds like he’s near tears.

Earlier in October, High Vis released Guided Tour, one of my favorite albums of the year. It’s not exactly a hardcore album, though Sayle snarls out every line like a hardcore singer. At different points, High Vis cross over into oi or post-punk or Madchester-style baggy. One song, the early single “Mind’s A Lie,” draws on acid house, a fun left turn. A little while ago, I was talking to someone from another band, and he brought up that song. He didn’t make fun of it, exactly, but he did make fun of the way that he knew the music press would attach all sorts of narratives to that song’s genre-fusion. My response was: Well, yeah. The narratives are there, and our jobs are more fun if they’re interesting. It’s more interesting to be like “here’s some weird shit” than “here’s another song.” And anyway, “Mind’s A Lie” is fucking fire.

Onstage in Richmond, Graham Sayle talks about what it means to be welcome in a space like this. He says how much he hates the gatekeepers with big ideas about what punk is or should be, and he uses “middle class” as a term of derision. (I wish I could phonetically spell out how he says “middle class.” I cannot.) Sayle says that “hardcore and graf” are the two places where he’s found community, and I can see how those would be the two places where everyone’s not trying to fuck everyone else over or make money off of each other. He says how we’ve all got to take care of each other, which is really probably the single greatest theme of High Vis’ music.

Guided Tour opens with this line: “You’re desperate to feel more for once in your life/ Looking in all the right places for what you’re missing tonight.” That hits hard because that’s exactly why I’m in this room on this night, incurring a sleep-deprivation situation that’ll fuck me up for like the next week. (I’m old.) I come to places like this because I need to feel something. In a room where people are smashing into each other and cannonballing off the stage and singing along with these High Vis songs at the top of their lungs, I find what I’m seeking. As far as I’m concerned, High Vis are one of the best rock bands on the planet at this exact moment. It’s not a coincidence that they come from hardcore. Hardcore doesn’t always nurture that level of greatness, but it can. When almost every other resource that I know is shallow and depleted, this thing remains.

Concealer – “ableedingsky”

We’re at this interesting stage where certain segments of the screamo world are basically doing the exact same thing as the Ephyra metalcore-revival bands, just coming at it from different directions. Everyone is doing super-sincere epic world-on-fire mega-riffage; the only differences are social and sartorial and maybe about how the screamo bands don’t go straight to the mosh-part breakdown quite as often. Orlando’s Concealer are on the screamo side of the equation, but they still do the breakdowns. Anyone who loves metalcore should be able to fuck with this kind of scorched-earth megablast. [From “tarnished” b/w “ableedingsky” single, out now on Zegema Beach Records/Armageddon Records.]

Day By Day – “Until Then… It’s War”

The bottom of this column won’t be all Florida bands, I promise. At the same time, put respect on Florida bands. They have to be from Florida. Can you imagine how much angrier you’d be if you were from Florida? Can you even fathom how much harder and heavier you’d play? Day By Day have been around for a solid decade, and this song already brings the metallic thunder before Three Knee Deep’s Dalton Rivas shows up, grunting with elemental fury like he’s an ancient demon who you just accidentally woke him from a comfortable centuries-long slumber. [From Dust And Ashes EP, out 1/17 on Flatspot Records.]

Direct Measure – “Hour Of Siege”

People who actually know how to play guitar probably know whether that note has a name. I don’t know how to play jack shit, so I don’t know it. But you know when there’s a really heavy riff and the last note is just slightly off? Like, it’s just a tiny bit higher than it should be? Like “tweenk” instead of “twuuuurnk”? No? I sound like an idiot? Whatever. It’s a thing that happens on certain ultra-thrashy hardcore songs, and it makes me feel like I’m in an elevator and the cable just broke and I’m about to die. Direct Measure are from St. Louis, and they used to be called Brute Force. On this song, their riff does that thing. [From Might And Might Alone, out soon on WAR Records.]

Ingrown – “Enemy”

I don’t know how the guys in Boise’s Ingrown voted, and I’m afraid to ask. Best-case scenario might be that none of them can vote because they’ve all got felonies. The cranked-up monstersplat of “Enemy” makes Ingrown sound like they’re both scary and extremely fun to hang out with, and the video, with its guns and its four-wheelers, only reinforces that idea. If you’re going to go heavy, go heavy. I had to miss the Sunami/Ingrown/Torena tour when it came through town last month, and I am very bummed about that, even if there’s a non-zero chance that I would’ve been decapitated at that show. [Stand-alone single, out now on Closed Casket Activities.]

Mile End – “No Excuse”

The Brampton, Ontario band Mile End has an extremely ’90s take on militant down-the-middle stomp-around hardcore, to the point where it’s disorienting to hear them screaming “you throw shade” on this song. Do people still say “throw shade”? Probably not, right? But Strife definitely weren’t saying that in 1997 or whatever, so this song makes me feel like I’ve been ripped out of the flow of time. Maybe that’s what I need. Maybe Mile End are here to help me escape this godforsaken linear march, to warp off into the chaotic slipstream of eternity. Fourth-dimensional hardcore is here to stay! [From Mile End, out now on New Morality Zine.]

Prevention – “Cessation”

Push! Back! Fuck yeah. Let’s go. In my way-too-many years on this planet, I have probably heard about a thousand variations on this exact kind of old-school fastball hardcore, and all of them are basically awesome. Prevention are the pride of an apparently-booming hyper-local scene in Springfield, Illinois, and they bring even more fire and energy to that exact same sonic blueprint, so it rules that much harder. [From 2024 Fall Promo, out now on Delayed Gratification Records.]

Ratking – “Down And Out”

This is not Wiki’s old New York rap group Ratking, which was at least hardcore-adjacent enough to tour with Trash Talk or whatever. It’s probably not the only hardcore band called Ratking, either. So that’s confusing. And really, that’s a gross name. Do any bands need to be called Ratking? I finally played The Last Of Us 2 a couple of months ago, and the level with the zombie ratking was so fucking stressful. All of this is to say: This Ratking, from Perth, already have a lot working against them from my standpoint just because of their name, and I think they rule anyway. The combination of snaky Joy Division-ass guitar riffs, black metal blastbeats, and the kind of vocals that basically demand gang-chant singalongs? That’s the shit I like. [Stand-alone single, self-released, out now.]

Senza – “Scrap The Waste”

Don’t even try to follow it. These Oregonian screamo freaks push their chosen genre all the way to its logical conclusion, which is just this seemingly-structureless all-elbows tangle of screeches and crunches and clatters, an abstract-expressionist ball of absolute chaos rolling downhill and crushing you. Every once in a while, there will be a part that sounds vaguely pretty, and your brain will start to relax. But then that part will end at some haphazard, randomly chosen juncture that doesn’t even make musical sense, and then the bedlam sweeps over you again. So don’t try to figure it out. Just go with it. Let the fury engulf you. Bathe in it. Let it become part of you. [From Celestial Body EP, out now on Zegema Beach Records.]

Spy – “On The Brink”

This song came out on the day that the election results came in, and it almost seemed too on-the-nose. If I wasn’t already aware of Spy’s patented brand of fast-and-disgusting splatter-punk, I might think it was a joke. There’s no way that the members of Spy think too hard about electoral politics. That’s not the vibe that I get from this band at all. Instead, they just happened to pick the right day to release a track that sounds like you’re puking into the back of a box fan while it’s on, just spraying bile in every direction until it’s painted every wall in your house and you’ll never get the smell out. [Stand-alone single, out now on Closed Casket Activities.]

Whispers – “Retribution”

For the past few years, people have been talking about a few different currently-exploding hardcore scenes in Southeast Asia, and that’s just awesome. American bands are touring through Vietnam and Indonesia, and they’re posting absolutely insane footage of those shows. Bangkok’s Whispers must be the chosen ones, since I think they’re the band from any of those scenes to really bust out and tour Western countries. I get it. It’s not that Whispers are doing anything radically new. It’s that they’re taking the established heavy hardcore playbook and going all the way in on it. “Retribution” is a giant fucking epic, a song that might be playing in your head when you’re standing on a mountaintop and screaming at the sky as blood drips from your hands. How many fucking mosh parts does this song even have? We have so much to learn. [From Yom-Ma-Lok out, 12/13 on Flatspot Records.]