59 Times the Pain
Twenty Percent of My Hand (Burning Heart/Revelation)
by Doug Sery
There’s just something about that sweet, guttural and utterly foreign Swedish accent that just sends shivers up my spine and makes me want to curl up and make cooing sounds … this, of course, refers to the shower scene in Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. In the case of Sweden’s 59 Times the Pain, it makes me want to… dance!! I haven’t nodded my head so much since I ran it against a brick wall in New Mexico going 75 m.p.h. And it makes my ears bleed, too!
With their second full-length offering, Twenty Percent of my Hand, 59 Times the Pain not only manages to pump out one of my favorite hardcore CDs in recent memory, but will also most likely confuse those worthless lackeys at Tower Records who are going to have to expend their not-so-significant number of brain cells on the cataloging responsibilities foisted upon them by this numerically infatuated hardcore band (geez, maybe this is a clear sign of socialist educational policies… most American hardcore bands would have a hard time counting beyond their first testicle).
In a welcome change from the neanderthalistic bellowings that represent the hip, new trend in hardcore sounds, Nicke Lundgren, Michael Conradson, Magnus Larnhed (had to check to make sure this wasn’t really a Gwar one-off), Toni Virtanan (… or Abba), come up with 13 tracks that are firmly rooted in the old school sounds of bands like Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today. Plopping down power chords like Swedish meatballs into… well, I really have no idea what Swedish meatballs are plopped into or even whether there is any plopping involved, but the guitars of Magnus and Nicke definitely plop themselves silly. Nonetheless, this close to 30-minute ode to fast & loud had me annoying neighbors, damaging sensitive neural connections, and generally laying waste to the now common MTV perception that the “punk rock/hardcore” audience can be easily placated by endless loopings of Rancid, Green Day, and… O.K., I don’t have cable, so I don’t know who else they’re shuttling through their ’90s version of “Modern Times.” But, I have a feeling that a band like 59 Times the Pain may well prove to be the modern-day hardcore equivalent of Charlie Chaplin winding his way through the cogs of corporate America.
Make no mistake, this is NYHC, albeit with the accent of the Swedish Chef. Adopting the brotherhood stance of old-school bands like Agnostic Front, Warzone, and Whiplash, 59 Times the Pain makes it crystal clear that it’s an Us-against-Them fight and, while it’s not particularly clear who Them is, a line has been drawn in the sand. Their lyrics are familiar, their message has been said before, but this is a band that brings home the beauty of hardcore – it’s loud, it’s fast, and, goddamn it, it doesn’t like you very much. Buy this CD.
