GOLD RECORDS // MUSIC // Ceremony - Rohnert Park

2010

Hardcore punk has never exactly been famed for its mutability. The music can be extremely vital and powerful, but the genre is full of samey bands who adhere strictly to the ‘four chords played as fast as possible’ template (which is kind of amusing, considering the punk tenets of individuality and free thought).

A little band called Black Flag blew the lid off what hardcore could be with My War back in '84* – an album many years ahead of its time, progressing the ‘fuck you’ breakneck sound they helped create (with their debut, Damaged, in ’81**) with elements of sludge/doom metal and jazz. Unfortunately, a lot of punk fans rejected this strange, avant garde warping of the sound they had come to adopt (in the inevitable, natural way fans do) as 'theirs'. There followed a strange kind of defensiveness against any new elements that messed with the 'purity' of the original hardcore sound, with many bands being formed who preferred to ape the comparatively more straightforward fury of the sound they had, by then, simply become used to.

Ceremony’s 2010 release Rohnert Park sits nicely to the left of this traditionalist stylistic box, paying debt to the forebears who created and popularised the hardcore sound without being slavishly beholden to them. It’s razor-edged but accessible, with fantastic, crisp production; furious but thoughtful; a record made by a band who obviously respect their influences but don’t want to be stuck in the mire of paying blind tribute to them, hoping instead to push the form into something with perhaps (gasp!) wider appeal, without sacrificing aggression and intensity.

On opening track ‘Into the Wayside Part I/Sick’, vocalist Ross Farrar delivers a list of things that piss him off in a throat-splitting howl, and cheekily includes Black Flag (as well as another seminal punk band: Cro-Mags, who combine hardcore with heavy metal leanings). This could be interpreted as a simple snot-nosed diss, an adolescent thumbing of the nose at one’s elders, so to speak - but consider the other things that make the list of things Farrar is sick of:

“Sick of realism/sick of Buddhism/sick of longboards/sick of hardcore (!)/sick of Catholics/sick of atheists”

…yeah, I don’t think he’s being entirely straight-faced.

The great thing is that the song is still authentically livid while being kind of funny, with Farrar’s bark over a relentless drum beat and chugging guitar making for an opening track that immediately grabs you by the throat and commands you to pay attention. The frenetic little guitar solo on the second track, ‘M.C.D.F’ – a song from the POV of someone being sent to Marsh Creek Detention Facility and protesting their innocence - further compounds the fact early on that Rohnert Park is not interested in simply being ‘another hardcore record’. I love that solo; it’s simple and it’s brief, but it’s also unselfconsciously catchy and hooky in a way the genre often isn’t.

The album deals throughout with the staple punk themes of alienation, apathy and anger, but doesn’t wear those themes out with vague, repetitive invective. Take for instance ‘The Doldrums (Friendly City)’; the band commit the cardinal hardcore sin of actually letting themselves slow down, as Farrar - affecting a bored, tired-sounding register far removed from his vocal delivery elsewhere on the album – bemoans the anaesthetising dullness of being stuck in a not-quite-shitty but nevertheless dead-end town. “This place is a vacancy stuck in figure eight/where nothing ever happens, no-one’s ever late”, he laments. Where other bands might try to get the same point across by pushing the frustrated aggression to the hilt, Ceremony dial it way back, and in doing so more accurately reflect just how dull and eroding it can be to feel like you’re drifting along in a place that just doesn’t have anything going on (not that I’m calling the song itself dull, of course… it’s actually one of my favourites on here, in no small part because I've felt that exact way myself).

‘Moving Principle’, which features one of the album’s most fist-in-the-air, yell-along choruses, finds Farrar apparently terrified of the mechanised depersonalisation of the 21st century in a way I can honestly sympathise with. “Technicism is scary”, he opines, and he closes out the song by claiming with conviction that “the modern world is surrounding me/the modern world is slowly burning”. We can all be grateful that such emotions as fear and frustration are, when channelled well, catalysts for brilliant music. Rohnert Park is one of the finest examples from the past decade that I can think of. It’s a smart, bracing, pissed off gift that keeps on giving.

*Funnily enough, there’s also a song on Rohnert Park called ‘Back in ‘84’. Hey hey!

**While I'm pontificating on the subject, it should be noted that this 'classic' hardcore sound was also moulded by similarly influential bands of the era such as Circle Jerks and Bad Brains; I don't want to give the impression that Black Flag deserve total, sole credit (although they are undoubtedly one of The All Timers when it comes to this stuff).