All Photos & Text By Matthew Grant Anson
Twenty minutes isn’t a lot of time to make an impression, but hardcore punk thrives on handicaps. Whether it’s an ignored lack of instrument ability, the absence of a monitor or the presence of cops, hardcore has had a come-what-may attitude the entirety of its existence. From 7 p.m. to 7:20 on a warm Wednesday in Silverlake, Retox reconfirmed that credos as they carved out a space on Vacation Vinyl’s concrete floor and gave it everything they had for 1200 seconds.
Retox’s set at Vacation on May 29th was to commemorate and celebrate the release of their newest LP, YPLL. The between song banter was kept to a minimum, the only sentences amounting to some gratitude to the record store and a snarky plea to the audience to pick up the album. “Buy our album so we can be…something,” vocalist Justin Pearson said between breaths. “Successful.”
If you were to treat the Retox set as a 20 minute audition to gauge success, then the hardcore band has reached its goal. The Retox approach to hardcore combines the usual driving speed with uncharacteristic riffs whose noises land closer to mathcore than anything else.
With a fresh take on the hardcore genre as his audio backdrop, Pearson yelled and screamed directly into the audience’s faces. He draped the mic cord around his neck, occasionally yanking it toward the ceiling where for a few fleeting moments it was more noose than cord. He convulsed and contorted himself all over the small area at his disposal behind a table of records, at times arching his back so far it was like he was making a pitch for his inclusion as a gymnast for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
It was quick, it was satisfying, and it was engaging. It was everything a free set to celebrate a record release should be, ended by the satisfying sound of the drummer’s sticks free falling to his snare to end the performance and sending the audience back out into the Silverlake sunset. Short and sweet – if ever there was an idiom invented for hardcore and for Retox, that’s the one.
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