FLESH ON BARBED WIRE – VOID

You know how you finally listen to a band that everyones always talked about and think “Well this sounds tame by today’s standards”? Void is not that fucking band. Void still sounds like a plane falling through a mall or even crazier. For the longest time I was sure that they were all actually deaf students going off of each other’s movements. From Bubba Dupree’s knife-plunging guitar to Sean Finnegan’s (RIP)lock-step drums, Void sounded like they were always on the edge of a breakdown.

Void were a DC Area hardcore punk band who were only around for about 3 years, from 1980-198youdothemath and only played an amputee’s handful of shows. When they played at CBGB’s lead singer Jeff Wiffenbach broke his leg leaping from an amp midway through their first song. Their only major release was a split with The Faith (Ian Mackaye’s younger brother’s band). At their heart they were a hardcore band but their sound merged crossover thrash/doom/noise into a swirl of insanity.

It’s crazy that they’ve been so influential considering how little they were actually documented, but everything about them was so far ahead of their time.  Bubba Dupree was a black-filipino kid with a pompadour who used to wear black eyeliner and two bullet belts. This was in hardcore mind you, where a look like that was so forbidden it even had masochists saying “fuck that”.

Most people didn’t know what to make of them, which is a sign of true significance, but all respected them and were probably terrified of them. Their artistic aesthetic predated the black metal scene and they laid the foundation for post-hardcore before hardcore was even hardcore. And they were always on LSD.

recently their demo tapes surfaced and you’d hate yourself more than I hate you for not downloading them right now.