The Flex play good old fashioned youth crew hardcore that sounds like it’s been beamed straight down the years from the VFW halls and tape decks of 1980s Boston and New York City, and Scum On The Run sounds like a long-lost straight edge classic you’ll swear you remember from your golden years grinding the kerb outside 7-11 on a battered skateboard with X-ed up hands and just-shaven locks. With a maximum track length of just over two minutes, suitably rough and tumble production values, lyrics of pissed off social commentary and a Xeroxed, monochromatic sleeve, Scum On The Run will slot in perfectly beside your favourite Minor Threat, Youth Of Today, SSD and DYS records.
But The Flex aren’t beholden to the sounds of the past, they’re proving that the sounds of the past still have power across oceans and years. As entrenched as this style of hardcore is in the time and place of Reagan-era America’s East Coast, it sounds just as potent spewing from the hearts and speakers of this Leeds, UK based band. After all, what is better suited for soundtracking venomously incisive observations about society’s shiftless, braindead and repressed than the sound of torn vocal cords and instruments beat to shit?
With Scum On The Run, The Flex show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Decades and time zones may separate them from their spiritual forefathers, but these proud LS4 lads are still suffering the same societal bullshit as those that first discovered hardcore as a cathartic means of venting their disgust at their culture’s social, moral and political failings. Lack of conviction and substance, ignorance, archaic beliefs, listlessness and ingrained disillusionment are as relevant as ever and so is hardcore as the universal musical language of rage and discontent.
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