Deaf Club / Fuck Money
Deaf Club feat. HIRS Collective & Fuck Money Split
THREE ONE G
Since its inception in 1994, Three One G Records has been one of punk’s most exciting, experimental, and energizing labels. Formed by The Locust’s Justin Pearson, in those 30 years it’s provided a home to most of Pearson’s outfits, including (among many others) Head Wound City, Some Girls, and Deaf Club. It’s also released singles, splits, EPs, and albums by a host of other boundary-smashing bands like METZ, The Blood Brothers, Moving Units, and Cattle Decapitation.
It’s Deaf Club who are on the first side of this particular split, albeit with added input from HIRS Collective, the Philadelphian queer-punk, well, collective. The first of their two tracks is “Biblical Loophole,” an ear-eviscerating barrage of discordant noise terror. Yet there’s beauty in the chaos, just as there’s still beauty in our doomed, death-laden world. Their second is a wonderfully unhinged cover of Nirvana’s already-unhinged In Utero explosion “Tourette’s,” which only makes the song—much to this version’s credit—even more powerful. Similarly, Fuck Money’s two songs—“Alley Tricks” and “Rat Queen”—are feral, squalling spurts of emotional, mental, and musical instability that are as weird and wonderful as they are savage and brutal.
It goes without saying, like most of Three One G’s releases, that this split is challenging, confrontational, and occasionally uncomfortable to listen to. Both bands manage to capture the violence of life on a planet that’s being willfully destroyed by corporatism and colonialism, extreme capitalism and imperialism, but both—by nature of their very existence—also offer some hope that all’s not lost. Play it loud enough and you might not just be inspired to feel—an act of resistance in and of itself in a system that constantly and actively seeks to numb and dumb down—but also think for yourself and fight the hell back.
