On any given weekend in the 1980’s, a hardcore turf war threatened to swallow Fenders Ballroom whole. In this cramped shrine, tucked away inside Long Beach’s historic Lafayette hotel, hordes of young people moshed en masse to the likes of Black Flag and Agent Orange. The music was pulverizing, to be sure, but there was much more danger to be found simply by looking around the room. The Suicidals, the South Bay Skins, FFF, Circle One: according to those who were there, these and other rival punk gangs were known to sulk about the space, doling out bloody noses and beat-downs as they saw fit. Muggings and stabbings were not uncommon, nor was the prospect of going to see Bad Brains only to get your brains bashed out.
And yet, even as violence threatened to tear the place apart, the true fury and fervor of Los Angeles' punk scene resided, ironically enough, in the music of peacenik bands like Final Conflict, who were among the first to successfully augment the crude power of hardcore with sleek, sophisticated musicianship. Formed by guitarist and principal songwriter Jeff Harp in 1983, the Long Beach quartet enlisted elements of thrash, black metal, and d-beat to lend their minute-long manifestoes an essential, acrid urgency. In 1987, they released their pulverizing debut album, *Ashes to Ashes—*a venom-soaked takedown of the Reagan years, as well as one of the decade's best crossover releases. Since its original pressing by Pusmort, the album has seen three more reissues, including one from Relapse. Now, with Tankcrimes' Record Store Day reissue, Ashes to Ashes returns for its fifth lap around the ring, just as sprightly and scowling as when it loped into our lives over a quarter-century ago.
During the height of the Orange County hardcore scene, bands' lists of influencers typically included their fellow Californians, along with NYC acts like Reagan Youth Final Conflict's palette, on the other hand, combined the fever-pitch intensity of UK crust-punk pioneers like Discharge and Amebix with the grizzled black metal of Crucifix. The ramped-up intensity and increased emphasis on technically-proficient solos enabled the band to carve out a newer, more brutal niche from the existing framework, lying somewhere between thrash's reptile-brain party mode and the tempered rage of heavy metal.
Jack Control's robust remaster creates some much-needed space, allowing Harp's toothed guitars to mingle alongside Warren Renfrow's nimble bass riffs, rather than overwhelm them. Dave Phillip's drumming sounds more hot-blooded this time around, too, firing off snare hits into the abyss at the start of "Apocalypse Now!" and striking a throttling gallop on "Crucifixion". Control places Ron Martinez's vocal track lowest in the mix, so that at any given point, he's yowling from between his bandmates' slabs of sound like a trapped and wounded beast. These contrasts distinguish Ashes to Ashes as a work determined to distance itself from its more unilateral-sounding peers, providing enough smatterings of depth and texture to please even the most punk-a-phobic eardrums. It's a hardcore album, all right, but between Control's ear-friendly Mix and Harp's penchant for turbo-charged, hooky refrains on songs like "Abolish Police" and "Constant Fear," there's enough pop appeal here to lure in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater Soundtrack fanatics.
As the cover art suggests, the hand of the doomsday clock sits dangerously close to midnight for the entirety of Ashes to Ashes. Corrupt cops, rainforest-gutting corporations, the Reagan administration, the atomic bomb: disturbing images abound on the record, often sketched in excruciating detail. On “Constant Fear”, Martinez describes man’s annihilation by nuclear warhead through the sensuous image of “smoldering flesh underneath crumbling structures.” Elsewhere, “Abolish Police” and “Self-Righteous Pigs” plaster the walls with grotesques of authority figures “playing hero” with civilian lives. The band even takes part in a little aural graffiti for the album’s closer, tearing down a sample of Reagan on the campaign trail with an instrumental sucker-punch.
A single listen of the included 1985 demo of the album (even more blistered and rabid than the studio version) sufficiently proves that even a quarter-century after its release, Ashes to Ashes continues to burn with a ferocity of which few hardcore albums can boast. There's no doubt that Final Conflict's rage has matured somewhat the passage of time (Trash Talk they ain't), but it's comforting to know that the white-hot fury of the band's Fenders Ballroom gigs hasn't retreated an inch. Long after the demise of L.A.'s infamous punk gangs, the poetic violence of Final Conflict's debut hits hardest of all.
