Don't get your hopes up too high about Hoax, nihilistic hardcore punks of Western Massachusetts; with half the band's impending move to Los Angeles, there have been rumors of a break up. Over three years, Hoax have remained firmly underground on principle, playing remote locations like a cave and a now-legendary recycling plant gig. Jesse Sanes, the perpetually-fuming 27-year-old singer, habitually bleeds from the head on stage and gets crowds of primarily young men to shout lines like "I'M A FAGGOT" (I have interpreted this song, from their debut 7", as an indictment of homophobic bullying). There has been nearly as much discrediting punk-world chatter about Hoax and their supposed "hype" as tracks from the band—its previous output has spanned just over a dozen songs with such titles as "Discipline" and "Living on the Brink of Suicide". This debut full-length transcends the noise.
Sanes typically sounds as though he's about to implode, with tough, raw growls that cover the most morbid shit. Self-deprecation doesn't quite hit it; with his bleak lyrics comes the evocation of guilt for just existing. Hoax's brooding sound is steeped in mutant destruction and caustic anger—a mid-tempo hardcore foundation with thick, chainshaw guitars and gruff grunts, pummeling towards metal. You could see fans of the recent brutal Nails record liking Hoax as much as followers of more accessible strains of dark punk; the band is self-loathing but not self-sabotaging. Placing headphones blaring Hoax into your eardrums has the empowering effect of plugging a phone charger into an outlet; you’re struck with a visceral surge of energy that is possibly dangerous. Play Hoax while walking down the hall at school, and no one is going to fuck with you.
"Drive", the record's peak, has one of the most tense breakdowns you'll find anywhere (complete with an endearing prefacing chant of "BREAK-DOWN!"). There is crank, build, and release—momentum made of a militaristic drum march and slow, searing, sinister guitar solos. The record's "Intro", from New York noise artist Margaret Chardiet aka Pharmakon, sculpts vile hacks and nauseting industrial clangs. On Hoax, there is liberation in running to hide from treacherous society; themes of hopelessness, ruinous behavior, and well-served anxieties abound. Sanes searches for answers in the vastness of the sky because he's hateful and hollow inside. He's not fearful of death but makes the incredibly more harrowing assertion of being "terrified to try at life."
Sanes' existential missives are so precisely articulated that even without the screaming and scowling they'd still be grating. "How can I die?/ I'm already dead," he roars on the dread-laced "Anesthetize", just clear enough to be decipherable. Slow, abrasive, and poetic, the closer "Los Angeles" pulverizes both heart and ears; while the band's material is always realistic, this feels especially human and vulnerable, like a twisted lullaby on paper. "There's a place I go in my sleep," Sanes screams, describing dreams of Los Angeles and its potential, he feels, for self-reinvention. With much juxtaposed beauty and grit, the song's real emotional killer—"I can't go on if there's nowhere on earth/ Where heaven is cheap"—conveys an essential dream and dilemma of all artists.
Elsewhere Sanes is directly political, calling out men of power who destroy the planet; "Fear" deconstructs the economic concept of "scarcity" and blames it on "whites trapped in fear" while linking race and poverty to the prison-industrial complex. Political anger fueld earlier Hoax material, all refreshing but unsurprising considering Sanes is also an environmental activist, a position that could offer endless frustration for unadulterated all-caps rage. It seems apt, too, that Hoax's debut 7" was getting its second pressing around the same time the Occupy movement exploded. A resilient ethos is inherent to any worthy hardcore band, and Hoax defends its complete independence fully, endeavoring to function outside the scope of what they consider corporate leeches.
Nothing about the total misery of Hoax suggests a narrator with a lot of friends, but the album's package makes its 100-strong "Thank You" list a central part of its ambitious art concept, along with impressive posters from 14 punk illustrators. The album resists being stripped of its context, meticulously outlining this network of labels and radio DJs and festival-organizers and bands from Brooklyn and Olympia and Barcelona and Copenhagen and Tampa and Toronto and Japan, women and men who helped Hoax be a band on its own terms, gravitating very close to the nucleus of this global community.
As a teenager hardcore changed my life because it ultimately repulsed me—girls were sidelined at shows and it seemed a maddening microcosm for the world in general—but Hoax remind me how I was drawn to it in the first place, how the ideas rearranged the way I thought and gifted me a necessary sense of skepticism. You need this even more in adulthood, and with records like Hoax, one need not travel to spin-kicking pits of testosterone at shows to hear it loud.
