“He had a high tolerance for pain,” said drummer Pat Doyle in 2012 when eulogizing his former guitarist Anthony “Tony Offender” Johnson, who had just died of lung cancer. To play in Offenders, he would have had to. Rounded out by bassist Mikey Offender (née Donaldson, who died in 2007) and singer J.J. Jacobson, the lineup of Offenders during its 80s prime was as anguish-trawling as any in hardcore. Of all the historic punk and HC bands based in Austin in the early 80s—MDC, D.R.I., the Big Boys, and the Dicks foremost among them—Offenders remain the least celebrated or even recognized, despite the fact that Johnson was a founding member of MDC (when they were still called the Stains) and Donaldson played on D.R.I.’s seminal 1985 album Dealing With It. Offenders have always belonged on that top tier. No amount of revisionist oversight can blunt the brute impact of their discography, particularly their two full-lengths, 1983’s We Must Rebel and 1985’s Endless Struggle, as well as their 1984 7” “I Hate Myself”/“Bad Times”. In an effort to help rectify this blind spot, these three releases have been collected in full by Southern Lord as a double-LP anthology including beefed-up fidelity. Not that these songs have ever sounded less than staggeringly savage.
The discography of Offenders has never been that difficult to find. Copies of Endless Struggle abounded in used bins of the 90s, and over the years, various CD anthologies have surfaced, both domestically and as imports. With hardcore hitting another upswing in its perennial cycle, though, the timing of We Must Rebel/I Hate Myself/Endless Struggle couldn’t be better. Yet it underscore that Offenders’ music is more timeless than many of its better-known contemporaries. After a strong if derivative debut 7”—1981’s “Lost Causes / Rockin’ the Town”, which is not included here, features an A-side that sounds like an homage to Orange County punk and a B-side that’s a fun but out-of-place Clash pastiche—We Must Rebel ditched the past and went after the future with fangs bared. That future included a plan of attack that, up to that point, had been antithetical to hardcore: heavy metal. On the album’s first track, “Fight Back”, a new tone is instantly set with a shadow-steeped arpeggio that would have sounded at home on another record released that year, Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. But unlike the proto-crossover of Void’s half of the 1982’s The Faith/Void split album, We Must Rebel isn’t sloppy or chaotic. It’s tightly wound and inhumanly focused, even when Doyle’s drumming on “No Chance” feels like it’s about to catapult itself into insensibility, or when Johnson’s riffs on “New Militia” are applied like surgical implements.
The between-albums single, “I Hate Myself / Bad Times”, is rawer than either full-length, which only renders the abusive self-loathing of the former into a hackle-raising cry of elemental hurt. Jacobson’s vocals hint at another D.C. hardcore influence besides Void—namely Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye—but in Jacobson’s throat that barking roar is less accusatory than confessional. Along with Offenders as a whole, he hits his personal best on Endless Struggle. “On the Crooked Edge” jabs gaping holes in itself, leaving space for Johnson and Jacobson to hang in—that is, before Johnson’s plugs the holes with squealing snarls of guitar-solo anarchy worthy of Void’s Bubba Dupree. “Endless Struggle” earnestly sports an epic, organ-laden, Deep Purple-esque intro at a time when Day Glo Abortions were making fun of that exact same sound. But it’s the opening salvo of “You Got a Right” and “Face Down in the Dirt” that marks the anthology’s peak. Less than three minutes combined, the pair of tracks spans the band’s own spectrum: The latter is a scathing rebuke of abuse that pukes up battery acid and a palpable stench of degradation, while the former is a glacial, churning, bleakly anthemic grind that sounds like a primitive ancestor of “Owner’s Lament”, the legendary Scratch Acid song that appeared a year later on Rabid Cat, the same Austin label that released Endless Struggle. Slow and choked with sludge, “You Got a Right” marks a turning point in hardcore—a song-length breakdown that offers no respite, and a omen of the grunge and pigfuck crawl that was just around the corner. As if to punctuate that pivotal nature, Offenders’ cover of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”—or rather, Offenders’ cover of Vanilla Fudge’s version of the song—concludes Endless Struggle on a bitter, bludgeoning note that carves a straight line between the proto-metal of the past and the shape of post-hardcore to come.
In 1982, an infamous episode of CHiPs (on par with an equally infamous Quincy M.E. episode that year) featured a fictional band called Pain performing its signature song, “I Dig Pain”. It was meant to be a true-to-life portrayal of hardcore circa the early 80s, although its hopelessly square depiction of musical sadomasochism looks as cartoonish now as it did then. But there is something perversely real at the heart of Pain’s otherwise laughable “I Dig Pain”—namely, the idea that hardcore, unlike the punk that preceded it, dived deeper into the realm of inner turmoil, confusion, and agony with less mercy than any music before it. It wasn’t a celebration of pain, but a stark acknowledgement of it, especially necessary during a decade when a new conservatism stifled not only political policy and social convention, but the way kids were expected to just absorb all the pent-up shit that ate away at their souls. Calling We Must Rebel/I Hate Myself/Endless Struggle catharsis is too pat. Offenders weren’t purging. They were conducting, in a Morse code of twinges and flinches, all the hate and pain that was being forced through them.
