In 2004—a year in which Green Day, Good Charlotte, and My Chemical Romance released platinum-selling albums—an unknown hardcore band called Coliseum holed up in a garage in Kentucky with an eight-track tape recorder and a fistful of songs. The band was new, but its members weren’t untested; all four were veterans of the Louisville scene, a fertile field that had nurtured everyone from Slint to Will Oldham to By The Grace of God. Coliseum’s vocalist/guitarist Ryan Patterson had most recently served in Black Cross, a seething post-hardcore band that also featured By The Grace of God singer Rob Pennington. But Patterson had never fronted his own outfit, despite all the time he’d spent in notable Louisville groups such as Metroschifter, The Enkindels, and The National Acrobat. In short, he had something to prove—and Coliseum’s self-titled, 2004 debut was that proof.
A decade later, Coliseum still makes a compelling case. Out of print since 2006, the album has been overhauled and expanded for a tenth-anniversary reissue. It’s likely to go down as the only reissue in history produced by a member of Sebadoh (Jason Loewenstein) and remixed by a member of Toxic Holocaust (Joel Grind)—a fact that’s indicative of Patterson’s wide-ranging sensibility. Not that Coliseum is what you’d call eclectic: Like chunks of charred flesh, “Detached” and “Burn Out Bright” come with a stench of agony and angst that splits the admittedly slim difference between the vintage D.C. hardcore of Swiz and the apocalyptic d-beat of Discharge. But the album isn’t just straight homage to ’80s punk; on “Hostage of Privilege”, the bruised, lunging blues of classic Motörhead is shoehorned in—“Fast” Eddie-esque solo and all—and on “Give Up and Drive,” there’s a dissonant, Jawbox-like interplay between Patterson and second guitarist Tony Ash. But it all congeals into a howling, harrowing whole.
Patterson’s lyrics dwell on politics and pain, hardcore’s standby settings, so it’s all in the delivery—and his voice is an air-raid siren pitch-shifted down to the frequency of an earthmover. That tone is used for surprisingly fun effect on one of the Coliseum reissue’s bonus tracks, a previously unreleased cover of Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk”. Instead of singing it straight, Patterson trawls his own intestinal tract in search of the perfect, sustained grunt. It makes for one of the best Ramones covers in ages, although Patterson doesn’t nail the chemistry quite as well on Coliseum’s cover of Fear’s “I Don’t Care About You”, the other cover that appears among the bonus tracks. Originally part of the band’s 2004 split 7” with fellow Louisville band Lords, it’s a rock-solid rendition, but it doesn’t do much besides fulfilling the needs of completism.
The remainder of Coliseum’s half of the split single with Lords is more essential— in particular, the song “No Salvation”. Three years later, Patterson would use that title for Coliseum’s sophomore album; here, it’s the reissue's fiercest track, a harbinger of the needling mixture of anxiety and aggression to come. Demo versions of four Coliseum songs are also included, but they serve to show just how quickly the group came together between 2003 and 2004. There’s a knuckle-gnawing desperation to these tinnier iterations that Patterson only intensified by the time they entered the garage with Loewenstein, itching to lay down a statement.
Multiplatinum punks were all the rage in 2004, but that year also saw milestone releases from a profusion of post-hardcore groups, These Arms Are Snakes, The Blood Brothers, and Breather Resist among them. (In fact, Patterson’s younger brother, Evan Patterson, played in Breather Resist—and now Young Widows, with whom Coliseum issued a split in 2006.) Coliseum represented the extreme wing of that wave of groups; they hardwired brains and intricacy into a thunderous undercarriage of sludge and crust, and in doing so wound up creating a more timeless debut than most of their contemporaries.
Patterson is the only remaining original member of Coliseum, and the band has broadened its horizons even further since 2004; his old Louisville comrade, Will Oldham, even pops up as a guest on their 2010 album House With a Curse. A decade is a long time to be puking blood and pissing battery acid, and Coliseum’s ability to tweak the attack over the years has kept their music vital. But Coliseum’s strength—then and now—lies in its lockjaw tenacity, its willingness to buck every expectation while boiling hardcore down to the thickness of tar. Not to mention a deep belief in punk’s prerogative to scrap the bullshit and start over.
