Trash Talk are brutal. Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham once told me that Trash Talk has "the most violent pits I've ever seen", then told me a story about watching two 14-year-old girls punching each other in the face while the Sacramento hardcore band was playing. Frontman Lee Spielman manages to project an air of livewire danger and omnidirectional contempt even between songs, something rare even to hardcore frontmen. The band plays its brand of fast, borderline amelodic hardcore without frills or clean edges; there's no hint of, say Converge's technical precision, or Iron Age's old-school thrash melodic sense. The band just bashes out its rage-fit growls extremely quickly, without regard for subtleties like hooks or song structure.
For a band like this, the show is the thing, and records are more like souvenirs, or previews. But Eyes & Nines actually does a good job capturing the instability of the band's live set. For one thing, it's not even 18 minutes long, even factoring the relatively epic 4:30 doom metal excursion "Hash Wednesday" into the equation. For another, it's deliberately messy. The guitars raggedly bleed into each other, and every lyric is delivered in the same wracked, high-pitched scream, whether it's Spielman or one of the other guys singing. Without a lyric sheet, you're only going to pick out the odd word or phrase ("sadistic psycho," "no one can save you now"). On a few songs, the band slows things down toward the end for riff-heavy mosh-part breakdowns, and when those come in, you can practically see the fists whipping around.
Eyes & Nines doesn't quite sound like it was recorded at a basement show somewhere; the fidelity's a little higher than that. But the recording is kept purposefully raw, and the immediacy is there. "Hash Wednesday" is the type of thing that should just destroy live; after all the hyperspeed riffage of the songs that came before, it's slow and full of empty space. The drums don't even kick in for more than a minute, which is longer than a lot of Trash Talk songs last, and the whole exercise gives the band a chance to sound straight-up evil rather than just grimy and pissed off. And though you can probably listen to the album more than once on your morning commute, it still works as a full-immersion experience, its sludgy roar hitting hard on a visceral gut-level.
The album never pushes hardcore in any unexpected directions; that's not what it's there for. Really, Eyes & Nines could've come out at any point in at least the past 15 years, so if you're looking for innovation, look elsewhere. But for those of us who had formative, life-changing experiences screaming in our friends' faces in wood-paneled basements or tiled VFW Halls while bands like bands like Pageninetynine or Milhouse played, it's a real treat to hear that a band like that is still around, still perfectly conveying absolute fury. If you're in the right mood, Eyes & Nines could turn out to be exactly what you need.
