From start to finish, Trash Talk's Eyes and Nines is 17 and a half minutes. Their songs often skip buildup or cooling down, exchanging those slopes for immediate aggression. Trash Talk's brand of hardcore isn't something new, they've lifted heavily from the rawest eras of Black Flag and peppered it with the pummeling of the ’90s power violence scene of their native northern California. Eyes and Nines, though, distills varieties of rage into a simple formula of fast and angry. There are exceptions, of course, like the slow, Sabbath-loving "Hash Wednesday," or the youth crew chants on "Explode," but Trash Talk is best when they're at their most brutally curt. "On a Fix" takes brief breaks to, you know, hit the crash cymbal or have a drum fill, but is essentially one repeated, consistent heavy pounding. Still, there's something rock ’n’ roll about Trash Talk still—party riffs, stage dives, crisp drums. The speed and screaming alone aren't scary. Certainly hardcore—or at least the loud traits it initially ushered into rock music—has been canonized and co-opted by much more mainstream acts. Trash Talk just compress all of these details into a brutal little package. We're better off without the trimmings.
Stream: Trash Talk, Eyes and Nines
