Throughout the history of the commercial record industry (or as I like to call it, the fourth Reich),
major labels such as Warner Brothers, BMG and Universal have led a rapacious crusade to befoul any kind of worthwhile musical movement. In the past three decades, music lovers seeking refuge from this plague of mediocrity have seen stronghold after stronghold come crashing down before the onslaught of drivel churned out by these musical barbarians.
Corporate necromancers then added insult to injury by resurrecting the fallen heroes as zombie slaves to the god of profit. Punk transformed from a defiant culture of angst and DIY ethics to something you could purchase in a
mall. Hip-hop, a poetic form of positive dissonance that sprang from the minds of inner-city residents interested in the values of personal integrity, education and racial awareness, has been reduced to repetitive, stereotype-enforcing garbage for rich white kids to “bump” on the way to the next roofie-fest. Even metal was somehow beaten into submission,
turning leather-clad, long-haired metal warriors into the enemies of online music and lovable reality television stars.
In the past decade, the success of grunge bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam gave the big bad five a fresh new target: the American
underground. Now that these big labels have caught on to the allure of “independent” music, they buy out smaller labels and use them in their elaborate scheme to make everything suck.
Machine Shop Recordings is the latest of these wolves in sheep’s clothing, started by none other than the pioneer of boring bands with misspelled names — Linkin Park. Machine Shop’s debut release, “Suffer, Survive,” by hard-core turncoats No Warning, marks the beginning of New York-style hard-core’s forced defloweration. “Suffer, Survive,” is the first release since the band’s jump from the highly reputable hard-core label Bridge Nine to Machine Shop. It demonstrates how, with enough money and a little help from Sum41 and producer Greig Nori, a decent hard-core band that has shared the stage with legends like Cro-Mags, Sick of it All and Bane, can become just another chunk of corn in an ocean of musical diarrhea.
The pop-punk overproduction of “Suffer, Survive” and Machine Shop’s corporate ties make the
album a little less than DIY, but that doesn’t mean No Warning can’t be marketed as a band right off the streets and making it the hard way. Machine Shop even went so far as to publicize the release through a company called Independent Music Media, whose name and contact info appears at the end of No Warning’s press release, just three pages after the huge WB logo.
The press release describes No Warning’s sound as “equal parts punk, hard-core and a secret song writing ingredient all their own.” Well guys, the bad news is that the secret got out long ago and every wifebeater-wearing-shaved-head-pointy-beard-tribal-tattoo-sporting-angry-inner-child-jock-metal-band in Vin Diesel’s record collection picked up on it a long time ago. The good news is that you will probably sell a lot more records now that you suck.

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