BAND OF THE DAY: NEW MORTAL GODS

Be a better crust band, practice what you preach, and make your music available for free. Don't expect people to support you if you're not even remotely willing to do anything for them. You want to take apart all the hypocrisy of the old order, but you still insist on providing a service in exchange for cash/beer, and selling CDs and vinyl with enough of mark-up to make a tidy profit. And to think every generation in turn wonders when it was that the scene became another consumer option for idiots to flash cash at, before emptying their PayPal account into the lap of an overpriced distro in Germany. If you're not even prepared to step outside of the society you're condemning, how can you expect anyone to take you even remotely seriously YOU POSER?

Start by learning from New Mortal Gods. The Belgrade crusties make their one and only release so far, their 2010 demo, free to download, and seem to be very much in favour of this brand of thinking, dismissing the idea that punk itself is dangerous, and saying "To become a threat it is necessary that people change at the individual level." Identifying broadly as anarchopunk, that seems to say more about their attitude (and their shit name and their vocalist's no-fuck-given sartorial elegance) than it does their music, which has the coppery ambient chime you'd associate with atmospheric black metal, while the melodious riffage itself and the hoary bellow that accompanies it are very much a product of driving d-beat, rolling you up like a corpse in a carpet and tipping you into a quarry.