or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

At their respective worsts, hardcore and professional wrestling have more than a few things in common, but the similarity isn’t limited to the perennial war-of-the-brows value judgement (or, to be kinder, the relativism inherent in different levels of how much one enjoys big, screaming morons who want to hurt you and each other). Roland Barthes said of wrestling that it is an artform in which “form exhausts content,” a pain-obsessed spectacle wherein “one is not ashamed of one’s suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.” Wrestling also creates a world wherein struggles are crudely and excessively delineated: “it is each moment which is indistinguishable, not the passage of time.” Here I present to you the miasmatic sonic blurs of hardcore. Someone is angry at something (maybe you!). He yells about it, backed by a turgid wall of noise that is, in its own flagellating stances, operatic. Everything stops. He yells again and, if you can see him, strikes a pose of suffering (maybe the one you have struck or are striking or soon will strike). Does anyone win? Does anyone care?

Here is the part where you might be hoping (perhaps quizzically) for me to say that Angel Hair’s discography—collected on this sole CD—rises above this paradigm but the thing is that, well, it really doesn’t. I did read an anecdote in an At The Drive-In interview once where they said they saw Angel Hair play with the traditionalist Clash-revivalists and thug-punks Rancid and blow the latter away, which was encouraging to me, at least (this might’ve been where I first heard of the band, but then there’s a chance you hate At The Drive-In and hate, by proxy, anything they might recommend, so this might not carry much weight). I did also read the lyric sheet to this album—as I have a soft spot for single-disc encapsulations of a band’s lifelong output, I also have one for albums that take longer to read and decipher the lyrics of than it does to listen to—and thought it was as wildly entertaining (many, many gems to choose from on this front: “I sell ice to eskimos when I’m not selling ass to assholes,” “Forget romance and twelve-packs and birth control pills / You’ve got guts to be sick to,” “This wet nurse’s feet have kicked some asses,” and then there are the titles, most notably “You Were Ugly But You Got Cute Again”) as the music was pulverizing, but then that might not also do much for you. The truth of the matter is that I can’t find much that distinguishes Angel Hair from conventional hardcore: it’s guilty of the same blunt excesses and limitations.

But Susan Sontag says in “Notes on Camp” (and is hardcore camp today, fashion aside?) that it’s foolish, even senseless, to deny the part of yourself that enjoys the things, however low, that you do. And so I turn to aesthetics in hopes of justifying just why this album amazes me, why I find it truly exceptional hardcore—hell, the ne plus ultra of wild, compellingly brutal thrash—notable as the harbinger of a new hardcore music whose ruthless plasticity could destroy everything in its path. It’s supercharged, intricate, and truly relentless: if this music consisted of little else besides Sonny Kay’s uniquely spacious and surprisingly versatile sneer/blurt/yell, a hybrid of PiL-era Lydon dissolution and Skinny Puppy monstrosity, it’d go above and beyond so much else that everyone (myself included) have described as such.

“Witch Hunt Scene From Star Trek” kicks the band’s sole full-length (recorded last, included first, as on the Antioch Arrow discography) off with some tape-flukey deep-space atmospherics, a wavering descent of feedback, and a slight, breathless pause, then kicks into fast, ugly fury, taking a short, snarling guitar phrase and leading it through all its possible permutations: here it is thrashing alongside crude, not-quite-able-to-keep-up drums, here it is in too-grimy-and-quick-to-catch-on-the-first-listen metal- slash mode. “This Stool Is Cool” (a lament from the sort of cobwebbed engineering student who prefers the campus in its summer-session desertion) lunges and parries at barely over a minute, substituting blasts of pure noise—both vocal and instrumental—for anything resembling a hook or a chorus, while the equally deranged “Origin of Species” briefly drops into grim, reverbed absences of the same noise, only, with Italian-zombie-flick virtuousity, to hit you twice as hard as you expected the next second.

The fun doesn’t really begin, however, until the campy, taking-it-way-too-far cover of Bauhaus’ “Stigmata Martyr”. Remaining fairly faithful to the original’s effects-pedal Grand Guignol until about midway through, the band seems to get tired of what they’re doing and lunges into one of the most terrifying blasts of now-all-together-this-time murderous glee I think I’ve heard outside of the Jesus Lizard. And it’s that band’s slow, gruesome tendencies that are evoked by the overlong yet well-paced “The Wax Museum,” a trudging-uphill trickle that occasionally rises to the expected spasms of inchoate violence; the noise-funk “Space Ape,” one of the few songs here to remind me that this band does have a bassist under all the dual-guitar noise assault, has a similarly suspenseful agenda, and delivers in distorted-to-the-breaking point spades.

The split 7”s and EP presented here lack something of the condensed brilliance of the full-length, but nonetheless dole out their share of thrills. The ominous toll of “New Rocket”’s introductory passage builds up to a series of tense blasts that, surprisingly, possess a good deal more restraint and wiry (dare I say it?) lyricism. For a miniature punk rock epic, it’s hard to top this, and the line “How I can I make me more boring and stupid?” only sweetens the deal. “T-Minus Sixty Years” seethes with dark, punishing guitar tones, but contains enough hidden psychological subtleties (the faint, oscillating pulse that hints at a level of uncertainty; the fearful reticence with which Sonny delivers what passes for a chorus) to be fascinating for completely new reasons. By the time you reach it—if and only if your stomach’s strong enough—you’ll be anxious to listen to this record again and again, searching—like some forensic detective combing over a murder scene—for the twisted brilliance in the mess.