Halo Of Flies - The deafening flies of post-hardcore

In the Eighties, alongside Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman), Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Greg Graffin (Bad Religion), Greg Ginn (Black Flag) and a handful of others, Tom Hazelmyer was a guiding figure - both musically and as a label boss - of the most extreme American independent rock.

In the long and complex history of hardcore, by the mid-Eighties things could have reached an irreversible standstill, had a platoon of brilliant young musicians not given fresh wings to a movement that, after one last revival at the start of the Nineties, would come to an end for good - coinciding with the apotheosis of grunge.

After the movement's birth in '78 (with Germs and Misfits) and a first "post" phase (Fear, Wipers, Minutemen, Flipper etc.) running alongside the movement's peak in '81 (with Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Descendents etc.), there came a second "post" phase (Mission Of Burma, Big Black etc.) as the movement spread from Los Angeles across the whole of America (Minor Threat, Husker Du etc.). Then came a second re-founding of hardcore in '83, bordering on metal (D.R.I., Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies). Finally - and by now we've roughly reached the mid-Eighties - came the phenomenal, extreme protagonists of the "third post-hardcore", the most substantial, widespread and varied of all, coming not from Los Angeles or New York but from Washington (Pussy Galore, Rites Of Spring), Texas (Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid), Chicago (Naked Raygun), Kentucky (Squirrel Bait), Seattle (Melvins)... and Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis (with the early Husker Du), hardcore had found a crucial point of reference; and so did post-hardcore, with the mature Husker Du and the Replacements.

In Minneapolis lived Tom Hazelmyer, who from 1980 onward moved from one musical project to another, searching for an answer to his own personal route into post-hardcore.

That answer, and its full realization, came in 1985 with the birth of Halo Of Flies on one hand and the founding of Amphetamine Reptile Records on the other.

Over twenty years, Amphetamine Reptile Records would release around a hundred records - mostly singles and EPs - by major hard-noise rockers from all over America: Cows, Helios Creed, Helmet, Melvins, Boss Hog, Tar, Unsane, King Snake Roost; always skirting close to grunge but never fully embracing it, true to the label's avant-garde status.

Every shift in hardcore has obviously been driven, cause and effect, by shifts within society and therefore within the audience consuming that music. If hardcore was never truly music of rupture or rebellion (that was punk), but rather one of reflection and above all self-reflection, this is all the more true of the hardcore of this era. By the mid-Eighties, history, society and the role of youth within them hold no interest whatsoever for hardcore, which becomes - for all its alienation and pessimism - definitively elegiac and metaphysical. Hardcore is no longer the music of the Los Angeles drifter, but of the suburban outcast, the failed artist, the shy kid, the nihilist without a suicide, the apathetic soul without sadism, the aphasic fifteen-year-old.

In the field of rock music, Tom Hazelmyer pulled off one of the boldest and most radical operations of all time. Halo Of Flies completely re-founded the use of all three classic rock instruments.

The guitar (Tom Hazelmyer) sounds like a Hendrix playing in the most extreme MC5. The drums (John Anglim) hammer away, booming, off the beat. The bass (Tim McLaughin) rushes in to cover the huge holes left by the other two instruments' wild excursions, to the point of single-handedly holding the whole harmonic thread together. Tom Hazelmyer's voice, meanwhile, is the missing link between the most extreme garage-rock vocals (Iggy Stooge), the bleakest hardcore delivery (Steve Albini) and the most radical grunge scream (Kurt Cobain).

What comes out of it is something unheard of, and for all its formlessness, dissonance, harshness and difficulty, formally impeccable. Each Halo Of Flies song (averaging two and a half minutes) is a precious essay packed with as many devices, tempo changes, tones and textures as the best 15-minute progressive symphonies.

In the rock field, only the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys had done anything comparable. Yet those bands drew on means outside the genre (jazz especially, but also blues). Halo Of Flies instead pull off the miracle of doing it all from within, entirely within rock's own vocabulary. In those same years the Melvins also re-founded, in their own way, the three rock instruments. If the Melvins' operation was just as avant-garde but heavier, more radical and more unlistenable than that of Halo Of Flies, the latter also scored points for variety - staggering from one song to the next, stunning even within the same song - all while remaining under the banner of the rawest, most uncompromising violence. Needless to say, melody is literally swept away.

It should be said, however, that the 1985 Husker Du represent, within post-hardcore, the mirror opposite of Halo Of Flies: one post-hardcore act is built around pop, the other around cacophony; the antithesis is all the more exacerbated given that the two bands came from the same city.

Yet Halo Of Flies' cacophonies are not gratuitous - unlike most others' - but genuine art, because they manage to seize the listener's heart and rip it clean out of their chest.

Finally, without Halo Of Flies, Pussy Galore and everything that followed (the Jon Spencer Group first and foremost) would be unthinkable.

Halo Of Flies' post-hardcore goes beyond the sublime - yet still human - existentialism of para-indie bands like Squirrel Bait. Halo Of Flies' music is programmatically inhuman, as if it no longer had anything to do with this world. While Slint would reach that same parallel dimension through atonal chords, Halo Of Flies get there through the most visceral, urgent and irresistible discords.

A final tribute to their avant-garde spirit is Halo Of Flies' choice never to release an album, only singles and EPs - after all, that format has always been hardcore's most natural habitat, even if now, in the post-hardcore era, that choice comes across as provocative, off-putting, in a word, otherworldly.

"Rubber Room" (1986), single.

Halo Of Flies' debut stands out for being, on one hand, a particularly epileptic and disorienting grunge (Stooges-style garage-rock dragged into the noise era) ("Rubber Room" [- 2:03]), and on the other a blazingly fast, inhuman dirge - split into three distinct parts - where it sounds like Hendrix performing Killing Joke scores ("Thoughts in a Booth" [- 3:37]).

The band's confidence and assurance already hint at the novelty their future masterpieces would bring.

"Snapping Black Roscoe Bottles" (1986), single.

The second single ramps up the dissonance with particularly syncopated and devastated blues: Tom Hazelmyer's guitar is an encyclopedia that ranges, with originality and awareness, from Eric Clapton to Sonic Youth; the rhythm section immediately stakes its claim as one of the most original ever (tempos shattered, stretched out, dropped, picked back up, pitted against each other). If "D.D.T. Fin 13" [- 4:15] parodies lysergic trips through sheer alienation, "Can't Touch Her" [- 2:04] floors the accelerator on every level and lays the groundwork for what would become the blues-core-noise sound of Pussy Galore first, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion later.

“Circling The Pile” (1986), singolo.

Halo Of Flies' fifteenth recorded minute radicalizes and sublimates the blues-core-noise they'd left us with ("M.D. 20/20" [- 2:10]). Then ("Pipebomb" [- 1:22]) things descend into the most bestial circles of perdition (Big Black). Finally, order is restored with a rock'n'roll revival set to a metal beat, where every instrument finds its most expressive and innovative path, in an exercise of estrangement, progression and devastation, with the vocals growing ever more guttural ("Sinner Sings" [- 2:54]). At this point alone, Halo Of Flies would already rightfully and knowingly belong to the American post-hardcore avant-garde (that of Big Boys and Butthole Surfers). But the best was yet to come.

"Richie's Dog" (1987), single.

The fourth single is once again a full-spectrum blues-core fresco, where a particularly deep alienation manages to express itself through an especially lush musical fantasy ("Richie's Dog" [- 2:41]).

"How Does It Feel to Feel" [- 2:59] is a blasphemous cover of Creation, an English band active in 1966-68 - alongside the Who among the most extreme acts of the era. Just as Creation's (and the Who's) sound was, oxymoronically, rhythm blues, so Halo of Flies' version is blues-core.

Garbage Rock (1987), EP.

Halo of Flies' first work to run past 7 minutes opens with a bridge spanning from the Minutemen's jazz-core to the most avant-garde, self-referential peaks of so many late-80s indie bands ("Garbage Rock" [- 1:56]).

"D.D.T. Beat 69" [- 2:45] varies, for the umpteenth time - and with the umpteenth degree of radicalism - on the usual blues-core formula. The rhythm section ticks along like a metronome, while the guitar shifts from symphonic to acidic, to solos that are at times classic (and parodying the classic), at times like a fingernail on a blackboard.

"One Barrel Spent" [- 3:35] is the most powerful racket of all (rhythm section) and, at the same time, the most distorted (the guitar really does tear your ears apart). The vocal is all choked up in an endless lament, yet consonant with the whole scenario of a performance in its purest state, with no life left to refer back to.

"I'm Clean" [- 2:53] charges forward more unstoppable and essential than ever: plenty of runs, plenty of starts and returns, in the rhythm, in the fuzz. This is three-dimensional music, where you're assailed on every side, through all the time and space around you. This synaptic flight is the band's first truly significant milestone.

Headburn (1987), EP.

Here's Halo Of Flies' turning point. Everything now plays out at the expense of blues and in favor of -core. The band gets harsher, tougher than ever. Above all, Tom Hazelmyer's voice is now given over to the most deflagrating, extreme screams.

"Headburn" [- 4:10] is an instant masterpiece. A symphony built on heavy-metal rhythm guitar, a grunge voice constantly screaming over a faint hum, and a rhythm section that packs and stokes this cosmic-hell noise.

"Easy Or Hard" [- 2:23] shows that by now Halo Of Flies have no mercy left for anyone. Here they brutally devour a harmless slice of beach-punk. Hazelmyer's throat alone would be enough to justify the whole operation: it's so total, so raw, so visceral; but also worth noting is a bass capable of rising up like a self-propelled wall, looming over everything else and carving out its routes and grooves.

"Father Paranoia" [- 2:58] also grafts on industrial elements and sets no limits for this masterpiece of an EP, surely among the most violent ever made. It sounds like two Black Flags put together and launched at blind speed, interrupted here and there by sudden changes of course.

"No Time" (1988), single.

This is the real Halo Of Flies. "No Time" [- 2:17] explodes, summing up a decade (and a ton) of sonic holocausts both exploded (Black Flag) and imploded (Big Black). The solidity of a sound that's otherwise perpetually stripped to the bone finally comes from a surge of Dead Boys-style memory.

“You Get Nothing” [- 2:36] matches it all with no less class. The ending, with its surges and rising pitch, is unrivaled.

“Death Of A Fly” (1989), singolo.

Still no letdown. While “Death of a Fly” [- 2:47] stages a Jon Spencer-style ritual – it's an apocalyptic guerrilla blues-core – finished off with grunge screams and heavy-metal chords; “Ain’t No Hell” [- 1:59] sacrifices on the altar the most anorexic version of Steve Albini (the guitar and rhythm section seem to be counting the vertebrae of a carcass), hurled at ultrasonic, disfiguring speed (and if it weren't the speed, it would be the screams and the tormentor-guitar leaving no escape).

“Spit It Out” [- 2:54] rationalizes it all with Hendrix-like blows (metal, tribal rhythms, Steve Albini, the most merciless screams, the most ultrasonic industrial).

“Winged” (1990) single.

Next come two covers of great class, savagely reworked: “Human Fly” [- 2:29] from the voodobilly of the Cramps, who back in 1979 had already anticipated much of 90s Jon Spencer: “I’m a Bug” [- 1:06], a track from the late 70s by the Urinals, performed in the most lo-fi and alienated way possible.

“Big Mod Hate Trip” (1991), single.

After the 8 masterpieces of Headburn, “No Time”, Death Of A Fly, 8 tracks and a handful of minutes, capable of refounding the very concept of rock, is a step backward for Halo Of Flies; or rather, a step even further into the depths of the “post”. Now we witness the “post” even of Halo Of Flies. After the 1987-1989 Halo Of Flies had already risen to a dimension transcending every pain, emotion and value – every humanity – now there's a return to humanity (to some kind of melody) in order to – while mocking it – mock ourselves for having abandoned it (or believed we had).

“Tired & Cold” [- 2:43] is a bundle of fused rock n' roll; “Wasted Time” [- 2:44] is a madness set to rock n' roll time. From punk – in all its shades – to garage-rock, to alternative, everything is devoured and at the same time rejected. A rape, and a contempt for the raped. Perhaps going even further than Albini – in terms of brutality and ruthlessness.

“Mod Showdown” (1991), single.

The Halo Of Flies saga ends with an odd collaboration with Mudhoney. Odd not because the two acts have nothing in common, but because, in this collaboration, they seem to parody the surrealism of the Screaming Trees, assaulted not with violence, but with estrangement through sound and rhythmic experiments (“Jagged Time Lapse” [- 2:23]).

Given the peculiar balance and devices on which Halo Of Flies' music rests (as cerebral as it is pogo-worthy), it's impossible to find true heirs to these – moreover – supreme performers. Helmet for one strand and Pussy Galore for the other fail to exhaust the full, inimitable and exceptional potential of Halo Of Flies.

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