Easy Off: Dark Place
Some years, the local punk scene in Aotearoa New Zealand produces a bumper crop of tasty releases to feast upon. Other years, you're left to pick over the remains of a much less fertile field. Regardless of the overall yield, though, every year the Aotearoa punk scene seems to deliver at least a couple of releases that are as impactful as anything emerging from much larger and often more well-resourced scenes offshore.
This year, the honour of delivering the first knockout Aotearoa punk release goes to Kirikiriroa (Hamilton) four-piece Easy Off. The crust punk band's recent Dark Place LP is an absolute ripper that deserves to be the focus of plenty of eyes and ears from home and abroad. Piggery's thundering self-titled debut was the last crust LP from Aotearoa's shores to hit that mark. That instant classic owed an unmistakable debt to the crushing apocalyptic sounds of groups like Stormcrow, Filth of Mankind, or Hellshock. Easy Off exude plenty of filth and fury too. But Dark Place's barrelling tracks feature as much fist-in-the-air intensity (à la Hero is Gone, From Ashes Rise, Tragedy, etc) as they do nihilistic hostility.
Admittedly, I'm getting long in the tooth, and my primary reference points often match my age. Not wanting to do Easy Off a disservice in that regard, I contacted the band's guitarist, Adam Fulton, to see how wide of the mark my initial thoughts were.
Adam responded, "I was very into Tragedy and His Hero is Gone as a teenager, though I hadn't really considered those bands before people started referencing them in regards to Dark Place. I don't believe any of the others listened to that style of crust, and I wouldn't want to overstate my own contribution to these songs. Callum (vocals) is a big fan of Stormcrow, Skaven etc and is the cheerleader for heavy miserable riffs. Michael (bass) and Josh (drums) come from a more hardcore background, which changes things pretty drastically. I wouldn't say it was completely intentional, but I do accept the album came away with a very '90s sound to it."
"More than anything," Adam also noted, "it is a lack of musical articulation that shapes a lot of the sound of the band at this stage." I understand what Adam means — that the songwriting process is gut-driven, and nothing is set in stone, creatively — but as far as articulating an idea goes, Dark Place lacks for nothing.
The band's first LP easily eclipses Easy Off's last release, 2019's Mot Strömmen EP. Mot Strömmen wrapped raw crust and d-beat around tinnitus-inducing hardcore, and while Dark Place follows a similar recipe, Easy Off's previously nails-on-a-chalkboard tone feels heavier and backed by more bulldozing might. The band haven't polished their sound, as such — Dark Place certainly isn't clean or shiny — but there are more polished performances on the LP. Dark Place still features plenty of abrasive instrumentation. It just arrives with a heftier thwack this time.
Dark Place was recorded and mixed at Bagnall Hill by Easy Off's aforementioned guitarist Adam, who has also produced an increasingly long line of thundering releases for Aotearoa groups like Long Distance Runner, Hedge Fund Trader, Wakhan Corridor, and more. Dark Place was then mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air, and Killingsworth's well-known wizardry for beefing up releases (while retaining much of their necessary rawness) explains a lot about Dark Place's powerful finishing touches.
Lyrically, there's not a great deal of hope to be found, as Dark Place's title suggests. Interestingly though, three of the tracks on the album — "Smith's Dream", "Facts/Feelings", and "Dark Place" — have their lyrics lifted from literary sources.
Album opener "Smith's Dream" takes its title and lyrics from the classic 1971 novel by Aotearoa author CK Stead, which tells a tale of violent resistance to autocratic rule. Smith's Dream was also the basis of the 1977 NZ film Sleeping Dogs, which has long been recognised as a groundbreaking work in the annals of homegrown cinema.
The lyrics on "Facts/Feelings" are taken from Aotearoa poet Airini Beautrais' work Dear Neil Roberts. Beautrais' book focuses on the events surrounding the death of Roberts, a 22-year-old punk/anarchist, who detonated an explosive package at the entrance to the Whanganui Computer Centre in November 1982. At the time, the building housed the primary computer systems for several NZ law enforcement agencies. Some have called Roberts a hero for taking violent action against the State. But others view Roberts' death as the tragic endpoint of a mental health crisis.
The last literary lyrics on Dark Place appear on the LP's title track. They're plucked from the pages of Joseph Conrad's famed novella, Heart of Darkness, which explores humanity's rapid descent into barbarity. Connective threads run through works like Smith's Dream, Dear Neil Roberts, and Heart of Darkness. They're all politically charged works, exploring ideas of resistance, catastrophic emotional upheavals, and humankind's propensity to feast on its self-destructive desires.
I was curious why Easy Off vocalist/lyricist Callum chose to look to literary sources for lyrical inspiration. More importantly, I wondered whether Callum saw an overarching narrative to Dark Place's lyrics, particularly at this anxious and volatile point in time. So I went straight to the source and asked exactly that.
Callum: "The lifted lyrics I see as a sort of collage — taking something existing and recontextualising it, a process that will create new allusions and associations while also linking to the concerns of the original works. I really subscribe to the 'eye of the beholder' school where the individual engaging with the lyrics will have their own idea of what it's about and draw their own connections to a broader theme it's trying to explore."
"The songs were all approached as individual units, without much thought to creating a whole. But having said that, there are a couple of themes that I keep returning to, so the collection of songs is fairly cohesive. I really like Skaven, Axegrinder, Effigy, and other sundry doomsayers, so I feel like I'm beating the same dead horse as those bands when it comes to lyrical content. There are a few outliers on Dark Place, but even then, they aren't radical departures from the core."
"The lyrics from "Smith's Dream" takes from the last chapter of the book — one which was cut from the original edition. I just liked the bizarre imagery of the text and that it comes from a part in the book removed from the main narrative — when the novel's events are no longer immediate but treated like a half-remembered nightmare. Using a New Zealand-based dystopia as a source is a conscious choice that I hope would nudge the audience (that I presume to be largely New Zealanders) into thinking about the themes in a domestic context."
"The lyrics on "Facts/Feelings" are a response to hearing someone say that what Neil Roberts did was 'a great thing' and that he 'did it for all of us' and things to that effect. It stuck in my craw because I see the bombing of the computer centre as a pretty horrific public suicide rather than some glorious political act (that ultimately achieved nothing). The two Beautrais poems I use are themselves made of quotations — one from the police report and the other from conversations with Neil's friends. It's the 'feelings' part of the song that's key — because that's where the real impact of Neil's actions lie."
"The lyrics to "Dark Place" are basically a joke. Before the narrator of Heart of Darkness gets into it, he's musing about how London was once the arse end of the world and speculating about what the Romans, who came to subdue the natives, must have thought of this hellish backwater. A lot of the description of the barbarous landscape could apply to Hamilton, so that's the dark place I'm thinking about with Conrad's words. It tickles me to link what is surely the world's most un-literary, un-romantic dead-end city to the canon of English literature and 'Western Civilisation'".
Questions and concerns about humanity's pitch into madness have been perennial topics in punk rock's history, and, obviously, many bands have looked to literary texts for inspiration. I've been jamming the Minutemen a lot lately, and it's been great to step beyond punk's de rigueur sloganeering (which I love). It's always interesting to see lyrical output draw from diverse sources; in Minutemen's case, doubly so, because they were working class kids keen to self-educate and illuminate a host of different issues.
In any case, however punk's perennial topics are framed, you could argue those topics feel extra pertinent right his minute as inflamed political issues + a global health crisis + boiling divisions = super-heated societal tensions. That's why bands like Easy Off (and like-minded crust-inspired outfits) matter. More than any other punk sub-genre, crust has remained relentlessly focused on humanity's combative nature, our callous disregard for environmental degradation, and the grim realities of war and social collapse. Crust often paints a very bleak picture, but it's also an honest illustration of the bitter battles we wage against one another and our callous plundering of Mother Earth.
Big or small, those clashes and conflicts are often sites of extreme tension, and tense times call for — what? That's right, amigo! Hard-out cathartic fucking noise As we all know, a horrible-sounding racket is liberating in and of itself. Sure, Dark Place's tracks point to some of the worst failings of the human condition, but combine that with a bunch of fierce crust, and you've got all the makings for a brutal purge of pent-up emotions.
Sledgehammering songs like "Planned Obsolescence", "Next Go Around", and "Shed" utilise all of the full-force exorcising weaponry in crust's armoury. As unhinged as Easy Off often sound, they still do an excellent job of combining savagery with precision on tracks like "Facts/Feelings" and "Go Slow". Throughout Dark Place, jagged riffs and battering drums hit like a steel-toed kick to the head, while Callum's throat-scouring vocals add the soul-searing veneer.
Easy Off's songs don't hang around for long, but they feature plenty of dynamic action. In fact, for all the gruffness and grimness here, it'd be a mistake to describe Dark Place as a one-dimensional crust onslaught.
There's subtlety and shading to the album, with the broader musical experience of Easy Off's members coming into play on tracks like "Funnel" and "Die is Cast", which twist and turn with more of a post-hardcore wrench. Elsewhere, Dark Place's title track drags thickset neocrust into the light. And quick-fire flashes of diverse inspirations — raw Japanese and Swedish hardcore, for example — engineer points of difference throughout.
The upshot is, while Dark Place's crustier influences may be recognisable on the first pass, like all good records, the Devil's in the detail here.
Most underground Aotearoa bands don't spend much (if any) time 'marketing' their new releases. Often bands will post a self-deprecating gag accompanied by an awkward humblebrag, and leave it at that. I get it, and I'm sure you do too. But I quite like enthusiastically shouting about great local releases. And I'm too old to care about collecting cool punk points (not that I ever had any, tbh). So I'll give to you straight: Easy Off (and their label, Real Vegan Cult) should be damn fucking proud of Dark Place.
From its striking cover art (designed and screen-printed by Michael Clapham) to its combination of cerebral and caustic ingredients, Dark Place is an excellent example of just how visceral DIY Aotearoa can punk get. Easy Off's first full-length sounds feral and feels ferocious. Dark Place will expel your demons, slay your anxieties, and that aforementioned fist-in-the-air intensity will likely leave you feeling empowered.
To my mind, Dark Place ticks all the killer crust boxes.
