Discography

The Huguenots

Hydra Head

2008-02-18

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You’ve probably not heard of The Huguenots and why would you? A New England hardcore band in the mid/late 90s they had only a few small releases, culminating in a split 10” with the similarly probably unknown to most SevenPercentSolution. But now Hydra Head, the label that put out that split, have pulled together all of the band’s work onto one Discography CD.

The songs are ripped through and shouted noisily with searing and sometimes wild riffs touching on the metallic as well as crunching and slashing out punk chords. The bass also switches between more classic punk sounds to fuzzed and ultra-distorted low rumbling noises. Drums are predominantly frantic and frenetic — working round the kit in the beats, and the vocals are a raw battery of shouts. Songs are often couple-of-minute short but with a draining speed and intensity and without often running straight but breaking and switching off elsewhere.

Touching on the metallic as well as crunching and slashing out

It all comes together to make a sound which serves onto and feeds off the same plates as a range of punk/hardcore bands from At The Drive-In to Botch to Black Flag to Blood Brothers but in reality offering more raw edges and less strength than pretty much all of them, and indeed a lot of the rest of the bands that that you’ve heard of that formed from the scene The Huguenots played within — which some of the members went on to be a part of. Yes, not to detract too much from the band’s work itself here in question, one of the main reasons this record is seeing the light over others from the era is due to the heightened interest fans will have in it due to the fact that Huguenots members went on to bigger and better things — most specifically Kurt Ballou moved on to Converge, Dan Colby joined The Explosion and Aaron Stuart joined Piebald.

The fact that the members achieved their success not in The Huguenots but elsewhere is testament to the fact that the band’s music wasn’t quite there — some elements needed fine tuning for the style to hit home (and the often one-dimensional vocals begin to grate…) but there is a load of interesting things going on in this discography which soon after exploded into shape with bands like Converge, Botch, Cave-In, Dillinger and Coalesce. It’s more than a fascinating document but this Discography still falls short of a classic record.