Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.
Originally, Ian Shelton conceived Regional Justice Center as a collaboration with his incarcerated brother. The idea was that he’d write half of the lyrics and Hellesto would write the other half. Things didn’t really work out that way, though Hellesto was always a presence on RJC records, often as just a voice on the other end of a phone. RJC evolved into something else. Rage at the criminal justice system was part of the band’s animating force, but their music was more personal than political. Shelton got into cycles of abuse, fucked-up family histories, guilt, helplessness. On the astonishing 2020 track “KKK Tattoo” — his absent biological father has one — Shelton looked at his own genetic history and wondered how close he came to turning out like that.
Regional Justice Center explored those heavy ideas through the frantic, guttural churn of the fast-hardcore subgenre known as powerviolence. (Shelton often claimed that RJC were just a fast hardcore band, not a powerviolence one, but the glove usually fit.) Regional Justice Center records were short and fast and brutal. There wasn’t much difference between the albums and EPs. The band’s membership shifted over the years, but it was always built around Shelton. Onstage, he would play incredibly fast and often complex drum parts while screaming extremely loud, which looked quite difficult. I bet he’s good at video games.
In the seven years since Ian Shelton started Regional Justice Center, things have changed. Shelton moved to Los Angeles. RJC became a huge deal in an extremely niche hardcore subgenre — the biggest fish in the smallest pond. They toured a lot, and then they had to stop touring for pandemic purposes, which was when Shelton was bored and antsy enough to start Militarie Gun, a band that is now much more popular than RJC could ever hope to be. Most importantly, Max Hellesto came home from prison two years ago. It took time for Shelton and Hellesto to decide what to do with Regional Justice Center, whether it should even keep going, but now it’s back. In this iteration of the band, Max Hellesto is an actual member, rather than an inspiration and occasional voice on the other end of a prison phone line.
Regional Justice Center’s new album Freedom Sweet Freedom is being billed as their final chapter, and the band is now closer to being the true collaboration that Ian Shelton originally envisioned. He’s not the only one writing the songs now, either. Max Hellesto writes lyrics. Longtime guitarist Alex Haller writes music, and so does new member Taylor Young. Young is also a member of heavy-ass hardcore bands like Twitching Tongues and God’s Hate, and he’s probably the most important producer in hardcore at the moment. Young produces Freedom Sweet Freedom, just as he did with RJC’s 2021 album Crime & Punishment, and the new record marks a sonic shift for the band. They’re still playing fast, abrasive, desperate hardcore, but they sound cleaner and more streamlined than ever. Sometimes, they’re even catchy, though only in the ugliest ways imaginable.
“Freedom,” the first song on Freedom Sweet Freedom, opens with Max Hellesto bellowing the title word at the top of his lungs. (Freedom Sweet Freedom starts with a song called “Freedom” and ends with one called “Sweet Freedom.” This is serious music, but that’s pretty funny.) In that moment, “freedom” takes on a meaning that’s hard to define. There’s joy and exhilaration in there, but there’s also dread and disbelief. When you’ve been locked up for your entire adult life, the idea of freedom must feel like a weird abstraction, or maybe a joke. Even if you’re not physically in a cell, you’re still subject to the forces that landed you there in the first place, and you’re always in danger of going back. Freedom Sweet Freedom isn’t a triumphant record — or, at any rate, it isn’t just that. There’s a heaviness that goes far beyond the riffage.
The riffage is heavy, though! Freedom Sweet Freedom flies by, with 12 tracks in 15 minutes. If you like a riff, you need to enjoy every moment of its presence, since it’s about to be gone forever. The band plays with a pulverizing intensity, but the guttural stomach-drop changes of powerviolence don’t come quite so often. Some parts are classic knuckle-dragging mosh breakdowns. Others are adrenaline-charged thrash-outs. The music is always harsh — I keep having to give myself breaks from the record even while I’m working on this review — but it’s so sharp and focused and well-recorded that even an uninitiated listener might hear it as something other than a series of guttural blurts.
You’ll need a lyric sheet to decipher lots of the words on Freedom Sweet Freedom, but it’s worth the deep dive. Ian Shelton and Max Hellesto both wrote big chunks of the Freedom Sweet Freedom lyrics, and they both add to the record’s sense of perspective. On the opening track, Shelton’s lyrics could be read as a warning to Hellesto, or really to anyone: “Freedom can’t be gained! Not if you stay the same! Freedom can’t be gained! Someone else decides your fate!” One song later, Hellesto shrieks from deep in a fog: “Wake up confused and I don’t know where I am! Face consequences for shit I don’t understand!” On “Take A Step Away,” Hellesto growls, “I would never want to hear you’re proud of me!”
Since he got out of prison, Max Hellesto has started rapping under the name Vatican Voss. On the late-album track “Curse,” he takes a few seconds to rap in a deep multi-tracked mutter over Taylor Young’s guitar feedback. His words burn with nihilism: “My moms was an addict, my pops was an addict/ Like fuck it, I’ll pop a few Xanax for practice/ My mental health trapped in a cell, my head havoc/ I’ve managed to know that most don’t understand it.” Closing track “Sweet Freedom” is the one song on the album that where the two brothers wrote the words together. (At 1:51, it’s also the longest song here.) That song is about dealing with the shit that you’ve done and maybe taking ownership of it: “You ain’t taking me back! I left that shit in my past! Killed myself a thousand goddamn times! Trying to make up for all my lies!” It’s intense.
You don’t need to know the whole story to appreciate the music. Freedom Sweet Freedom is a feverish and focused hardcore record, one that burns with urgency and purpose. If you only know Ian Shelton from Militarie Gun, as I’m sure many do now, then it’ll be a trip to hear him on this. This isn’t the guy jumping around and covering Blur’s “Song 2” onstage. This is someone who needs to get some dark, chaotic thoughts out into the world. If Regional Justice Center get a chance to play many shows behind this record, they are going to be wild. If you’re looking for some fast, physical music that can convince you to jump off something tall, this fits the bill.
But if you do know the story — and you do, since you’re at the end of this review — then Freedom Sweet Freedom gains depth and resonance. It’s a beautiful thing. These two brothers have been through some shit, and they’re probably still going through some shit, but now they can help each other process it through this frantic, mean music. It’s trauma rendered through art, violence that’s become metaphorical rather than physical or mental. That’s inspiring. That’s bigger than music.
Freedom Sweet Freedom is out 9/20 on Closed Casket Activities.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Future’s Mixtape Pluto
• Jamie xx’s In Waves
• Bright Eyes’ Five Dice, All Threes
• Katy Perry’s 143
• Manu Chao’s Viva Tu
• Katy J Pearson’s Someday, Now
• Thurston Moore’s Flow Critical Lucidity
• Downhaul’s How To Begin
• Clinic Stars’ Only Hinting
• Nubya Garcia’s Odyssey
• The Waeve’s City Lights
• Julian Casblancas + The Voidz’s Like All Before You
• Sunset Rubdown’s Always Happy To Explode
• Ed Schrader’s Music Beat’s Orchestra Hits
• Trace Mountains’ Into The Burning Blue
• Pale Waves’ Smitten
• FIDLAR’s Surviving The Dream
• Nelly Furtado’s 7
• Kate Pierson’s Radios And Rainbows
• Joan As Police Woman’s Lemons, Limes And Orchids
• cliffdiver’s birdwatching
• Dreamless Veil’s Every Limb Of The Flood
• Herb Alpert’s 50
• Erland Cooper’s Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence
• Wilderado’s Talker
• Sammy Rae & The Friends’ Something For Everybody
• LICE’s Third Time At The Beach
• Honeyglaze’s Real Deal
• Blossoms’ Gary
• Nonpareils’ Rhetoric & Terror
• Dave Guy’s Ruby
• Lutalo’s The Academy
• The Calamatix’s self-titled LP
• The Brant Bjork Trio’s Once Upon A Time In The Desert
• Haich Ber Na’s The Everyday
• Midland’s Barely Blue
• Trey Anastasio’s Atriums
• Moon Kissed’s I’ll See You In New York
• Theo Kandel’s Eating & Drinking & Being In Love
• Smallpools’ Ghost Town Road
• Honeyglaze’s Real Deal
• In Flagranti’s Silver Jubilee
• Dialect’s Atlas Of Green
• Orion Sun’s Orion
• Lea Thomas’ Cosmos Forever
• Photay’s Windswept
• Tasha’s All This And So Much More
• Lawns’ Be A Better Man
• Hannah Holland’s The Visitor Soundtrack
• Kanonenfieber’s Die Urkatastrophe
• Hippo Campus’ Flood
• Weak Signal’s Fine
• Kassi Ashton’s Made From The Dirt
• Kurious’ Majician
• Fight Dice’s Total Party Kill
• The Last Gang’s Obscene Daydreams
• Unto Others’ Never, Neverland
• YSEULT’s Mental
• James Bay’s Changes All The Time
• JJ Wilde’s Vices
• Nina Ryser’s Water Giants
• Malcolm Pardon’s The Abyss
• Tim Reaper & Kloke’s In Full Effect
• Jaz Karis’ Safe Flight
• George Burton’s White Noise
• Terry Gross’ Huge Improvement
• JD Simo & Luther Dickinson’s Do The Rump!
• DEFTR’s Run Away
• Noga Erez’s The Vandalist
• Vended’s self-titled LP
• Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway’s Into The Wild
• Pearl & The Oysters’ Planet Pearl
• Cody Belew’s I Did It For Love
• Circus Trees’ This makes me sad, and I miss you
• Nightwish’s Yesterwynde
• Drifting In Silence & Suseti’s Echos Beyond
• Drake White’s Low Country High Road
• The Black Pacific’s Here Comes Our Wave
• p:ano’s ba ba ba
• White Poppy’s Ataraxia
• Pekodjinn’s TN TAPE
• Tom Walker’s I Am
• Playhouse’s Broken And The Damned
• Mountain Time’s Dream Homes
• BLACKSTARKIDS’ Saturn Dayz
• JOY (Anonymous)’s Joyous People (South East Corner)
• Neon Trees’ Sink Your Teeth
• Keith Urban’s High
• Seether’s The Surface Seems So Far
• claire rousay’s sentiment remixes
• Johnny Marr + The Healers’ Boomslang deluxe edition
• Teen Jesus And The Jean Teasers’ I Love You Too
• Sarah Jarosz’s Polaroid Lovers Deluxe Edition
• Theodore Shapiro’s Wolfs Original Soundtrack
• Big Ups’ Eighteen Hours Of Static (Reissue + Remixes)
• Galaxie 500’s Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90
• Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt EDITS
• Louis The Child’s The Sun Comes Up
• Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party’s Chain Of Light
• Michael Schenker’s My Years With UFO
• Gregg Allman’s Uncle Sam’s live album
• Bob Dylan’s The 1974 Live Recordings
• Phil Collins’ Both Sides (All The Sides) box set
• Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage Tour ’82 box set
• Grateful Dead’s Friend Of The Devils: April 1978 box set
• The tribute compilation Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin
• Rival Schools’ Pedals (Deluxe)
• The Kills’ Happier Girls Sessions EP
• Tanukichan’s Circles EP
• Starcleaner Reunion’s Café Life EP
• Little Bit’s talk a blue streak EP
• Office Dog’s Doggerland EP
• God Is War’s Boogeyeman Inc. EP
• Max McNown’s Willfully Blind EP
• Kayla Silverman’s Sophisticated Lady EP
• Balderdasch’s Control The Ending EP
• Charming Arson’s Another Kind Of Vision EP
• Jana Diab’s Season One EP
