The videos always look nuts. Every once in a while, an American DIY hardcore band, an Ingrown or a Magnitude, will make it over to Southeast Asia to play a few shows. The gigs generally look a lot like the ones that those bands might play back home — same horseshoe crowd formation, same spinny mosh moves, same pile-on singalongs, same stagedives. But since those bands had to hustle hard to make it to Indonesia or Vietnam, and since they probably won’t be back again for a long time, both band and crowd move with real urgency. They act like this will be their only chance to throw down like this, and they might be right.
Bands from America and Europe are able to head over to Southeast Asia to play those shows because the bigger cities across the region have huge and exciting hardcore scenes of their own — their own bands and labels and venues, all built from the ground up by people who truly love that stuff. The internet makes it easier for young people in those places to hear hardcore from our side of the world and to build their own versions of what they’ve seen and heard. It also gives Westerners a chance to hear what’s going on elsewhere. For years, lo-fi recordings and cell-phone videos Bangkok’s Whispers have been bouncing around the hardcore internet. Now, they’ve become arguably the first hardcore band from their part of the world to truly go global — collaborating with Western bands, touring Europe, and now releasing an unbelievably heavy and non-whispery EP on an American label.
Whispers — no relation to the ’70s R&B group who made “And The Beat Goes On” — have been around for a decade, and their sound is a crushing, epic take on the heavy hardcore that bands like Integrity and Cold As Life pioneered in the ’90s. “Bangkok Evilcore” is the name of the instrumental intro track from Whispers’ new Yom-Ma-Lok EP, and it’s apparently also the way that Whispers describe themselves. It’s an evocative phrase. “Evilcore” is not a known subgenre, but you understand exactly what the word means before you even hear the music. When the flaring, rumbling riffs and guttural blastbeats ring out on that intro track, Whispers earn their chosen genre name.
I’ve never been to Bangkok, or anywhere in Asia for that matter, which means I only have the most distorted and media-poisoned idea of what happens over there. It’s where the hard men crumble, right? Whispers’ take on metallic hardcore isn’t fundamentally Thai in any way that I can identify, though they do occasionally mess around with Buddhist chants between tracks, the same way that American bands mess around with dialogue samples from action movies. Whispers’ sound isn’t original, but it’s huge, and it reaches a new apex on Yom-Ma-Lok. At seven tracks, Yom-Ma-Lok is technically an EP. But plenty of the tracks are longer, grander, and more ambitious than what you’ll hear from most of their Western peers. Also, the record crosses the 20-minute mark, so it’s plenty long enough to stand as an album by hardcore standards.
Whispers recorded Yom-Ma-Lok in Bangkok with producer Suchai, and Weekend Nachos’ Andy Nelson mixed it. It sounds clearer and cleaner than Whispers’ past two EPs — they still haven’t released a full-length — and the precision-engineered crunch makes a huge difference. Whispers sound best when they sound big — colossal downtuned bruiser riffs, occasional searing guitar leads, drums locked in double-bass judder mode, singer Nitisart “Mike” Chaiburi going full guttural-bellow. Their sound deserves to be captured in high definition, and that’s what Yom Ma Lok does.
Guests from across the planet appear on Yom-Ma-Lok. Stephen Bessac, singer for the French beatdown band Kickback, has apparently been living in Thailand for a long time, and he joined Whispers onstage when they covered Kickback at a Bangkok fest a few years ago. Bessac appears on the title track, a forbidding atmospheric lurch that seems to explode in slow motion for three minutes. Shaun Alexander, the mesmerizing and terrifying mosher who leads Glasgow’s Demonstration Of Power, shows up on the only-the-strong anthem “Weisenheimer (You Were Never One Of Us).” Jem Siow, from Sydney juggernauts Speed, appears on “A Choice To Survive,” and he also helped Whispers translate their lyrics to English, which brings me to another point. The Yom-Ma-Lok lyrics are almost entirely English, though that’s not Whispers’ first language, which might explain why they have a song called “Weisenheimer (You Were Never One Of Us).”
Sometimes, the language of hardcore is pretty universal. Mike Chaiburi’s demonic roar isn’t location-specific, and some of his lyrics are hardcore boilerplate: “I choose to live my life my own way, and I’ve got nothing to prove! Because I don’t give a fuck about you and your fakeass crew! Forever true!” Sometimes, though, they’re just different enough to be weird, and that makes them interesting: “Revelation’s time is now! Your world will fall apart to the ground! The path of righteousness is burning down!” The vague disconnect reminds me of what happens when Swedish producers write English-language pop songs — that thing where it can sound wrong and right at the same time. The same is true of Whispers’ music. You can tell that they’ve internalized the codified tropes of hardcore, but that doesn’t stop them from throwing in occasional ominous acoustic guitars or stretching songs out far past the four-minute mark. They know the rules, but they don’t live by them.
Look, it’s late in the year. The best-of lists are already out. For the most part, the only people releasing albums at this time of year are rappers who only announced their new albums a few days ago, and we didn’t get promo copies of most of those in time to give them real consideration. A record as heavy and single-minded as Yom-Ma-Lok will probably only appeal to a narrow slice of Stereogum’s readership. But if you have any love for berserker mosh-music, you should really check out Yom-Ma-Lok. It sounds so much bigger than most of what American hardcore has to offer, and it’s a welcome reminder that the heaviest music can come from anywhere.
Yom-Ma-Lok is out 12/13 on Flatspot Records.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Roc Marciano & The Alchemist’s The Skeleton Key
• Snoop Dogg’s Missionary
• Saint Etienne’s The Night
• BossMan Dlow’s Dlow Curry
• Fiji Blue’s Glide
• Mario’s Glad You Came
• Elodie Gervaise’s Exosoul [Of Anaïnja]
• A Flock Of Seagulls’ Some Dreams
• Stray Kids’ Hop
• Daniel Blumberg’s The Brutalist (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
• The benefit compilation Every Possible Way
• The Go-Betweens’ G Stands For Go-Betweens: Volume 3 2000-2006 box set
• Fang Island’s Doesn’t Exist II: The Complete Recordings
• Laibach’s Opus Dei Revisited
• The Cure’s Songs Of A Live World: Troxy London MMXXlV live album
• The National’s Rome live album
• Dom Martin’s Buried Alive live album
• Wings Of Steel’s Live In France
• Amen Dunes’ Death Jokes II
• Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday 2 – The Hiatus
• Victoria Monét’s Jaguar II Christmas
• PlayThatBoiZay’s Vampires Impersonating People Deluxe
• Sugarhill Ddot’s 2 Sides Of The Story Deluxe
• Valee & Surf Gang’s Grey Sky London EP
• A Certain Ratio’s Christmasville UK EP
• Stella Rose’s Hollybaby EP
• Clothing’s Beauty Filter EP
• The Holy Knives’ I Don’t Wanna Win EP
• Will Swinton’s December EP
