Maryland's No Trend made the sound of the world burning. Operating outside the strictures of the straight edge scene of harDCore proper, the band chronicled a chaos of the mind, and a raging disgust with...everyone and everything. The best overview I've seen lately of this band has been this one by Chris Richards in The Washington Post. The new Too Many Humans / Teen Love package out now from Drag City prompted that article, and with good reason as this is one of the more significant American punk reissues in recent years.
One listen now to Teen Love makes it seem like Jeff Mentges, front-man of the band, was a prescient genius or some kind of psychic. Raging as the music crashes around him, the easiest point of comparison for this is not, say, Void or S.O.A. from the early years of the D.C. scene, but peers across the Atlantic like The Pop Group. Like the material from that Mark Stewart project, the No Trend stuff is a cry from the void launched at every aspect of modern society. "Kiss Ass to Your Peer Group" and "Too Many Humans" find snarled lyrics over riffs that are primitive, brutal and rudimentary, while "Reality Breakdown" skirts dangerously close to a set of conventional riffs, with a rhythmic underpinning that suggests early Buzzcocks in a big way. Still, the wailing guitars in "For the Fun of It All" do little to make the tune seem like rock-and-roll or even punk rock. So much of this feels like hardcore but not harDCore, you know? And never does Mentges seem anything less than anguished, railing against people, fads, consumerism, and modern life throughout.
This Too Many Humans / Teen Love set reveals that there was some progression to the music of No Trend. Still, for whatever musical growth had occurred to make "Teen Love (12" version)" an odd alternative radio hit in the era, the sentiments of Mentges had hardly been made more agreeable. Listening to the second half of this set, you can hear a band taking tentative steps towards broadening its sound, or reaching a new audience, but you also hear a band fighting every step of the way against that. This is unpleasant music that was necessary, and which remains so. While "Hanging Out in Georgetown (Demo)" seems like a snide dig at the bands on Dischord in the early Eighties, and their followers, it's also exactly the kind of bitterly hateful music that straight edge would never have been capable of issuing forth. While "Purple Paisleys Make Me Happy (Demo)" almost sounds like something that could have been put out by Mark Robinson in one of his many bands, "Human Garbage (Demo)" is repellent.
If one considers what was out in 1983 that was as heavy as this, you had Black Flag, but they were making punk fueled by testosterone and machismo, it seemed, and you had a few acts on SST broadening the definition of hardcore punk, and of course the acts on Dischord in the early Eighties were flourishing, though they seemed in retrospect too much in sync with a scene of their own making. Sat next to any of that, the music of No Trend was, as this set reminds us over and over again, intent on rebuking everything and pleasing no one. The live tracks here reveal a real corrosive power, but rarely will you hear something here on Too Many Humans / Teen Love and not be surprised at the vitriol committed to tape. There was never a chance for this group to have survived this brief flowering of venom so a band history beyond what's on this masterful set isn't where I'll go to wrap this up. All I can say is thanks to Drag City for preserving this wonderfully corrosive stuff for current generations.
Too Many Humans / Teen Love is out now via Drag City.
[Photos: Drag City / uncredited]