Dischord - Director's Cut

  In the words of Edwyn Collins, "Rip it up and start again..."

  Dischord are the Blackpool band who impressed back in 2016 with the concept album War Or Peace (a song from which featured here : https://justsomepunksongs.blogspot.com/2016/09/dischord-red-poppies.html). They've been together since 2011 and feature Chris Newton (vocals), Zowie Swan (bass), Dave Swan (guitar) and Jake Fenton (drums). They're currently preparing to release a new album, it'll be out on Oct 31st and will be titled Convent Crescent.

  On the surface it's a soundtrack to a short horror film released by Chris and Zowie last year and as well as Dischord it features numerous other bands such as Soulcakes, Despairground, The Never Dead etc.  You haven't heard of those bands? Not surprising. Read on...

  In March 2018, Zowie and I released a short horror film, ‘Convent Crescent’. We knew it was only the beginning of a much longer story. What we didn’t realise at the time was that it was also the beginning of a new Dischord album.
In 2016 we released our third album, ‘War Or Peace’. It was our proudest achievement at the time; a concept album about war, death, love, forgiveness and, well, peace. The album’s final track, ‘Love’ became our favourite track to play live, and closed that album with our most important lyric: “They call me blind, but my name is peace. I am the silence when the guns have ceased.”
The problem with writing your best album is the subsequent question: what comes next? Fast forward to 2019 – imagine a Hellish time-jump montage of Brexit negotiations, Theresa May dancing to Abba, Boris Johnson shuffling into no. 10, Tommy Robinson covered in milkshake, Mosque attacks, John Lydon sporting his ‘Make America Great Again’, school shootings and Donald Trump mocking the disabled – a post-satirical dystopia seemingly designed by Quentin Blake and Spitting Image on a particularly bad day. Ample fodder, we were repeatedly told, for a political punk band.
But fodder for what, exactly? Evolution has always been integral to our writing process. We’ve never wanted to repeat ourselves. Ultimately, the point of ‘War or Peace’ was that war, political corruption, religious extremism, nationalism, terrorism and suffering are universal, self-perpetuating and doomed to continue indefinitely without drastic systemic upheaval… Despite the reign of leaders so grotesque as to be utterly immune to parody, nothing has changed. There is nothing to say we haven’t already said – and continue to say on stage every night. There are only so many punk songs you can write before they all begin to sound the same.

  Having taken ‘punk’ as far as we could without repeating ourselves, we were faced with a dilemma: could we change our focus, push our style to the point where we risked no longer being ‘Dischord’? And, what the hell was ‘Dischord’ anyway? A band who played three minute fast, shouty songs, or four people pouring every ounce of their souls into their instruments?

  Should we split up? Start a new band? That would be too easy. Should we grit our teeth and write a hardcore album about ‘Brexit Britain’? That seemed about the least punk rock thing we could do. That’s what you’d expect from us.

  Why not evolve? Why not take a risk? As strange as it sounds now, Seaside Suicide was a risk. Prior to that we had never played hardcore punk. We didn’t know we could do it. We didn’t know if people would connect with it if we did.

  So we set ourselves a challenge. Many artists we admired – David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, The Beatles – reinvented themselves from album to album, using new personas to find fresh perspectives and create new sounds. If they could reinvent themselves with each record, why couldn’t reinvent ourselves with each song?

  What if Dischord wrote the soundtrack to Convent Crescent?

  Ten tracks performed by ten different ‘bands’, each one of them Dischord in disguise. It was the perfect opportunity to shake things up. For me to get back behind the drums, to let Jake demonstrate his abilities as a guitarist and – more importantly – a producer, to let Zowie take on lead vocals, for Dave to hang up the Gibson and break out the Spanish guitars, 12 strings and effects pedals, to open our studio doors to a variety of guest musicians.

  So began the creation of one the most insidious concept albums ever written. A novel and its soundtrack written simultaneously, with songs for once not written to flow together, but written deliberately to jar, to contradict each other, whilst surreptitiously forming an elaborate concept – a narrative told in secret.

  We’ve always said that the album was the ultimate artform, the perfect combination of music, film, art and poetry. We’re taking that to its extreme with this album: A record, a novel and a short film all in one, combining to tell a complete story.

  ‘War or Peace’ declared love to be the solution, and we thought that was a full stop, but now we’re exploring what that actually means. ‘Convent Crescent’ is a story of love. It is also a story of death, rape, murder, demonic possession, sacrifice, addiction and loss because it’s written by the same damaged minds that brought you ‘The Wakes’, but ultimately it’s about love.

  For our last album, we designed a set of tarot cards, featuring characters representing the albums’ themes: The Soldier, Death, Love, War and The Devil. ‘Convent Crescent’ is their story, and if you think we’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.
 

  Intrigued? If you want to hear a band determined not to stand still it'll be available via Lickerish Records (https://www.lickerishrecords.co.uk/)  and you can pre order the album here https://dischorduk.bandcamp.com/album/convent-crescent-official-soundtrack

  You can get more info here : https://www.facebook.com/dischorduk/

  This is one of the songs on Convent Crescent, it's a dark delight and it's called Director's Cut...

Dischord - Red Poppies

 

  Blackpool punks Dischord recently made a triumphant return with their new album, War Or Peace. Released on August 30th, it's a hard hitting political punk masterpiece. If you listen to the album (and you should), you'll notice it's a well written treatise on the subject of war, song titles include War, Peace, Shellshocked, Battlefield and it finishes with Love in which they pronounce "....they want to fight and they want to kill, but I want to live in peace." Another couplet, "Red is the colour that brings them to me. Their blood and their souls, they gave for free" pretty much sums up the futility of war. All in all, an elegiac lament with a heavy soundtrack.

  You can check it out here : http://dischorduk.bandcamp.com/album/war-or-peace

  The song you'll find below is a scathing indictment of the role of those in power in sending our youth to die on foreign shores. This is Red Poppies.....

You can't save the soldiers 
Who died in 1917 
But with a canteen full of hate 
You can desecrate their legacy 
Shedding blood for oil 
You guaranteed your place in hell 
Pulling the triggers for the rich 
In the wars the rich won't fight for themselves 

And you can wave their flags 
And you can dance their dance 
But there's no help for heroes 
They're still rotting in France 

And you can sound the horns 
At the cadets parade 
But they're following footsteps 
To an unmarked grave 

Rotting and forgotten 
In an unmarked grave 

And you can fight for England 
And say you killed for your country 
But you'll die for a German Queen 
And an all American currency 
Dropping bombs on schools 
You guaranteed your place in hell 
Killing children for the crown 
In the wars the crown don't care about 


'I was born in this town 
But I was made a monster 
Dehumanised. Radicalised 
Taught to kill without compromise 
So pack up your troubles 
In your old kit bag 
But they won't support you 
When you come back.'

Top 10 Songs Chosen By David Dischord Swan (Dischord)

  A week or so ago I posted a song by Blackpool band Dischord, today their guitarist Dave is kind enough to share his favourite 10 songs of all time (or 11, as he manages to sneak an extra one in). If you want to check out Dischord (and if you like passionate, hard rocking music why wouldn't you want to check them out?), here's a link to their Bandcamp page : http://dischorduk.bandcamp.com/

Thanks for the list and the comments Dave......

Offspring - All I Want - could have been any song as they are my favourite band ever but this is my favourite) - this is the band who started my punk rock journey as I was a big 90s dance fan before (please don't shoot me.

American Head Charge - just so you know - it was during this song in the tache that I met my beautiful wife zowie.

Placebo - sleeping with ghosts - this is the song we had for our first dance at our wedding

Enter shikari - fanfare for the conscious man - this band need to be listened to more by people who like meanings in songs. They have the same power and impact in their songs as gallows but delivered in their beautiful dance / metal style.

Gallows - crucifucks - the main reason Dischord exists is because frank Carter left gallows and left a massive hole in the hardcore punk scene which we have tried to patch. This song is so powerful and needs to be heard by everyone!

Frank Carter and the rattlesnakes - rotten

blossom - this song is the question I ask myself every day. One thing that I am not afraid to tell anyone is my fear of death and this song feels like he is inside my mind.

Mansun - legacy - Only got listening last year and this song is absolutely incredible.

Radiohead - paranoid Android - this does not need words. One of the best songs ever written in my eyes.

Deftones - be quiet and drive - have loved these guys since the started and they keep getting better and more inventive.

Limp bizkit - Rearranged - I can never get enough of this song. It is a masterpiece

One minute silence - the hill is a hole - simply the best song by these guys and it gives me chills every time. Incredible!

Dischord - Seaside Suicide

 

photo by Stefan Holden


  I was lucky enough to catch Discord's set at last weekend's Punk And Disorderly Fest in Lancaster and thought that they're a band definitely meriting a place in this blog. They hail from Blackpool, formed in the lead up to the bulldozing of the town's Tache rock club to make way for a supermarket (2011) and are a passionate, hard hitting punk rock behemoth featuring Chris (vocals), Zowie (bass), Dave (guitar) and Jake (drums).

  They released the Your Father's Moustache ep to celebrate the last night of the Tache.  Their debut album, The Wakes, was released in 2012 and was heralded by Punktastic as "...the punk-rock release of the year. An unrelenting juggernaut that leaves you feeling flame-licked." Second album, Here Come The Weeds followed in 2015 and they're currently in the process of recording a new long player which will be unleashed later this year. You can check their music out here : http://dischorduk.bandcamp.com/.

  The song I've chosen for you was one of the highlight's of their set, it's from the debut album and it's a song about the ups and downs of living in Blackpool. This is Seaside Suicide.....