With all of the great fucked-up, violent hardcore that has been coming through the C-Blast office over the past year, I'd keep coming back to Void as a reference point when trying to describe the chaotic, off-kilter punk that the bands are playing. Coming out of suburban Maryland in the early 80s, Void was always aligned with the DC hardcore scene that orbited around Dischord Records and Minor Threat, but the band never really fit in with that scene despite releasing all of their material on the influential indie label. Void played hardcore just like everyone else, but no one else sounded like Void. No one was as vicious, as threatening, as weird sounding as Void. This was especially apparent when you listened to the legendary Faith/Void split. The Faith were a ripping hardcore band, but when you played the two sides back-to-back, it was like switching from classic American punk to the sound of mental patients breaking down the doors. Their sound was so off-kilter, at first taking form as a pretty standard hardcore attack, but quickly mutating into a chaotic sound that was due in large part to the strange, babaric guitar playing of Bubba Dupree. Combine that with the maniacal vocals of front man John Weiffenbach, the flattening rhythm section of bassist Chris Stover and drummer Sean Finnegan, the creepy artwork and iconic band logo that incorporated upside-down crosses, and you have one of the pioneering bands of psychotic hardcore, a kind of gnarled, fucked-up proto-crossover that along with Die Kreuzen, Siege, and Corrosion Of Conformity would have an enormous impact on just how ugly and weird hardcore could get.

The band's best known release has always been their split Lp with The Faith, but they never really had anything else available, up until now. There was an Ep called Condensed Flesh that came out in the early 90s long after the band had split up, but that was nearly impossible to find. At long last, Dischord has finally put together a collection of Void's early recordings, Sessions 81-83, which gathers their demo tracks, the session that produced the Condensed Flesh Ep, and some live tracks. It's pretty much everything from Void's early existence save for the Faith split. And it's absolutely essential listening for fans of extreme, messed-up hardcore.

The first half of the disc has the twenty tracks from their first recording in late 1981; at this stage, Void's songs were blazing hardcore punk, with the classic ten-second blast of opener "Void" leading into anthemic rippers like "War Hero", "Organized Sports" and "Don't Wanna Be Like You" hurtling between the noisier chaos of "Condensed Flesh" and "Suburbs Suck". The music has a cleaner sound than their later recordings, but it's still highly volatile,

filled with a sense of desperation and isolation even at this early stage. But when you get to the Inner Ear session from a month later, the band sounds markedly more chaotic and frenzied, the songs riddled with feedback and sounding a lot more unhinged. Dupree's guitar playing is noisier here, more atonal, jagged, bringing a newfound dissonance and metal bite to the songs. These songs are fucking awesome, and it ranks as one of my favorite hardcore recordings ever. From there, the disc features another set of songs from 1982 that sound even more crazed and murderous, and a couple of killer live tracks where the band assaults the audience with a violent barrage of noise.

It's a crucial collection of some of the most groundbreaking hardcore of the early 80s, with liner notes from Ian MacKaye that help to outline just how unique and out of place Void's feral thrash was in 1982. Highly recommended.