Friday 19 March 2010

Japanese Music - Part 4


D-Beat




What is d-beat?

According to wikipedia, d-beat is this:

C: | x - - x - x - - x - - x - x - -:| | C= cymbal
S: | - - o - - - o - - - o - - - o- :| | S= snare
K:|o - - o - o - - o - - o - o - -:| | K= kick

There is some debate over the origin of the d-beat, some attributing it to Filthy Animal Taylor, others saying that it was used by heavy psychedelic bands before Motörhead got their hands on it.

Yeah, whatever. BTW, the wikipedia entry on d-beat sucks.

So, we're back where we started. What is d-beat?

Urban dictionary has a good definition: "D-beat is basically crust punk without the hippy part."

D-beat is a style of aggressive, hard-core punk rock, modeled on the concept that Discharge are the best band to have ever existed. This is a good concept, and I subscribe to this theory whole-heartedly. For no adequately explained reason, d-beat appears endemically in Sweden and Japan. Osaka has, as I've previously mentioned, a kick-arse d-beat scene, populated with all manner drunk-punks, operators, thugs and misfits. The music's not as shabby/hippy as crust-core. It's a lot heavier than most hard-core, with bigger, fatter, yokuzuna-sized guitars, wild thrashing vocalists, and drums that sound like a herd of charging rhinoceros. It's really charged, stirring music and I find it extremely listenable. D-beat remains thematically fixated on concepts such as human annihilation (black metal anyone?)... and most importantly... I really like it.

Bands that might be called d-beat include:
Disclose
Framtid
Gloom
D-clone
Disturd
Redrum
Unarm
Reality Crisis
Fortitude

Look, I don't claim to be an expert on these things. I'm just an enthused antipodean BM drummer, so don't get too upity if I've got d-beat on my crust, or some metal in my punk. But yeah, if you can, listen to all of the above bands. Especially Discharge. They're ace.

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