Last month, a white supremacist group called Crew 38, a PNW offshoot of the Hammerskins, put on a a festival called Hills of Hate Camp. It was just outside of town on private property and by invite only. This publication did not receive an invite, not that we’re sore about it. But I did get kind of curious about skinhead music because close-mindedness and creativity seldom go hand in hand. I wondered if there was any talent in the racism scene. I found a few songs by the bands playing at this Hills of Hate festival and gave them the benefit of the doubt. Sure, they’re racist, but are they any good?
Spoiler alert: No, not really.
Beer Hall Putsch
This band is named after the failed coup d’etat that landed Adolf Hitler in prison in 1923. I could only find one song, it was a crappy recording from their debut show in which they sing a love ballad to deceased neo-Nazi Robert Jay Matthews. The guys in the audience almost had a circle pit going but they were too old. The frontman ended the song with a “Seig Heil!” instead of a thank you. This is the stuff of sketch comedy and I can’t believe it’s real.
13 Knots
I believe a recording with only two songs counts as a “single,” but they went ahead and called Buckshot an EP anyway. They have a dollar-store Murder Junkies sound. The lyrical talent and vocal cadence are sub-nursery rhyme (“Buckshot- just for you. Buckshot- watcha gunna do?”). Then they threw in these goofy gunshot blasts, turning terrible music into comedic gold. This is some of the most retarded music I have ever heard.
The other song I found was called Running From the Law. Based on the intro, I thought it might actually be half decent. Then the lyrics kick in and it’s just the power fantasy of some Alabama trailer trash who thinks he’s a badass because he beats his wife. Two thumbs way down.
Ironwill/Label 56
I couldn’t find any recordings of Ironwill. I found a few skinhead forums sharing an album the band recorded in 2014, but there’s no way in hell I’m following those download links. I did trace them back to Label 56, which is where things got really interesting. This Maryland-based record label has been banned by WordPress so their website is blank. I had to access it through the Wayback Machine and boy, was it a cringe goldmine.
This website looks like a t-shirt you’d find in a truck stop gift shop. In addition to promoting the bands that they’ve signed, they had a whole podcast, plus a blog called This Week in Racism, and a whole slew of comments commending them for doing the “Lord’s work” followed by every racial slur in the book. From here, I was pointed towards a few other skinhead bands that I was able to find on YouTube on a series of throwaway accounts. None of these songs had more than 70 plays.
Anyway, I wanted to share with you a metalcore band called 14 Sacred Words. During my dive into the skinhead music sewer, this is the only place I found any real talent. The music was well written and the production was terrific. In fact, the lyrics weren’t that offensive per se- they were mostly generic high-energy fight-the-power type songs you could expect from metalcore. Then I heard a song called If It Costs Me My Life, in which the band claims that they will violently resist the Jewish manipulation of our government and media, even to the death. Yikes. I finally find some talent, and they’re just as dumb as the rest of these troglodytes. What a damn shame.
Spud media 