Coma Beach never fails to amaze me with how much depth lies beneath their abrasive, manic surface. A literate bunch, Coma Beach’s latest release, the 9th single off their album The Scapegoat’s Agony, titled ‘Extreme Masochist’, will resonate most with the surprisingly-numerous fan base of really hard-hitting hardcore punk with a literate, deep lyrical theme. Yes, they exist, and they are more than you think.
This hardcore outfit that blurs the lines between punk, alternative rock, and nu metal hails from the town of Würzburg, Germany. A 5-piece band, the group’s lyrics usually carry over nihilistic topics like their perceived lack of meaning to anything, a satirical approach to the absurdities of the human condition, tragic situations between their different characters or within the character’s oneself, and every now and then, adopting Schopenhauer’s system of radical metaphysical pessimism. Things like that.
Spearheaded by B. Kafka’s “Keith Flintian”, howled, short vocal utterances, to which a big amount of the Extreme Masochist’s aggressive edge is indebted, and his vast knowledge of literature, the song ends up with depth to its words that is met with the sharp knife’s edge of the riff-centered, distortion-heavy, guitar-based arrangement. The heaviness of Coma Beach’s music makes it usually cacophonous, corrosive, hard-to-stand, and other terms that us -punk heads- really fall for.
Come Beach is a band whose music comes loaded with all the poignancy of well-read poets, and all the lunacy of raging hooligans, and it is in this particular duality that they carve out a name for themselves as one of the more noteworthy and memorable hardcore bands out there. ‘Extreme Machosist’ expands on this dual nature of their music and sound, and adds one more hefty single to their album.
