ICD10 – Faith in Institutions

Featuring members of Philly heavyweights like Fuckin’ Lovers and Poison Ruin, ICD10 sounds like they’ve soaked up 40 years of hardcore history and are sweating it out into a battered denim jacket covered in rusted studs and faded band logos. Swirling around ICD10’s tornado of noise, I hear the anthemic anarcho-hardcore of Final Conflict and the Iconoclast, the total noise approach of 80s Kyushu punk, the off-kilter artiness of early 2010s New York, and Gudon’s marriage of heaviness and musicality. ICD10’s vocals are bathed in noise and effects, but rather than the uniform delay effect most hardcore bands employ, there are a range of effects that sometimes cascade across the manic riffing and sometimes lock in with it, creating jagged looping effects that evoke a crumbling technological dystopia. Lyrically, ICD10 combines Crass’s political astuteness with Poison Idea’s nihilism; the world is fucked, the system is rigged, and the only momentary respite is in tasting the void. Faith in Institutions is an unrelentingly bleak record, but it channels its hopelessness into an original and compelling take on hardcore punk.