THE average passerby might not have noticed, but there's a resurgence of interest in Ye Olde Punk Rock these days. Wednesday night at the Mean Fiddler attracted people out of the woodwork, generally the kind of folk that you don't see at standard rock venues, Why? Because the sort of music they like to listen to has been ghettoised. A minority taste for minority types, for whom Paranoid Visions realistically represent some kind of mouthpiece. Of the bands that played to a small audience, it was actually Paranoid Visions that impressed the most, more about which anon.
Stagnation were all too aptly named, a resolutely dire, one dimensional punk rock group rooted in its own sub cultural mess of Hellraiser videos, fascist salutes, and almost forgotten "alternative" punk bands such as Crass, Anti Pasti, and Discharge. Bunny Hoover are a passable facsimile of the commercial punk blueprint, while Rumble - mewling pussycats compared to Stagnation - are at least possessed of an irritating ego driven self promotion that will do them no harm whatsoever when they relocate to London in late September.
As for Paranoid Visions, it was their gig. Not as ludicrous a proposition as they were in the early 1980s, now their hard nosed, pointed music makes better sense, which implies that either Paranoid Visions were ahead of their time, or else they have simply waited for the zeitgeist to strike again. The fact that they are arguably Ireland's most resilient and stubborn rock group is of little consequence. Their music is as honest and gritty as it's ever been, which is more than can be said of many, many other bands who have long since split up. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
