by Álvaro Molina (@alvaromolinare)
From the depths of the Pacific Northwest’s crustiest garages and gutters comes Buyer’s Remorse, the first LP by Portland-based quartet Retirement, a charming set of sharp, amped-up and pinpoint hits aimed to please your hopelessness. Released via Iron Lung Records, the West Coast purveyors of some of the finest anarcho punk this side of hell on Earth, Buyer’s Remorse wastes no time in uninviting you into its harsh soundscape, filled with diatribes against modern contradictions, life debts, paranoid anxiety, addictive decay, and traces of assorted human wastes.
After an EP released in 2018, Retirement struck earlier this year with Bleed City, a self-released collection of smashers and a sneak-peek into the void of their garage-industrial-hardcore vim. The forceful and unswerving drive of their trademark chaotic punk met with a broader scope of dark, doom-laden industrial noise; a depiction of today’s zeitgeist, brushed with raw and murky ambient sounds that encompass despair and an overall bleakness rife with violence, death, and rubbish.
Buyer’s Remorse picks up right where Bleed City ended. It’s shaped through turbulent hardcore punk with rougher edges, courtesy of the feedback-filled bits and interludes that weave together its eight tracks. Garage-informed scorchers “No More,” “Death Sentence,” and “No Refund” serve as the LP centerpieces of heaviness. Combine the three of them and you have yourself a triptych of disarrayed and misanthropic bangers. In between are the rapid, fuzzy smackers, the ones that follow the angriest anarcho and crust punk momentum; from the blazing speed of “On Display” to the crushing grind of “Pull the Shades,” your speakers will be regretting this loudness.
With an almost perfect timing of exactly fourteen minutes, Buyer’s Remorse leaves a metallic and concrete taste. Though it’s difficult to regret listening to it and its twisting and turning rants against contemporary human waste.