When no one's chomping at the bit, hardcore can easily turn into comfort food. Sing-alongs, breakdowns and carefully placed "go!"s can become a security blanket. This has its place, but hardcore is often best when bands eschew the easy outs of well-worn forms and stake out fresh ground. Bands like Crime Desire are what keep the wheels turning by breaking down old formulae and reconstituting hardcore's DNA so it can stay engaging, unpredictable, and exciting.
Id Music to Combat the Superego isn't a novel invention as much as a forceful, virtuoso re-interpretation. The band blends the sturm und drang of sturdy, classicist hardcore with a deviant sensibility not so far removed from the Brainbombs or Arab on Radar. The band is artful without being artsy, keeping every ounce of gristle intact while still offering plenty of flavor; equal parts abstraction and full-throated ordeal. Crime Desire offers jagged, sheet-metal savagery worthy of Gehenna tempered with satiric, biting intelligence.
What's most immediately striking are the vocals of M. Colin Tappe: usually delivered in a high, quivering, nasal wail more at home in an S&M pleasure-dome than a basement show (think Arab On Radar again, occasionally spilling over into screamy Charles Bronson territory). For many this is a turn-off, but the vocals grow on you like an unsightly rash. The lyrics are the lubrication for this belt-fed, fully automatic beast: social criticism in the form of clipped, psychosexual dissection. Crime Desire conjures up images of electrical tape and spent fluids, and is equally at home referencing Discharge or Dostoevsky. The packaging of the LP stinks of refinement and class: glossy black-on-black, eerie and unsettling (like everything else regarding the band).
Crime Desire and their Id Music to Combat the Superego are defiantly different. To pit them against already over-mocked contemporary hardcore cliches, this isn't a band about Nikes, brotherhood, and staying true. This is hard, sleek, and delightfully nasty music meant to discomfort: jarring and shot through with bleak Nietzschean seriousness, gruesome and stylish like Tetsuo: The Iron Man as a punk band. In short, it's something that's all too often missing in hardcore these days.
