NME Radar Piece: Mob Rules

Mob Rules take their name from a record that bass player Paul Steere assures NME is “Gregg Ginn of Black Flag’s seventh favourite Sabbath album”. They are also the pick of a Leeds punk scene currently seeing something of a renaissance with bands like Rot in Hell, Broken Arm and Hordes all coming out of a city that offers “many excellent examples of how not to do things and ten months of terrible weather a year that act as a good incentive to spend the prime of your youth locked away in sweaty rooms making music”.

Mob Rules daringly mine perhaps the most ambitious, and least well known, of all hardcore sub-genres, the terrifylingly named: ‘powerviolence’. With Steere and drummer Connor Rickford’s precise and devastating rhythm section pointing to the dynamics of powerviolence pioneers Infest and Crossed Out while Ben Hirst’s guitar work is reminiscent of late 80’s New York legends Citizen’s Arrest. Combined with the thugguish vocal delivery of ex-Birds of Prey man Thomas Cambell who sounds a little like a bi-polar rottweiller whose balls are slowly being crushed in a vice and you are witnessing a home grown band plying the genre with unprecedented success.

To see Mob Rules live is to discover new levels of that overused journalistic adjective ‘intense’. All crushing riffs and impossibly fast drums their violent sets are usually done in ten minutes flat. In fact your only real chance to catch them at all is at a show or on their debut 7” on SuperFi Records. This is due to what Steere sees as a crisis of definition: “The phrases 'Hardcore band' and 'social networking' should be mutually exclusive. It's an anti-social form.” AKA: don’t expect to find Mob Rules on MySpace…