Raleigh, North Carolina, is not on anybody's map of this genre, and the band who came out of it made the record that opened the southern route out of hardcore and eventually produced an entire regional strain of American heavy music.
Eye for an Eye
The 1984 debut is straight hardcore: fast, thin, angry and short, made by teenagers on a label they had helped start. There is very little on it to suggest what happened a year later.
What matters about it is the position. C.O.C. were part of a southern hardcore network that had almost no connection to New York or Los Angeles, and being outside both centres meant nobody was policing what they did next.
Animosity
The 1985 album is where it happens. The tempos vary rather than staying at maximum. The guitars are heavier and, crucially, they have a southern inflection in the phrasing that has nothing to do with hardcore or with thrash.
Mike Dean sings and plays bass, Reed Mullin drums with a swing that no other band in this scene had, and the whole record moves in a way that hardcore records did not. It is aggressive without being relentless, which was close to a contradiction in 1985.
It also sold, by the standards of the scene, and it was released partly through Metal Blade, which put a hardcore band into metal shops.
What made it southern
Not banjos. The inflection is in the riff phrasing: figures that swing rather than chug, bends and slides where a hardcore band would play straight, and a rhythmic feel that comes from Black Sabbath and from southern rock rather than from punk.
That is a genuine regional accent and it is the first time it appears in this branch of heavy music. Everything from Down to Eyehategod to a substantial part of modern sludge comes down that corridor.
| Album | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Eye for an Eye | 1984 | Straight hardcore |
| Animosity | 1985 | Hardcore with the throttle half open |
| Technocracy | 1987 | Heavier, and a different singer |
| Blind | 1991 | Metal, essentially |
| Deliverance | 1994 | Southern heavy rock, fully arrived |
What happened next
A long, slow transformation that took the band from hardcore to something else entirely without any single moment where the change is visible.
Pepper Keenan joined and eventually took the vocal, the tempos dropped further, and by Deliverance in 1994 C.O.C. were a southern heavy rock band with a hardcore past rather than a hardcore band with heavy riffs. Keenan later joined Down, which connects this line directly to the New Orleans scene.
The band have since gone back and forth, including a period reunited with the Animosity line up playing the early material, which is the version most people in this genre would choose.
Why it belongs in a thrash history
Because it is one of the three or four records that made the crossover trade legitimate, and because it demonstrated that the trade could go somewhere other than metal.
D.R.I. traded hardcore for thrash. S.O.D. traded thrash for hardcore. C.O.C. traded hardcore for something that did not exist yet, and the fact that a third option was available changed what the whole exchange could produce.
The New York side of the same trade, made by people from squats on the Lower East Side, is Cro-Mags, "Age of Quarrel", and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
The southern network
C.O.C. did not appear from nothing. There was a functioning southern hardcore circuit in the mid 1980s, with bands, venues and labels, and it had almost no contact with either coast.
North Carolina had No Core, the label C.O.C. helped run. Georgia, Virginia and Texas each had their own bands and their own shows, and the touring routes between them were driven rather than flown. Nobody from New York or Los Angeles was paying attention, which is a large part of why what came out of it sounds different.
That regional independence is the same condition that produced Voivod in Quebec and Sarcofago in Minas Gerais. A scene nobody is watching has no house style to conform to.
What to listen for
The drums. Reed Mullin plays with a swing that almost nobody in hardcore had, and it is the single clearest tell that this record is doing something other bands were not.
Then the guitar phrasing. Listen for the moments where a figure bends or slides rather than staying square, which is where the southern accent lives, and notice how much space the arrangements leave compared with a New York hardcore record from the same year.
The reunion
In 2010 the Animosity line up reformed as a trio and made a record that sounds like a direct continuation of 1985, which is a considerably better outcome than anybody had a right to expect twenty five years later.
The band has since operated in more than one configuration, with and without Pepper Keenan, essentially alternating between the hardcore version and the southern rock version. Both are legitimate and the audiences barely overlap.
Where the line goes from here
Follow the southern inflection forward and it arrives at a whole regional strain of American heavy music that had no name in 1985.
Eyehategod and Crowbar in New Orleans took the weight and slowed it further. Down assembled members of several of those bands, including Pepper Keenan, and made the definitive statement of it. Melvins on the other coast were arriving at something adjacent from a different direction.
By the mid 1990s that had a name, sludge, and a sound that is instantly identifiable: slow, thick, bluesy in the phrasing and hostile in the delivery. Every part of that description is present in embryo on a hardcore record made in North Carolina in 1985 by teenagers who were mostly trying to stop playing quite so fast.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Line up details refer to the periods of the albums named.
