Where they from?
Montreal, Quebec, Canada. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you wouldn’t know it but I am hopelessly addicted to playing daily fantasy hockey. It’s an obscure addiction for sure, but I have lost over $800 in the past two years, so yeah, it’s pretty bad. That being said I just want to express my gratitude for the Montreal Canadian’s second line of Jonathon Drouin, Nick Suzuki and Josh Anderson (although last year Anderson was with Columbus and right wing duties were handled by a combination of Joel Armia and Artturi Lehhkonen). This line was consistently one of the NHL’s most productive night in and night out and yet were amazingly undervalued on Fanduel pretty much on a nightly basis. And the crazy thing is this year we are seeing the same thing with third-liner Tyler Toffoli who was criminally undervalued last year with the Kings and now looks like a serious contender for the Hart trophy.
Why the hype?
Yo, so what is up with powerviolence bands just completely outclassing grind bands these days? I do plenty of slogging through the bowels off Bandcamp and YouTube for this column and it’s becoming a re-occurring theme that most bands who label themselves as “grindcore” just never seem to get around to playing any blast beats whereas most PV unites have them front-and-center.
This band gives you in-your-face blast beats 100% of the time, all the time. The drumming is so tight here that I’m almost tempted to say that, based off the precision alone, you could call Maxxpower a grind band. As a whole, this stuff really reminds me of Dead Instrument, another punk unit who were addicted to blast beats but also managed to strangle out some contorted, whiny punk melodies in the process that were actually quite memorable.
Latest Release?
Path of Leased Resistance EP from May 2020. It took me a whole week to realize the pun in this album’s name. “Leased Resistance” — is that like a statement on the sort gentrification of protest politics in our modern age? Or is it instead a barb aimed at the neoliberal order that has established a hegemonic presence in western capitalist democracies? Or is it just, like, a typo? The world may never know.
