It would be hard to overstate just how influential the Japanese hardcore band Confuse has been in extreme music circles since the release of their Indignation demo in 1984. The sheer extremity of Confuse's ultra-raw, noise-drenched hardcore punk and buzzsaw riffing would become an admitted influence on Scum-era Napalm Death, and you can hear echoes of their mangled chaos all across the nascent grindcore underground of the mid to late 80s. Not to mention the legions of crust and raw punk bands that would pop up all over the world in the decades since, all trying to harness the barbaric mind-melting power that Confuse had in these early recordings, which still hold up today as some of the noisiest, most violently fucked-up hardcore songs I've ever heard. There's a whole cottage industry of bands right now that are heavily influenced by Confuse's sound and taking it into even more extreme and hallucinatory directions, but even up against C-Blast faves like Zyanose, Schizophasia and Death Dust Extractor, this nearly thirty-year old demo still sounds absolutely skull-shredding.

There have been numerous reissues of Confuse's classic Indignation demo over the years; this latest one comes from the Spanish label Noise Not Music and as far as I can tell is identical to the previous Lp releases. Right from the start, Confuse drill through your skull with the garbled feedback/amplifier vomit that opens "Absolute Power Of Armaments Old Man", a grinding mess of malfunctioning cable-signals that suddenly explodes into a ferocious hardcore punk assault, the blazing three-chord thrash enshrouded in a near-suffocating fog of extreme distortion and static, the guitar leads totally crazed and chaotic, everything on the verge of total and complete collapse. That blast of Merzbowian sonic filth and insanely raw hardcore sets the stage for the rest of the Indignation demo, as the band blasts through one squealing, hissing hardcore assault after another, the rumbling bass guitar basically leading the charge with its simple bouncy riffs, the guitar completely wrecked and deformed and not really sounding much like a guitar at all. The singer's guttural vocals sound totally maniacal, slobbering and gasping over the driving speedfreak punk, and the drumming is intensely raw, stripped down to just the most rudimentary thrash beat. The songs are splattered with insane guitar solos, slippery shredding leads that fly all over the place and are more noise than melody, and it only rarely slows down into the sort of brain-damaged dirge heard on tracks like "Nuclear Poisoning". Hearing the extreme distorted chaos that Confuse produced with these songs, you can hear them pushing the primitive hardcore sound to its furthest possible extreme, with levels of noise so intense that they sound more like something from the likes of Merzbow or Incapacitants; at the same time, this stuff is undeniably rooted in the early UK hardcore of bands like Discharge, Disorder and Chaos UK, and there's a killer thrash song buried in each of these squalls of sonic destruction. In some ways, Confuse seem to have been aiming for the same terminus point that other Japanese bands like Hanatarash and Hijokaidan were also aspiring towards around the same time.

Can't recommend this enough if you're into early Japanese HC and the newer wave of extreme noise-punk bands, as well as the most fucked-up, brain-scrambling extremes of early hardcore.