profile - Sadville

Around my 10th grade year, a group calling themselves the Johnson City Collective started putting on DIY hardcore & punk shows in my hometown. Some of the most memorable shows I've ever seen took place in that grubby space downtown (now a karate studio, if memory serves), and accordingly my personal ideal of hardcore was shaped by the gripping, brutal, intensely emotional music I witnessed there in the late 1990s, as was my appreciation for the virtues of DIY culture. As the Collective dissipated a couple of years later (replaced for a short time by a place called The Office, which sullied the Collective's torch by throwing high school jock metal bands onto decent bills and slowly faded away) and I went off to school, my tastes drifted away from hardcore, but my appreciation has always lingered, dormant in the face of isolation from the subculture I'd once treasured.

Cookeville's SADVILLE have been my salvation. They play hardcore in the Gravity/Ebullition mode, nurturing brutality, chaos, and beauty in equal measure. The sweating, spitting and shouting of their devastating live show (they effortlessly upstaged No Idea's The Holy Mountain at the Longbranch this summer) take me right back to the tenth grade, and their DIY ethic is (sadly) unrivaled in these parts. "Forbidden Dance Of Decay", reliable show-closer and Sadville mission statement, is everything emotional hardcore ought to be, and one of my favorite songs. (A rerecorded version is due out soon on a split 7" from Akathis Records.) Thank you, Sadville, for putting so many of my records back into regular rotation.

RIYL: Man Is The Bastard, His Hero Is Gone, Bread & Circuits

MP3: "Forbidden Dance Of Decay" (8:36)