Arjen (Youff – guitar)
SPB: Who is your favorite 1990s artist?
Arjen: That is a hard question because most of my record collection exists out of bands from 1980s and early 2000s with some exceptions. These exceptions are the bands I grew up with as a teenager. They're not all worth mentioning. Nevertheless, one album worth mentioning is an album of 96 songs clocking off under 86 minutes. I'm talking about the ' Complete discocrappy' of the notorious hardcore band CHARLES BRONSON from Dekalb, Illinois. The album contains two discs of all their released material from 1994 to 1997 and as all great punk and hardcore bands they never went for the “album,” they just wrote, released, played and only released 7”s or split albums. It’s only afterwards when the band disbanded, Mark Mccoy the singer, decided to make a compilation of everything they did and then it went worldwide.
Anyway, what made this album so memorable for me is based on my first experience with such extreme forms of music. I was already introduced to bands that made the crossover between metal and hardcore but I started to dislike the metal part and got more drawn to the core side of it.
I got to know them through a local band called Shredder. They only released a demo and few EPs and a 7”. Then silently went into hiatus, which means quitting I discovered later, little did I know. They played what they called trash core or what is more known as “powerviolence.” Inspired by bands like Siege, Charles Bronson, Void and INFEST, they gave it their own spin. As a teenager this is all you want, shows that only lasted ten minutes with songs that clocked under a minute and mostly less. Moshing, stage diving, two-stepping, everything you could imagine happened in only a few minutes. Instant satisfaction!
---
Arjen enrolled in Youff in 2019 after they released 'Etcetera' in 2018.
