Looking for some current hardcore kicks? If so, then Muuy Biien’s This is What Your Mind Imagines might be right up your alley. In a nice twist, this five-piece sidesteps the creative blunders that once made hardcore such a dirty word. They smartly aim for reckless abandon rather than an atmosphere of the generic, and they’ve also got some other non-HC tricks up their sleeves.

Anyone looking back a quarter-century or so with the intention of gathering a measurement of opinion from that period regarding the state of the then-current hardcore punk scene will surely find the style evaluated, at least by anyone with their head screwed on half right, as being a near-complete wasteland of regurgitated formula.

While it’s unadvisable to ever step onto the proverbial soapbox to pronounce the death of a floundering musical genre, in the late-‘80s the situation with hardcore punk had gotten so freaking lousy that any foreseeable improvement in fortunes seemed to be, at best, a fanciful thing to consider. If not dead, it was certainly in a deep coma, and very few naysayers seemed all that interested in waking it from its critical condition.

For starters, nearly all of the trailblazing bands in the movement had ceased to exist, and those that actually were still active, either through recordings or by simply electing to endlessly parade their wares via the punk rock touring circuit, had become unfortunate shadows of their former incarnations. And frankly, some of those groups weren’t all that interesting in the first place

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“There’s a fire extinguisher strapped to that guy’s drum set. WHY? His sticks are on fire and I can clearly see smoke…is he going to be ok? Is he going to use the fire extinguisher? As a kid, this is what I would repeatedly think to myself as I stared at the back cover of my older brother’s copy of Van Halen 2.“

“I would fixate on the photo of David Lee Roth and try to comprehend how the split he’s doing is as high as the mic stand. Was there a springboard or something that they pulled away right before the photo was taken? I didn’t have the answers but I knew what I was looking at and listening to was AMAZING.

Downstairs in the den was my parents’ record collection. I had been having dance parties there with my mom courtesy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The coffee table would be removed to make room and then I would go to town. That record is now sitting in the basement next to a Sergio Franchi album.

I didn’t own my own piece of vinyl until “Start Me Up” was released a few years later. I had it on 45. Having my own record was definitely a big deal. Otherwise, if I liked a song, I had to tape it when it came on the radio.

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With 13, three-fourths of the original Black Sabbath has reunited under the guidance of career-savior-as-producer Rick Rubin. The result isn’t a masterpiece, but it is the best record of new material to bear the Black Sabbath name in decades. Ultimately, its biggest limitation is the one element that’s missing.

In a manner similar to the 1963 Mario Bava-directed film that provided them with their name, it took Black Sabbath a while to gain some critical respect. And when the belated praise started popping up in print, some welcomed it as validation of a truly important band while others dismissed it all as unnecessary.

Those of the latter opinion populated a camp that listened to hard rock/heavy metal enthusiastically and accepted it on its own terms, and they frequently adopted an intensely autodidactic approach, learning how to quickly recognize the good-to-great stuff from the mediocre or worse and largely dismissing the rumblings of the rock music press as antithetical to their interests.

And that was mainly because the scribes populating the rock critic game were in general quite dismissive of hard rock/heavy metal as a whole, with vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward often getting lambasted as cartoonish, unsubtle purveyors of a stylistic cul-de-sac that’s stereotypical main audience was a bunch of dead-end teenagers and twenty-something alcohol-swilling and illicit substance-riddled degenerates. Adding to the problem; as critical esteem for the group rose, their stock with fans started to wane.

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