Hardcore punk and skateboarding go hand and hand. Decades of rad skate videos prove that. The way the physical action and genre go together basically becomes figure skating for people who wear Dickies.
The rad chemical reaction of watching someone shredding street while listening to fast, heavy music hits with full force on Black Mercy’s new clip for “PTSD” … except with fingerboarding.
Wait, what?
Astonishingly, yes, that late-Nineties hobby still exists – largely in foreign countries where obscure American trends of yore persist in little pockets. Plus, these skaters are sick, nose grinding on tiny rails and doing backside 180 kick flips! They’re going so hard, I thought one of them might hit his knuckle on a miniature stair set.
“PTSD” stands out as a particularly pounding cut from Black Mercy’s brand new 45, For the Man Who Has Everything, which clocks eight songs in 10 sleek minutes. The Austin quintet’s strain of HC snarls the D.C. sound, powerviolence, and a bit of the Negative Approach blueprint diversified with especially interesting progressions and between-song samples the group employs live. The concrete throat of vocalist Noble Brown keeps the intensity high.
Drummer Ben Webster compiled the video from clips of fingerskaters all over the globe. He sees it as an ode to videos like Sonic Youth’s “100%” and Unsane’s painful “Scrape.”
It’s all kind of funny really, given that Black Mercy bassist Jason Morales remains a stand-out veteran skater here in town. Then again, this band finds him playing bass even though he’s one of the most furious guitar players in the ATX (see Tia Carrera), so it all kind of makes sense.
This article appears in February 21 • 2020.