The third in our series of live session to 2" tape featuring an excellent band P22. Members of Wand and Behavior, they play crass records style early anarcho.

Our take: Third volume of Shout’s Beat Sessions series—which aims to be a kind of updated, DIY take on the Peel Session—and while the first two volumes focused on established band this one introduces us to one most of us hadn’t heard of. I don’t really know anything about P22, but if I had to take my best guess, I’d say that they sound like a hardcore band trying to be a peace punk band, falling somewhat short of the mark, but ending up somewhere more interesting than if they had actually fully achieved their goal. At the end of the day, P22 don’t really sound like Crass or Conflict of any of that ilk, but they do take a lot of the tropes of that genre—tom-heavy beats, a kind of spoken word poetry feel to the lyrics and vocals, and a bubbly bass sound—and apply them to what is pretty much the standard USHC template. What you end up with is this hybrid entity that sounds like hardcore fleshed out and given additional depth, which is something that it often needs. If you like the neo-peace punk of bands like Permaculture, Vivid Sekt, or Rubble this is a slightly more hardcore-oriented take on that sound that you’ll almost certainly like.