Monster X – “Hand of Power” from Spazz/Monster X split 7” (1997 Reservoir)
The sadness I feel at never having seen Monster X (did they even come to Minneapolis?) is overshadowed by the incredible joy I feel everytime I listen to them. This band, perhaps inexplicably (I guess we’ll find out) never fails to produce a real shit-eating grin. I think we all need more things like this in our lives.
I graduated from high school in 1996, which is also the year that I got into hardcore in a big way. Previously I had limited myself to whatever Christian hardcore was coming out on labels like Tooth and Nail and whatever secular hardcore I was receiving in the mail on mixtapes from friends I met through making zines, but in the summer of 1996, the world was my oyster. I moved into a shitty but completely serviceable duplex in Northeast Minneapolis with four other dudes. Every last one of us was young and stupid and only two of us were in college. This last point is important only inasmuch as my newfound independence clashed mightily with my academic pursuits.
If we’re honest, I suppose I never really owned those academic pursuits; I went to the University of Minnesota because that’s what I believed one was supposed to do. I didn’t have a plan beyond that or really even understand the utility of a college education (something that I think remains an open question in 2023). I wanted to drink from the cup of the entire world, but lacked so much knowledge, like how to manage an ATM card without overdrawing my account over and over and over, or like how if you stop going to class the college doesn’t just figure it out and drop you. Turns out you still get a bill, and a grade, and neither one is good.
My parents were none too pleased, as they were paying my way.
I’m not the least bit proud of this, and I tell the story in my classroom a lot as a sort of cautionary tale. I remember my dad, stoic upper midwestern white man that he is, crying on the porch of my rented duplex. That hit pretty hard.
But I wasn’t a complete fuckup. I was working, for example, for the Salvation Army, driving a canteen out of their downtown Harbor Lights location to deliver bag lunches to the unhoused at their encampments and/or predetermined stops around town. I was going to shows, playing in bands, buying records, and reading zines.
Somewhere in there I discovered and fell in love with HeartattaCk, the newsprint hardcore zine out of Goleta, CA that was like what you’d get if Maximumrocknroll narrowed their focus to covering political hardcore bands. Available for a mere quarter at the local punk record store, I never missed an issue.
I think this is also around the time I came into a cheap copy of the Nothing’s Quiet on the Eastern Front compilation LP that Reservoir put out, featuring bands like C.R., Black Army Jacket, Dropdead, and, you guessed it, the inimitable Monster X.
I must have read about them in HeartattaCk, and so it was probably also around this time that I bought the Monster X Attrition 7” put out by Ebullition, the label run by the same people who published HeartattaCk.* It was a no-brainer, even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t get that the Ebullition logo was written in the style of Earache Records on the back of the record.
Anyway, what I discovered was a revelation. Here was a straight edge hardcore band not playing in the moshy, Victory Records inspired style of the day, but fast and dirty. They claimed not just straight edge, but grindcore and speed metal, writing “straight edge” with the speed metal swirl that had been prevalent on records put out by Banzai a decade earlier.
In those days Monster X felt almost like a novelty, especially with the release of their 7” of youth crew covers, To the Positive Youth. To hear those songs played at blistering speeds with John Moran’s trademark vocals (alternately low barks and higher pitched screams — we thought there were two singers for a while there) blew up the limits of what I thought was possible, corny as that might sound.
And the riffs! God damn. As I mentioned, I get all warm and giggly every time I listen to this band, and the riffs are a huge part of that. Because they’re not a joke band at all — if they were, their music wouldn’t endure for me like it does.
“Hand of Power” appears, as noted above, on the 1997 split with powerviolence lords Spazz. This is fitting because my favorite video of Monster X is from a daytime DIY show in what appears to be either a doublewide trailer and/or a VFW hall, on a bill that featured Monster X, Spazz, Devoid of Faith, Judas Iscariot, Quadiliacha, and Charles Bronson. It looks like it was fun as fuck and I wish I’d been there.
And the song rules, because it’s by Monster X. Check it below, along with the rest of the record:
*I am so heavily indebted to Kent McClard and Lisa Oglesby and a whole slew of other people I never met for creating and curating all of this culture. To say it had a heavy influence on me is an understatement; the way I teach and see the world, damn near thirty years later, can be traced back to HeartattaCk and Ebullition. Shit, even the fact that I teach — I used to read Chris Jensen’s “Movement vs. Motion” column about teaching before anything else, including record reviews and band interviews, long before I knew I wanted to be a teacher.
The Shuffler 
