From Dead and Gone, Punch, Talk Is Poison, Look Back And Laugh, Needles, Living Eyes, and more, guitarist Brian Stern has already left a powerful impact on punk and hardcore. Now he has cultivated some lifelong partners in a new endeavor, Planet On A Chain. Their debut full-length, Boxed In, is out now on Revelation Records.
Planet On A Chain came together naturally. “Moses (Saarni, drums), Tobia (Minkler, bass) and I have been playing music together for over 20 years,” says Stern. “Look Back and Laugh, California Love, and currently together in Mutilated Tongue.” As for vocals, they recruited friend and rage connoisseur, Dave Ackerman. “We’ve known Dave for a while, (he is) always in terrific high-energy hardcore bands: Tear it Up, Dead Nation, Obedience, Splitting Headache. Besides being a sick punk singer, he’s a great human, easy to be around!”
Never idle, Stern and company are writing a barrage of songs, continually pushing each other. Ackerman lives in Austin, TX while the rest of the band reside in Oakland, CA. Stern applauds technology and motivation as the factors which propel POAC.
“We had talked about doing a project some years ago,” he says. “The pandemic made it real easy to start it up. We started jamming songs via text messages with Garageband and started making demos. When things started sounding decent enough, we made some tapes and shared the music on Bandcamp. Blind Rage and 625 Thrash ended up releasing those home recordings on 7”s. It’s very easy to do all of the above, we can practically do it all on our phones,” he laughs. “Good communication helps! You can play music with people all living in the same house, (but) if you have poor communication, it just makes doing projects very difficult.”
Since the first recording to the current LP, Boxed In, POAC has evolved as a band and Stern proudly notes, “I think we wanted to mix in different, albeit hardcore, styles into this record, and we were conscious about making different song structures and varied sounding melodies for an actual album, not just pounding out a handful of blasters for a seven-inch, although that would be fun.”
Boxed In’s eleven tracks hit with severity. They follow the short, fast, loud ethos, with lengths from thirty seconds to three minutes. They crash and damage with a fierce brevity. Stern notes, “A lot of Boxed In riffs are based around the drums, drums first than the riffs. We don’t usually write that way, just sort of happened.” He calls out one track specifically, “I am fond of ‘Infinite Reaper,’ it was a title I had for something else, but fit perfect, (it’s a) fun song to play, the drumming is top notch.”
As Boxed In spreads the hardcore reality, Stern is excited to announce that POAC has expanded and strengthened. “Our friend Al from Screaming Fist just joined POAC on second guitar. We just wrote a new album’s worth of songs that we’ll go into the studio to start recording in June. We’re doing some California shows this month, and then some East Coast shows with Dropdead in August. The next album, Deprogram, is coming out on Revelation later this year.”
The five infuriated rebels are getting acclimated as they also challenge themselves. They aren’t infusing prog or anything—this is still hardcore punk—but they clearly wish to stand out and land a heavy punch.
“I think we’re always trying to do new things, sometimes that backfires, but throwing in new ingredients keeps things fun. We’ve been playing together for a long time and have a ton of very different influences, old and new. When we write songs, the best ones come when we really jam the parts, playing things in various ways, fucking with tempos, reversing the part order, etc. It’s a little more fluid that way, rather than someone coming in with whole songs completed for everyone to learn, though sometimes that is perfect.”
Ackerman is known for his unbridled bitterness and negativity. While viewing the shit show of a society, Stern veers himself toward what he calls, “the antidote: slow, steady self-improvement and helping people, that’s probably the most I’m capable of at the moment. I don’t write the POAC lyrics, that’s Dave’s department. I do try to keep myself fairly regulated, but still find myself raging quite a bit. It’s unfortunate and will probably shorten my life. I’m pretty inspired by all the younger ripping bands that we’re seeing lately, it’s incredible to see this surge of new hardcore.”
Boxed In is available now on the Revolution Records web store.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Creamer.
