ARTIST: Code of Honor
ALBUM: Code of Honor/Sick Pleasure
RELEASE DATE: 1982
It's early Saturday morning. The kids were up before the sun. The wife is sleeping in. The coffee is on. I needed something to get the blood flowing, so I dialed up some vintage hardcore on my iTunes to jump-start my day. Code of Honor was a San Francisco hardcore punk band whose catalog isn't especially vast, but there are few choice gems within. This is one of them.
I first heard the band in 1985 via their split LP with a band called Sick Pleasure (who, if I'm not mistaken, were basically just Code of Honor with a different lead singer -- a guy named Nikki Sicki). Code of Honor's lead singer, meanwhile, was a strenuously po-faced, agitated young man named Jonithin [sic] Christ (not the same dude who'd later play guitar for Danzig). Any time I was in need of righteously indignant, ridiculously earnest Punk Rock, Code of Honor handled the task with visceral aplomb. Rife with contempt and teen angst (favorite line in the track: I Quit My High School/I Could Not Relate/Neo-Fascist Fucking Academics/IT'S A NAZI STATE!), "Code of Honor" by Code of Honor is inarguably by-the-numbers in its sound and fury, but it packs an endearing wallop.
Twenty-someodd years later, I have no idea what became of Code of Honor. I'm no longer the sneery teen I was when I first heard it, but I still love this stuff. Play it loud and stick it to the man.
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