HEX COVER SINGLE SERIES FOR JUNE: CHILD BITE COVERS ROLLINS BAND!

 

Like most kids when they’re around 14 or 15 finding ones identity can be a big deal.  And by that point in my life I had started discovering punk, hardcore, and alternative bands that very much spoke to me through their music.  One such group I found was Rollins Band, the intense rock/metal band fronted by Henry Rollins after Black Flag disbanded.  It was their record “The End Of Silence” that captured my attention and found it to be one of the most powerful albums I’d ever heard.  Not only was Rollins absolutely shredding in his vocal delivery, it was the words chosen that grabbed me.  Well, that and the stellar musicianship of the all the players involved.  It still remains in my top five records ever.  From there I went backwards and picked up any Rollins Band record I could.  Some of them were live albums, showing off their braun and brains through recordings where you can feel the sweat coming through the speakers.  It was noticeable though that some of their earlier stuff leaned a bit more into punk versus the sledgehammer hard rock of later records.

Enter Child Bite- a band that lives, breathes, and eats DIY life and who have a sound that is somewhat unclassifiable.  They are an overlapping Venn diagram of punk attitude, hardcore fury, bizarre noise rock, and metal chops.  It’s the same way Rollins Band also fuze proggy sludge, punk, hardcore, and hard rock.  You can’t quite pin down either band.  And both bands have one-of-a-kind vocalists that absolutely command your attention.

And that’s why I asked Child Bite if they would cover Rollins Band.  They’re probably the only current band I can think of who could tackle the task and when they asked which song I said any of them would do.  With that they contributed an older Rollins Band track- “Black and White”, which certainly checks off the more ‘punk’ side of the group with it’s fast and direct approach.

I took so much inspiration from Rollins Band when I was a lot younger in terms of their musical acumen, but primarily the directness presented in the songs- to rise above the shitty times in life and do things on your own, follow your own path, and focus on self-determination.  And now I find that same kind of inspiration with Child Bite in their unrelenting drive towards freakish noise and a DIY spirit that is all encompassing through their actions.