ROCK AND PROLE
Baltimore's Punk Proletarians Fighting Chance Bring Two Fists of Power to the People

By David Carlton
excerpted from Baltimore City Paper, June 25 - July 1, 2003

Punk rock, like any other once-fresh style, forges on over time in various states of health, at one moment reviving its original spirit, at another falling victim to retread clich?. Punk shows are like small jazz or blues clubs in any town, where the faithful few gather week after week to hear the true gospel told straight as the day it came down from the mountain. Each new variation gathers the flock under its new tent, where the faithful soon enough again settle in for a long convalescence. Baltimore's latest punk upstart, Fighting Chance, which recently released its debut album, Thus Hopes Fades, on Toronto's Insurgence Records, finds itself standing at this crossroads--one foot turned toward the revival tent of punk-rock faith healing and one facing a shot at being the next new-school holy rollers.

Fighting Chance's innovation lies in a concept it has dubbed "street rock." Street rock is the band's point of departure from the familiars of punk and the lockjaw of hardcore, as well as out of the subculture isolation in which each of these has remained. "Musically we always wanted to mix things up instead of being another knockoff oi band or punk band," says Bullseye, the band's 21-year-old frontman. "There's a lot of bullshit about making subcultures such a stereotyped and restricted thing." For Fighting Chance, street rock is the banner behind which it proposes a new charge. Even if part of it is just a bit of repackaging of that old punk rock, it's time for a new thrust forward.

When Bullseye and guitarist Brian Chance, 24, started Fighting Chance in the summer of 2001, they intended to be a band that had something to say and didn't leave any doubts about where they stood: singing the praises and mourning the losses of the working class, with a keen eye to demanding its self-liberation. They did not, however, want to get caught in the trap of being branded a political band.

"We got a lot of songs saying the underdog is a pretty big population," Bullseye says, boiling down the group's stance. "And if the underdog started sticking up for itself, it could realize just how big it was."

Around the beginning of 2002, the band members saw a VH1 documentary on the white-power "hatecore" music movement. Somewhere in this--which amounted to, they say, an hourlong promo for the neo-Nazi imprint Resistance Records--they caught a brief mention of the anti-fascist, anti-racist indie label Insurgence. The boys got in touch, and, soon enough Fighting Chance's attack on Nazi boneheads, "Coward's Pride," came out on Insurgence's 2002 Class Pride World Wide 2 compilation, along with tracks by the legendary Angelic Upstarts and a bum's rush of other street-punk and oi class-war proselytizers. With Insurgence, Fighting Chance found a perfect platform for its street-rock broadcasts. Varied in its punk stylings yet unified in its prole-pride politics, Insurgence puts out material from oi classics such as the Upstarts to metal-edged hardcore, melodic punk, and several varieties of street punk and oi. Fighting Chance was soon on its way to Toronto and Montreal to play its first out-of-town gigs.

Thus Hope Fades offers a solid count of tense, punchy anthems. Mixed among them are an equal number of tracks that never quite catch their stride. As the band members admit, Fade is just about everything they have done since they started and stands as much as a closet cleaner as a testament of where they are now.

But when Fighting Chance hits its mark, Bullseye's smashing lyrical staccato--which approaches a punk riff on rap--provides the song's main punch. Alongside him, guitarist Mike Hock lays down a minimalist blend of pop punk, surf, and psychobilly licks backed by Tim Tation's bass rhythms, drummer Matt Mayhem's tom furries, and rhythm guitarist Chance's classic punk and hardcore chord walls.

Lyrically, Baltimore serves as Fighting Chance's grim muse--a reminder of a legacy of defeat for the city's everyday people. While a handful of neighborhoods get facelifts and investments for the benefit of newly relocated professionals, the other half of the city grinds on enduring a well-known litany of abuses, and Bullseye's lyrics reflect that. "We don't write happy songs," he says. "I don't think any of them are particularly optimistic."

The grim fury of "City of the Dead " and the panicked sense of failure in "The Cost" lay out these ruins in stark relief. "City of the Dead" is the most rocking track on Fades, as it directs a bloody carnival-ride tour of the city. The hopeless landscape of "City of the Dead" becomes personal in "The Cost": "It's the curse of the working class, open wounds of the past/ Father to son all hope's been lost/ Can we afford? Can we afford the cost?" The spacious dub track "Silence Is Murder" rounds out Fades with a break in the pace, and the band pulls off a thick atmospheric groove that shows off its ability to switch styles entirely and come out looking not only competent but distinctive.

Before Thus Hope Fades, Fighting Chance contributed tracks to the benefit compilation Baltimore: 28, Nazis: 0, put out by local supporters of 28 anti-fascists who faced multiple assault charges stemming from an Aug. 24, 2002, incident in which a large group of punks, skinheads, and anarchists protested busloads of neo-Nazis from the National Alliance organization outside the Travel Plaza in East Baltimore. (All charges were later dropped.) Such anti-fascist activities make Fighting Chance proud members of an alliance of bands up and down the East Coast, including New Jersey's Hudson Falcons, Montreal's Fate 2 Hate, Toronto's Class Assassins, and Cleveland's the GC5, dedicated to putting fence sitters on notice and bringing a class edge back to punk.

"This city doesn't present a lot of opportunities, and you really gotta make any opportunity you're gonna have," Bullseye says. "You can't [simply] 'Believe.' [If] you believe in the city, [if] you believe in the cops, in the mayor's office, and all that, you're not gonna get very far with it. And so we try to say it's all about sticking together and trying to make something good where there isn't [something good], doing it yourself."

back