Ire discography + two texts on Palestine

Taking cue from yesterday's Palestine post, I'm posting the discography of one of the most important metallic hardcore punk bands of all time, the legendary Ire from Canada. Fronted by Radwan Moumneh, a Lebanese national who also participated in other top-notch bands such as Cursed and The Black Hand and who now plays as the postmodern Arab music project Jerusalem In My Heart, Ire played forward-thinking hardcore with technical mastery, loads of darkness and well-thought lyrics about incarceration, the oppression of women, religion and politics. However, they are mostly remembered for "Atfal Al Hejara," one song of their first release, in which Moumneh extols the first Intifada, a position that gained Ire the hatred of part of the hardcore scene, who considered them antisemites.

As a plus, I'm linking two great articles about the Palestinian/Jewish question; the first is by Jewish academic Ilan Pappe, who has worked extensively on deconstructing the myths of Zionism, and it's an article he wrote on the day of the massacre suggesting that we shouldn't be talking about a Jew-Palestine conflict, but Israeli colonization. The second one is Edward Said's timeless "Identity, Negation and Violence" in which he discussed the right of Palestinians to violence. Unfortunately I couldn't find it anywhere on the web (fuck New Left Review for not publishing articles) so I'm uploading it here.

1996 - Adversity Into Triumph (Ellington Records)



Fierce metallic hardcore in the vein of other legendary bands of the mid-90s like Catharsis and Ringworm, plus some amazing Morbid-Angel-like discordance.

Download Adversity Into Triumph

1998 - I Discern An Overtone Of Tragedy In Your Voice (The Mountain Collective For Independent Artists Ltd.)




Here they got extremely dark, as well as technical, playing a hardcore/sludge/black metal/mathy hybrid over tortured vocals and some of the best lyrics in hardcore

Download I Discern An Overtone...

1999 - What Seed, What Root? (Crimethinc.) 



Less hardcore metal, more noisy rock and a slight rock 'n' roll, but with the dissonance left intact and the cyclical riffing that made them so fucking great, plus an anthemic/epic quality.

Download What Seed What Root