[Cred whore check - I was into Refused years before Shape of Punk to Come was released; eat it, haters!]
Enter xAnchorx, whose 5th anniversary as a band coincided with their KL appearance (one of three shows they played in Malaysia alone - that's some fearless globe trekking). Since Swedish straight edge vegan hardcore pushes all kinds of nostalgia buttons for me, I decided to check out the shenanigans on my way to the airport (I had a red eye flight to Manila, and a date with a certain Japanese death metal band).
Continuing the old school HC nostalgia was a band who call themselves (slaps forehead) Homerun - again, I can't overstress the fact that NO ONE PLAYS BASEBALL IN MALAYSIA, but they do get points for soundchecking with Refused's "Rather Be Dead" - a shout-out to the headliner perhaps? Their songs all seemed indistinguishable from one another - to me, and apparently to their drummer as well, who had a few false starts. Their half hour set would have been a breezy 10 minutes without the between-song lectures. Despite the fact that I don't speak Malay, I'm pretty sure he wasn't saying anything I hadn't heard before. That goes for the music as well.
[interlude - Old man yells at Malaysian Hardcore]
Maybe it's something in our Asian character and colonial mentality that leads us to copy blindly without adding anything of our own. My favourite example: Koffin Kanser, a local band that saw the way Sepultura mixed metal with their own Brazilian heritage on Roots, and were inspired to follow suit...by ripping off "Roots Bloody Roots" for an entire album (you'd think that they'd look to integrate metal with their own culture, but that would take effort).
Thankfully, Anchor learned the lessons of their own countrymen. Rather than simply rehashing the old school formula, they intersperse classic HC with jagged rhythms and some muscular rock a la Abhinanda and Nine (one of their members raved about my Catharsis shirt, so clearly they're a band who recognize innovation). And the kids responded to it in a big way; I haven't seen a pit this enthusiastic in Malaysia, ever...hopefully a few of them even take the hint that hardcore doesn't mean merely regurgitating what's come before you. Though I'm sure the most I should expect the next time I'm at a local show is a couple Malaysian bands who sound exactly like Anchor.