It’s been a minute since I had to physically navigate around and over obstacles to get to a punk show. Packing two friends and two people I met moments earlier into my elder Rav 4, we cruised from South Philly to West Philly through a lengthy detour due to the recent and tragic collapse of a hospital parking garage (another sign of the times). This “ask a punk” generator gig was our destination. Its exact location was unclear due to the variety of flat, dry spots under or near the Grays Ferry bridge where a hundred punks could set up shop for a couple hours. We parked at a pavement-meets-gravel dead-end where a few other cars were spotted and walked along an unlit river path, turned around in doubt, met a couple other punks also in pursuit of the gig, circled back together, bypassed a large chainlink fence, hopped a smaller chainlink fence, and stumbled through a cliffside thicket, pursuing the steadily-growing murmur of idle punk behavior.

Our persistence was rewarded with Cleveland’s Yambag, who played shortly after what ended up being our perfectly-timed arrival. They play what I will accept as my favorite form of hardcore: blasting fast-core with grind and US ’82 influences. The singer’s bucket hat flew off within a couple songs and they absolutely flew through what must’ve been a lengthy selection of tunes, enough song titles to fill one of OFF!’s Dead Sea Scrolls-looking set-lists. Drummer Drew Vaccaro set his crash cymbals at a comical height ala Lucky Lehrer, and as I watched the right wrist of bassist Nick Kroh vibrating in place for twenty minutes straight, my own carpal tunnel symptoms started to flare up in empathy. As my friend pointed out, they were undeniably “tour tight”, and the crowd response was accordingly appreciative, full of unserious sideways speed-walking, fevered fist pumps, a small handful of firecrackers (which continue to follow Cleveland hardcore bands around since Nine Shocks Terror first cursed the city), and some of the weakest approximations of Ray Cappo’s iconic toe-touch jumps I’ve ever seen. It was glorious.

Reek Minds were next, and I want to take a moment to say that I love when bands have such a unified look that they could pass as siblings or cousins (or at least’d make sense crawling out of the same manhole). These shaved-head mooks look like they benchpress cinderblocks and eat collared-shirt wearers like me for breakfast, and they clearly knew they had the tunes we all wanted to hear: ugly thrashing power-violence mixed up in a scrum with Poison Idea and the X-Claim! discography. If the number of beer cans hurled at the performing band were counted as votes, Reek Minds easily won the evening, and they even upped the ante by introducing dirt and gravel as possible projectiles – the vocalist’s only real banter was a strained “give me… dirt!”, and he didn’t have to ask twice. Instead, he screamed so hard that the speakers would frequently overload and cut out, giving his voice the feel of a garbled trumpet – Gutalax, eat your heart out! While the portable PA and outdoor acoustics make for a less-than-desirable sound, Reek Minds sounded surprisingly full as the air turned chilly; even the drummer’s snare, somewhat lost in the wind for Yambag, cut through nice and sharp. When the apocalypse inevitably arrives, I want these guys on my side – after their music blows the windows out of a Cybertruck, the five of them could lift it and toss it in the river.

While listed first on the flyer, Early Grave grabbed the headlining spot, a practical move to keep their local friends in check (and make sure the out-of-towners had their fun, in the case of a bust). For as ramshackle as the show was, they were the first band to suffer any real sort of technical difficulties – at first the faltering microphone, and later the bass amp after two rowdy showgoers piggypack-rode directly into it. Those were only slight hiccups for this great new Philly trio, who harnessed the slimy menace of Crazy Spirit and Dawn Of Humans with their grotesque interpretation of hardcore-punk. The vocalist barked his vocals from under a tight black hoodie (a poise and stature redolent of Poison Ruïn’s Mac Kennedy), and they kept pace with the touring acts nicely. For whatever reason, it took a few songs to warm up what was an already-warmed-up crowd, but once things were in full swing they truly swung, with the widest, dustiest pit actions going off and surprisingly few bodies hitting the floor (mercifully so, as the ground’s craggy cement chunks and sewage run-off could cut your skin and infect it in one fluid motion). They sounded great, though as I watched Jim Shomo (of Dark Thoughts and Delco MFs) absolutely raging along in stationary position (when he wasn’t actively helping to fix the mic or bass), I couldn’t help but think that hardcore bands usually have stand-alone lead vocalists for good time-tested reason. Had Shomo grabbed the mic and took over for a few songs, I would’ve had no choice but to crawl up the bridge’s graffiti-covered pier by my fingernails and backflip down into the shadows. Instead, we made a hasty exit on the smooth side of the Superfund landfill this time, microplastics and silica dust shining our way along the dirt path like magic treasure.

Some thirteen years ago, I interviewed Tony Molina for this very blog, and when I came up with the idea for this new Worst Song series, he was high on my list of hopeful contributors. His discography runs deep, with a list of songwriting credits that must run into three figures, and as his quality has always run high, I was dying to know what he felt worst about. Tony has taken a strict anti-social media, anti-internet, anti-promotion stance for a few years now, and it was only him wanting to “own up to making bad music” (his words, not mine!) that he decided to participate. I do miss his online banter (he once described a Trump vs. Clinton presidential debate as “two fools who have never heard Excruciating Terror”), though I am thankful for his wonderful music and the inspiration to throw my phone in a lake, or at least turn my laptop off once in a while. His worst song can be found here.

YGR: Alright – so why is “No One Told He” your worst song?

TM: Before we get into that, we should start with that I got sober in August of 2022 and am still sober today, no alcohol, no drugs, and I even quit cigs in July of last year. I think this song was written in 2014 when my drinking took an ugly-ass turn, as it did all the time, progressively, until I quit. I was real faded and very sick in all aspects when this song came about. I think at the time in my barely-functioning, cooked-ass brain I thought I was doing some kind of ‘68 Beatles / George Harrison nod with this one. Now in 2026, I have the mental clarity to realize that this song is more of a nightmare early ’70s soft rock AM radio, Crosby Stills & Nash, barefoot-bearded guy, CIA plant, hanging in the Canyon asshole nightmare song from hell. Basically everything gross, swagless and bad is front and center in this song.

There’s a part in the Stooges doc where Iggy is talking about The Stooges being a direct response to the late ’60s hippie-lite, boardroom-created, sellout federal-agent music that “still smells”. This song is totally coming from those things Iggy and co. were railing against.

YGR: As a sober person, are you happier with your songwriting in general? Or is that not a significant influence in the quality of your work either way, and it just happened to take a wrong turn for you here?

TM: No, I made a lot of bad music in my drinking years, I just think this one is number one. One character defect I can tell you about is that when I was drinking, bad music would find its way into my life. There’s a lot of manipulating factors out there, if you go on the internet at any time there’s a million people on there trying to sell you objectively bad music and then trying to manipulate you into believing it is good. And then you got played! I think I just didn’t have the mental clarity or intuition or any real ability to know what was what back then. I quit social-media for good in 2016, so those two things – being offline and sobriety – restored my overall focus, taste, ability, work ethic, and I also got more serious about record collecting and digging deeper and educating myself on music more than making music myself, all those things times ten. It’s like night and day, the difference.

YGR: This feels like sage advice, no joke. Any tips for those who want to kick social media (or drugs) but don’t feel empowered enough to do so?

TM: I think the first thing is understanding that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Spotify slimebag, Jack Dorsey, and any / all of these techie gentrifier colonizer pigs are true scum of the earth that do not have anyone’s best interest in mind. They one-hundred percent are trying to keep you addicted, manipulated and powerless, they will rob you of your dignity and integrity, strip you of your desire for honest and true self-expression, condition you to prioritize capital instead of the spiritual value of art. They will condition you to publicly log your character defects to the world, they will erase and wipe out real culture and replace it with swagless garbage, they will make your band suck ass and you will be spending your days thinking of ways to sell the shitty record you made to the public instead of writing real songs; they will sell you garbage and essentially give you brain disease for the rest of your natural life. Nobody needs it for anything, especially your band. I completely stay away from the internet and I’m doing better than ever – I even started a record label extremely recently (Olde Fade Productionz) with no social media or Bandcamp and the orders haven’t stopped coming in for weeks now. And I’m a cooked middle-aged dude at this point, I’m nothing special, so just like sobriety, if I can do it, anyone can. Only a manipulator who is trying to sway the narrative to get something from you is going to tell you otherwise.