17 years ago yesterday, the world lost its #1 Discharge fan when Kawakami of Disclose passed away. In his honor, here are 5 tracks of breakneck from their “Disbones” era in a 12” EP. Kawakami was a master of taking elements of Discharge and dialing it up to the nth degree, and then repeating those elements almost to a hypnotic fashion. That’s most prevalent in War Dead - a nod to “Free Speech For The Dumb” - which would later appear as an even more hypnotic ten-minute extended outro on their 2003 LP. None of these songs sound like they’d be written by Discharge, but they also all sound like Discharge songs, because they have the essence of them. It’s like distilling something to its purist, most base form, then continuing to refine it. That said, the “bones” part of this doesn’t really track for me, because I’m not really hearing much Broken Bones influence here, because it’s totally raw and blown out - vs a crunchy, thrashy Broken Bones.