Crucifix - Dehumanization

CRUCIFIX - DEHUMANIZATION

When the propensity for independence was combined with other influences such as American or even Cambodian cultures the results could often be mightily interesting, a case in point being Anarcho Punk band Crucifix, whose début album entitled Dehumanization was released on the Corpus Christi label.

With lead vocals by Cambodian immigrant Sothira Pheng, Crucifix were from California and were proof positive of the global reach of Crass. The music Crucifix produced was adrenalin-pumped, American Hardcore-style Punk mixed with lashings of Discharge that didn't deviate in any way from a full-frontal assault approach. Focussing almost entirely on the subject of war and a desire for world peace, their scope might not have been anything startlingly original for an Anarcho Punk band but the fact that they were full-on, spiky-topped Punk Rockers dressed in black based in sunny California made them uniquely unusual.

In amongst their songs of war and peace there were also references to Sothira Pheng's family history in Cambodia where just a few years earlier Pol Pot's Year Zero program had wrought such horrific devastation. It could almost have been anticipated that at some point Cambodia and Punk Rock would collide as there had always been a slender link between the two. From The Clash referring to Cambodia in I'm So Bored With The USA, to the Dead Kennedys singing about needing a holiday there, to Crass and a proportion of their audience dressed in black rags and black army fatigues looking like they had just stepped straight out of the jungles of Laos.

And who else would be better placed to truly understand the closing line of Crass's Bloody Revolutions - “the truth of revolution, brother, is Year Zero” - than a Cambodian?

Crucifix were a strange flower, born from fragile seeds blown on breezes from different corners of the world. The strange fruit they bore was their album, Dehumanization, that whilst not being to everyone's taste was still an enticing concoction that stood as an example of multi-cultural cross-pollination, genetically enhanced by fine and noble moral and political ethics.