Fifteen Counts of Arson is one of my favorite albums of all time and I objectively believe that it's one of the greatest punk rock albums ever recorded...and it's not even my favorite His Hero Is Gone record, Monuments To Thieves holds that distinction. The order in which I rank those two will surely be objected to by some, but I think that just about all of their fans can agree that His Hero Is Gone managed quite a feat in having produced not one, but two all time greats of the genre. Pardon me if I get a little too self-involved with this one, His Hero Is Gone was one of the most important bands in my musical evolution.
I was 13 years old when this record came out, though I don't think I heard it until the following year (1998). At that point I was starting to move beyond punk rock and hardcore staples like the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains and Black Flag. Bands like Discharge, Crucifix and Crass had given me an ethos to go along with my (just barely) teenage angst. But 1998 would prove a huge year for me musically. I would hear two bands that expanded my palate and completely changed the way I listened to music. One was Botch, though that's a story for another time, the other was His Hero Is Gone.
I imagine I must have downloaded it from the FTP site that some guys who posted on a message board I frequented ran, as that's where much of my music discovery happened in those early days of file sharing. Somehow I came into possession of a few MP3s, including "Professional Mindfuckers," "Sterile Fortress" and "Epidemic." I know that the phrase "blew my mind" is overused, but that's exactly what happened, my mind was fucking blown.
It was dark. Darker than Discharge or Rudimentary Peni (who I also loved at the time) and certainly had none of the levity of the latter. It was fast. I had heard some fast hardcore, but I had never been exposed to a blast beat before this record. It was slow. Sludge would later become my genre of choice, but this was my first exposure to the grimy stomp that's part and parcel of the genre. But most of all, it was heavy. Not the type of heavy that a bunch of meatheads would stomp around to at a hardcore show, but the kind of heavy that made you want to throw up the claw and bang your fucking head. It's almost solely responsible for sending me barreling down a musical path I might not have stumbled across otherwise and almost fifteen years later, Fifteen Counts of Arson remains one of my favorite albums of all time.
Buy it:
