Starkweather - 1995 - Into The Wire C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 4:02PM

Private Release – none

Into The Wire is where Starkweather sound fully committed to making hardcore feel psychologically dangerous rather than simply heavy. The 1995 EP is six tracks long in its original form: “Shroud,” “Shards,” “Unto Me,” “Murder In Technicolor,” “Into The Wire” and “Slither.” The Private Release C35 shown here adds “Mean Streets” from the earlier Crossbearer material at the end, so this cassette is not a strict one-for-one duplication of the original sequence. It is another physical version assembled from the band’s mid-1990s material. The uploaded files preserve that exact seven-track cassette program, and the sound confirms why Into The Wire became such an important record in Starkweather’s history. The band had already been operating since 1989, but this release pushes their combination of hardcore, metal, dissonance and long-form tension into something much stranger than the genre labels usually attached to them. Starkweather’s own archive dates the release to 1995, and the later Translation Loss reissue preserves these six tracks as the core Into The Wire program. 

“Shroud” opens with more than seven minutes of tightly wound pressure. It does not behave like an introduction. The track is already unstable from the first moments, with guitar figures that feel jagged rather than simply riff-based and drums that keep changing the apparent weight underneath them. Rennie Resmini’s vocal is central to the effect. He does not just scream at a fixed intensity. The voice stretches between bellowing, strangled phrasing and moments where the delivery becomes more controlled without ever sounding safe. That variation matters because Starkweather’s music is built around psychological escalation as much as volume. When the band pulls back, the quiet does not function as relief. It creates room for the next section to feel worse.

“Shards” is shorter and more compact, but it is hardly simpler. The uploaded file has a dense upper-middle spectrum and a strongly compressed wall of guitars, bass and drums, yet individual rhythmic details still cut through. One of Starkweather’s defining strengths during this period is that the heaviness never completely flattens the arrangement. The guitar can move independently from the vocal phrasing, the drums can push against rather than simply reinforce the riff, and the bass contributes weight without turning into anonymous low-frequency fog. A later contemporary retrospective singled out the song’s Celtic Frost-like riffing, but the resemblance is only one piece of a much less stable construction. 

“Unto Me” opens the structure again. At more than six minutes, it has enough room for Starkweather to make repetition feel oppressive rather than comforting. The uploaded file remains dense but slightly brighter than “Shards,” with more upper-frequency attack around the guitars and cymbals. What keeps the track from becoming monotonous is the way sections seem to deform rather than simply repeat. A figure returns, but its surrounding rhythm or vocal pressure changes. Starkweather were never particularly interested in the clean mathematics that later became associated with technical metalcore. Their complexity feels more emotional than demonstrative. The arrangements twist because the songs seem unable to remain calm.

“Murder In Technicolor” is one of the strongest examples of that approach. The title itself suggests violence converted into spectacle, and the song has a larger dramatic arc than the shorter material. The guitar sound is abrasive but not thin, with enough lower-mid body to keep every dissonant movement physically grounded. Resmini’s voice moves across the arrangement almost independently, sometimes lining up with the riff and sometimes seeming to resist it. That slight dislocation is crucial. Starkweather do not sound like four musicians executing the same attack. They sound like several hostile forces temporarily sharing a structure.

The title track is the center of the cassette and the longest original Into The Wire piece at roughly eight and a half minutes. It is also where the band’s range becomes most obvious. “Into The Wire” moves through quieter passages, restrained vocal sections, heavier surges and rhythmic changes without feeling like a suite assembled from disconnected parts. The quieter material has a particularly unnerving quality because the band does not suddenly become sentimental. Space simply exposes the tension more clearly. When the heavier sections return, they feel like pressure being reapplied rather than a conventional climax. A 2021 retrospective noted the track’s dynamic range and its almost Swans-like moments, which is a useful comparison for the way repetition, restraint and physical heaviness interact here. 

“Slither” lasts barely a minute and a half, making it the obvious structural anomaly. After several long compositions, the sudden compression is brutal. The track does not need to develop because its position already gives it meaning. It feels like the entire vocabulary of Into The Wire shoved into a narrow space and released before anything can stabilize. The brevity also prevents the title track from functioning as a grand ending. Instead, Starkweather finish the original EP with something short, ugly and immediate.

Then the Private Release cassette adds “Mean Streets,” pulling the sequence backward into Crossbearer. That choice is interesting because “Mean Streets” is not part of the original Into The Wire release, and the uploaded file is sonically brighter than the six tracks before it, with substantially more high-frequency energy. It also runs nearly eight minutes, turning what had been a short ending into another large final movement. The song makes the cassette feel less like a historical reproduction and more like a personal Starkweather program built around the 1995 release. Official archival sources place “Mean Streets” on Crossbearer, while the six preceding tracks are consistently documented as Into The Wire. 

That extra track also emphasizes how much Starkweather changed between the two recordings. “Shards,” “Unto Me” and “Murder In Technicolor” had already appeared on Crossbearer and were re-recorded for Into The Wire. Hearing “Mean Streets” afterward gives the listener another point of comparison with the earlier period. The later versions feel more massive and more deliberate, but not cleaner in any reassuring sense. The production allows more detail to survive inside the weight. The band sounds less like a metallic hardcore group trying unusual ideas and more like a group that has made instability itself the organizing principle.

The physical Private Release object gives all of this another body entirely. The cassette is an intense red-orange shell with a large orange paper label typed simply STARKWEATHER / 1995 / Into The Wire. There is no decorative typography and no attempt to imitate the original release. The J-card image is far more specific. A close-up photograph shows a partial face crowded by two hands, one bare and one covered in black leather. The hands dominate the image so completely that the face is reduced to fragments: part of the mouth, cheek and surrounding skin visible between fingers and glove. The photograph is warm orange-brown and black, matching the cassette unusually closely.

That image works particularly well with Starkweather because it feels physically restrictive without needing to illustrate any specific lyric. The face does not have room. The hands occupy most of the available space. The leather glove adds another texture, wrinkled, shiny and tightly stitched against bare skin. The image is intimate but not comforting. It feels closer to pressure, restraint or obstruction. That same sensation runs through the music. Starkweather’s arrangements repeatedly create the feeling that something is being compressed while simultaneously trying to force its way outward.

The cassette shell intensifies that effect through color. Bright orange-red plastic would normally read as playful or cheap, but next to the dark photograph it becomes almost feverish. The warm tones connect the shell to skin, leather and the photograph’s artificial lighting. Unlike many Private Release tapes where flowers or unrelated imagery open the object into a completely different visual environment, this one stays claustrophobic. The cassette and the picture seem to occupy the same temperature.

The uploaded files also reveal that this particular Private Release copy preserves the recording with considerable variation between tracks rather than forcing everything into one identical digital shape. The six Into The Wire tracks are dense and loud, but they differ in brightness and apparent scale. “Into The Wire” is somewhat darker than “Unto Me” or “Murder In Technicolor,” while “Mean Streets” is noticeably brighter and more open in the upper frequencies. Those differences make the cassette feel like a sequence assembled from specific recordings rather than a modern normalized playlist.

That matters with Starkweather because their music benefits from unevenness. Perfect consistency would work against the sense that each song is entering a different psychological room. “Shroud” feels entangled. “Shards” is tighter. “Unto Me” stretches. “Murder In Technicolor” destabilizes. “Into The Wire” opens and closes around long pressure cycles. “Slither” collapses the scale. “Mean Streets” then arrives from an earlier record and changes the historical frame.

Starkweather are often described retrospectively as foundational metalcore, which is accurate but incomplete. Their influence sits partly in the fact that they were combining hardcore and extreme metal before that combination had hardened into a predictable formula. But Into The Wire is more interesting than its historical usefulness. It remains difficult music. The riffs are not simply heavy. The vocals are not simply aggressive. The songs are too long, too dissonant and too emotionally erratic to behave as genre exercises.

The band’s own description is probably closer to the experience than most genre tags: “isolationist music for the disenfranchised individual,” “a disturbance of the inner ear,” and “a misanthrope’s internal monologue interpreted through primal scream therapy.” Those phrases are dramatic, but Into The Wire earns them.

The Private Release cassette adds one final layer to that history. Starkweather made the recordings. Into The Wire appeared in 1995. Years later the material was recovered, remastered and officially reissued. Somewhere else in that chain, these files were selected, placed onto a C35, given a red-orange shell, paired with a close photograph of hands pressing around a face, and extended with “Mean Streets.”

The music was already difficult to contain.

The cassette gives it another container anyway.