Swiz

The members of D.C. punk band Swiz assemble a colorful and eclectic career retrospective. Beginning with the group’s 1987 founding by Shawn Brown and Ramsey Metcalf—then Washington, D.C., teens who ”didn’t have any real aspirations, it was just playing music,” Brown recalls—the narrative tracks their rise to hardcore punk renown before breaking up in 1990. Along the way, sections highlight each band member’s punk roots, the highs and lows of touring (“I guess I secretly love the hell out of this amorphous living,” bassist Nathan Larson admitted in a 1989 journal entry, and the chaos of a D.C. punk scene rife with “finger-pointing” about “who was the good punk, who was the bad punk, who was healthy for the scene, and who wasn’t.” Such rifts—along with band members’ increased exhaustion with touring—contributed to the group’s dissolution, especially as skinhead and “tough-guy oriented” elements began to infiltrate the scene in the 1990s. Veering from prose to poetry to comic strip, the sections combine to form less a chronological narrative of the band’s rise than a passionate ode to hardcore punk’s brief but intense moment in the spotlight and Swiz’s role in it. Casual punk fans should look elsewhere, but the band’s devotees will delight in this unfiltered portrait. Photos. (Oct.)