Manic Progression

QUICKSAND GUITARIST WALTER SCHREIFELS REFLECTS ON A LIFE IN HARDCORE

- Jim Beaugez

HARDCORE PUNK MUSIC is simple by design and tribal by nature, focused on eliciting a specific response as opposed to encouraging exploration. It’s ironic, then, how hardcore journeyman Walter Schreifels has somehow evaded the genre’s strictures to create some of the most compelling and influential heavy music of the last three decades.

“Hardcore is such a limited format, in a way — it’s more like haikus than sonnets,” Schreifels says. “When I got into Quicksand, I didn’t wanna work within the boundaries of that formula of hardcore. I wanted to stretch out, and the guys I was working with all wanted to do that as well.”

Of all the groundbreaking bands Schreifels has been involved with — Eighties hardcore pioneers Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits, and early-aughts alt-metal underdogs Rival Schools chief among them — Quicksand will be writ large in his epitaph. Emerging in 1993 with their debut album Slip, Quicksand bridged the worlds of punk and metal while maintaining the bludgeoning beats of hardcore, the perfect concoction for music fans who loved Nirvana and Helmet in equal measure.