Articles Of Faith

Emerging from Chicago’s hardcore underground with an outspoken political edge, Articles of Faith ranked among the earliest standard-bearers of the Midwestern metropolis’s punk community and issued several landmark recordings during their short run. The group’s leader, Vic Bondi—a onetime protest singer who later taught history—assembled the band in 1981. Their debut EP, What We Want Is Free, appeared the following year, succeeded in 1983 by the Wait EP and then the full-length albums Give Thanks (1984) and In This Life (1985), both helmed by Bob Mould. Although the band’s initial output mixed disparate styles, In This Life helped ignite the emocore movement. Comprising Bondi on vocals and guitar, Dave Shield on bass and vocals, Virus-X on drums, Dorian Tajbakhsh on guitar, and Joe Scuderi on guitar, the lineup dissolved in 1985. Bondi subsequently launched the projects Alloy and Jones Very, issued the EP Fortunate Son in 2003, and featured in the 2006 documentary American Hardcore. Two years earlier, the veteran punk imprint Alternative Tentacles issued the exhaustive anthologies Complete, Vol. 1 and Complete, Vol. 2.