Heavy hardcore with pissed off vocals that are basically straight yells, but they really have an interesting edge that gives the band a unique feel. Musically it's pretty much your usual heavy hardcore band, sticking to an old school styled structure but with a 90's sounding NYHC sort of thunder, you know? It's not what I would call metallic, but it's definitely thick as hell and hits harder and more moderately paced than what most any of the youth crew types of bands are gonna pull off. There are a few little bits and pieces of melody as well, usually in the form of random ringing notes or open chords. "Viva Diamond Rings" drops some nice vocal tradeoffs, "Unbroken Covers" is a bit more melodic and uses a wider variety of tempos and cool little dual guitar interactions, and "Looks Like Rain" layers in some quick octave chords amongst a driving rhythm. There's not a great deal of diversity throughout the disc, but with an average song length of around two minutes (some as little as 38 seconds) there's no time for fucking around, so they get the job done. I like the sound quality just fine. The guitar tone is strong, the bass sounds like a million bucks, the mix is cohesive... I think the vocals could maybe fall back a touch against the guitars, and the percussion could stand to sound a bit more resonant to better suit the killer bass tone, but the end result works just fine and sounds pretty damn good to me. And I really like the artwork here, everything is pretty rough and dirty with a strict color palette and lots of high contrast imagery and bold text. The lyrics are pretty personal and vary from blunt to somewhat strange and abstract, but they definitely make their point most of the time with lines like, "Fuck love, it only grays with age..." Really there are only seven songs total since two of ?em are unlisted instrumentals, but the disc still plows through at a quick and easy 13 minutes of no bullshit hardcore. This is definitely a strong release. I'd expect to hear bigger and better things from these cats at some point.
[State of Mind]
Running time - 13:02, Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: Slow Motion Hate, Unbroken Covers, Looks Like Rain]
State of Mind Recordings - http://www.stateofmindrecordings.com
