Review: Pointing Finger “Best Bruises Collection” CD

Here's some cool straightedge hardcore from Portugal played in the basic old school style with lots of moderately fast three-chord hardcore, solid breaks, yelling vocals, and melodic sensibilities. Included are tracks from four previous vinyl releases, including the split 7" with Pollution and "The Illusion of Perfection", "Reasons, Not Rules", and "Transcend" 7"s. I'd compare their sound to the more melodic bands of old like Turning Point and Gorilla Biscuits along with a more modern hint of acts like Count Me Out or something. I wouldn't call the music upbeat, but it's got a lot of melody and force. The songs are all fairly short (none reaching three minutes) and straightforward, so if you're familiar with this style you should know what to expect, but I will point out that this material is definitely more energetic and reminiscent of the late-80's/early-90's than most of what this genre offers these days. Among the standouts, "Transcend" gets a little more intricate with layered guitar parts, "Quest for Trust" has one of the disc's most Ray Cappo-esque inflections to its vocal delivery, "Cast of a Thousand Fools" is midpaced with a really powerful drive, "Not This Time" has some solid rhythms that get a little heavier (but there's no metal here, make no mistake), and they close the disc with a slick cover of "High Hopes" (Gorilla Biscuits, of course). The sound quality is fine. The mixes tend to be pretty even and dense, the tones aren't too raw or too thin, etc. I definitely think the bass usually needs to play a larger role, and the tracks could use a little-more low-end punch anyway, but other than that I'm fine with it, and for the most part the different sessions sound surprisingly similar to one another. The later tracks on the disc sound slightly more compressed or a little dirty, while also being a tad thicker somewhere in the midst of it, but it's all strong enough to get the job done. The layout's pretty typical of a hardcore record but it looks fine. The color scheme is mainly faded blues, with lots of live photos and bold, clean text. It never indicates which songs come from which 7", but at least there are images of the old record covers and detailed credits otherwise. The booklet's actually rather large since all of the lyrics are included. The lyrics are all pretty standard as well, dealing with personal issues and other topics like greed, sexual abuse, war, etc. - and this is one of those bands that tries to have a positive sort of spin on things most of the time. There are some CD-Rom additions as well, but all I could get access to was the videos, so there are five songs from various shows, including another Gorilla Biscuits cover of "New Direction". All of the video and sound quality is rough, but you can get the idea of everything. I believe this is the first band of this nature that I've heard from Portugal, and they're definitely a promising representative for the country, so this is good stuff.