Damn, not bad. Vicious metalcore with raging vocal screams that almost have a really angry sort of snotty punk rock attitude, but even more pissed off. The music blends your usual chugging chord progressions with a little added rhythmic chunkiness and plenty of dissonance. It's certainly not too frantic or chaotic or anything like that, but it is flirting with a little bit of that, which is cool... because they hit on the finer points of that style and leave the shitty pull-off riffs and annoying overly technical nonsense behind. "1600" takes a more consistently midpaced route and lets the discordant side take the fore, which continues in the at times more creative "Spring Break..." - but both of these songs take a darker road that I find more interesting, so thankfully that tends to stick around for most of the EP. The longer "The Patron Saint of Losers" adds more dynamic shifts with some melody and brief clean passages, while "Reacharounds and Happy Endings" speeds it up a little more and has an increased bite to its guitar work. At the end of the disc is a lengthy portion of samples that seem to have an environmentalist bent, followed by an unlisted instrumental based largely around clean guitars and prominent bass runs (not bad, though in more of an oddly indie sort of vein). The sound is pretty strong, too. The rhythm section is clean and flows well, the guitars are heavy, etc. The vocals definitely sound the best, with the most rounded sound that harnesses their feel well, while the guitars could use a little more of a controlled distortion (it's heavy but has a little extra space in there) and the drums could stand to be less unnaturally taut. No big deal though, it plays just fine. The layout is chock full of colorful artwork and photography with handwritten text for the lyrics, which tend to be somewhat abstract both with the humorous song titles and the content - though some of it is very obviously socio-political in nature: "Cowboy rich kid motherfucker from Texas digging for oil stumbled on blood digging for gold stumbled on blood a moralless Jed Clampett modern day Colonel Kurtz..." This is pretty good stuff. It can get a bit sluggish at times since most of the material sounds pretty similar, but the best songs definitely pack a punch, so...
[Surprise Attack]
Running time - 30:00 (approximately), Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: 1600, Spring Break..., The Patron Saint of Losers]
Surprise Attack Records - http://www.surpriseattackrecords.com
