Review: Crowd Deterrent - Show Of Supreme Force
Being a hardcore kid is like being a junkie in many ways. You get hooked up first time you hear Set It Off, Crime Ridden Society or Brightside and the rest of your life you just chase the same feeling. And sometimes you succeed. Crowd Deterrent for last couple of years has been the bomb and this lp combines their various shit since Show of Supreme Force ep came out in 2012. I didn’t need to sell my TV to get this record yet but I would if I had to. Somehow they do it better than anyone out there.
For those who don’t know, CR sound is Agnostic Front meets One Life Crew meets Blitz meets Sheer Terror and just every hardcore band in history that cultivated values such as hatred for fellow man and not-to-be-fucked-with attitude. And they put their own stamp on it with obnoxious antisocial vibe and gang mentality. Combined with technical skills that keeps their delivery sharp and effective you know we’re talking serious shit here. And the vocals are of beast kind, on tracks like Worldwie or Outcast Mentality he proves he has some serious vocal chops. The dude has been blessed with a perfect voice for this shit.
Show of Supreme Force ep are hands down the best of the batch. These tracks are fat to death, I don’t even have a favorite one, front to back this is top notch. This record is already in my top ten for the last decade. The title track is aggressive and raw, hitting you hard with tight groove and sharp riffs all bound together by the meanest vocals. "Life's on the line for you/ no matter what I do/ always stay down for the crew". Hard as nails! As for the Certain Death, I got no problem putting it next to Murdario Stomp easily. The Hated Ones tracks are solid as well, just see me wilding out in my living room to these tunes. The lyrics are the same, most of all a salute to sticking to your guns in world gone to shit. "I can’t handle all this stress / I’m a paranoid mess/ There’s no life left in these eyes/ Seeking shelter but there’s none to bo found /The only peace I’ll find when I’m six feet underground"
This lp gets my highest recommendation.
New music: Forced Order
New track from Forced Order camp taken from the upcoming full length One Last Prayer. Shit sounds powerful like it's 1995 again. The band’s apocalyptic aesthetic has seen it compared to Clevo sound, but I also thought of early Kickback and the way they manage to blend grim with severe aggression. The band turns in solid performance which gets me pumped for the whole thing to drop later this year via Triple B records.
Harness - Carve The New Path
This stuff has been out for a while but for those who still don't know: 5 years after they made their debut with Victims of Suffering ep, Harness has posted two new tracks: Neophyte is a grimy metallic hardcore with a massive stomp part towards the end, while Meditations takes the same route but throws slower, sludgy bent to the game. I put this on the list of shit to write about when it was originally posted to their bandcamp in May but didn't do it until now.
Check it out if you haven't already. If you have, check it again.
Video: Clearview - Dirty Streets
Whether thug life is your thing or you want to harden up through listening to hardcore this is the shit right here. This track is from band's new album and deals with harsh realities of Sao Paulo. From start to finish this just both musically and vocally dominates. This is about as high in the quality department as hardcore has gotten in 2017.
Interview: Society Sucker
"hardcore is a very powerful cultural force in the underground
When we stop worrying about social and political matters we are actively working against what hardcore itself is supposed to be. "
Can you give Society Sucker some introduction. Where you from, how long you’ve been around?
Society Sucker is a hardcore band based in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Wilmington, North Carolina. We wrote and recorded a shitty demo in a week in 2013 and have been at it in one form or the other since then.
Promo ‘17 sounds sick. Tell us something about these new songs. Is there a new album coming and do you have any other new tracks ready?
Thank you so much for saying that! And yeah these two songs are part of a larger grouping of songs that we plan to put on an LP later this year. We have about 3 more songs finished more or less and a handful more in the process of coming together as I write this. We don't have any real plans yet with the actual physical release but its a little too early to worry about that stuff right now. We wanted to get the promo out to let people we are still alive and writing and show them the direction that we are going in for the LP since we feel it is our strongest material to date.
How is average Society Sucker track put down?
We have a pretty cool set up at our guitarist Chris's house where we are able to jam pretty much anytime and record it, so we riff around a lot and work off of ideas until we come up with something that sticks. The whole process is pretty organic, we try and get everyone's input and write stuff that we want to listen to or beat someone's ass to, whichever works.
People compare your band to Merauder, Leeway.... How would you describe your sound to people who are just getting familiar with you?
We started out wanting to be groovy and heavy, mixing elements of NYHC with thrash metal and crossover, but we kept kind of evolving between our demo to our first 7" to our split with Will to Die to now. The influences are still there but our approach to writing the type of hardcore that interests us has changed. I would say we are a heavy hardcore band at our core without a doubt, but we aren't trying to replicate anyone else's sound or be a "X-type of band" or whatever. We definitely take influence from Merauder, Leeway, Crown of Thornz, Stigmata and its obvious, but we also take just as much from bands like Alice in Chains, Guns N' Roses, all sorts of other shit so it's hard to pin down where exactly we are at any given moment. We are hardcore dudes playing the type of hardcore that we want to hear.
Review: Bent Life - Never Asked For Heaven
I saw this band live and the music was so good I knew I had to get this record. The show itself was odd cause the singer didn’t say a word between the tracks, which is not a hardcore standard, but not everyone is Scott Vogel and the music was dope. Special kudos to the guitar man, this dude is crazy and his work carries a lot of weight here. If they make any money on this record he should get the biggest cut. The band goes of their way to fill every track with both force and groove to make sure today’s hardcore audience is satisfied. If you follow what’s hip in hardcore right now I am sure you’ll find a lot of this stuff here. I mean nothing bad, just saying this has all the right ingredients. On top of it, the singer voice is really rough and he spits every word in full fuck-it-all mode. On the downside, I don’t like the way this is produced. They really went for a heavy sound but in the end a lot of details get lost. Overall, this package is complete: ridiculous songs, forceful vocals and murderous hatred for the whole world.
Bridge 9, 2016
Video: Slope - Goodbye Mr. Dandy
This fucking dress code. I know copying other dudes style is part of hardcore and we’re all guilty of this, but some trends are better than other. I dig good Madball copycat as the next man but I can’t understand why dudes in 2017 try to look like Kurt Cobain and The Stone Roses. Why I talk fashion not the music? Because hardcore is more than music. But getting down to this, the video is both simultaneously decent and shitty. It looks goofy as fuck, but visuals aside the music is not as bad as the singer’s shirt would try to make you believe. This is totally different to what BDHW usually puts on the market. The crew were obviously gunning for the Turnstile crowd with this one but despite the bad intentions there are some hints of decency.
