Tag: hardcore
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Rise Against – The Black Market
After illustrating that they were more than capable of moving forward beyond their melodic hardcore foundations with Appeal To Reason and Endgame, The Black Market proves that Rise Against still has some more ground that they’d like to break and a few boundaries they still want to push. Such creative testing is always a dicey…
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Harangue CD release show Friday, June 27th @ The Garrison, Toronto
HARANGUE CD release show with SIGNIFIER, GUILTFEEDER Friday June 27th The Garrison, Toronto By the Strength of the Mighty Atlas, the new full-length from Toronto hardcore outfit HARANGUE, got a release show worthy of its name at the Garrison. The opening act Signifier kicked off a solid night of wholly energetic aggression. While their sound…
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Hopeless Youth
Montreal’s Hopeless Youth have been on the road since late May, touring in support of Disgust, their Candlelight Records debut. From the outside, it looks like their collective career has moved as quickly as their music. In two years (Hopeless Youth formed in 2012) they recorded an EP and album with engineer Frank Daniel Shooflar (Blessed By A…
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Crowbar – Symmetry in Black
Crowbar’s Sever the Wicked Hand was an awesome album, one of my top albums of 2011. And despite an unfortunate head-kicking incident at MDF, I was still pretty psyched to hear what the band would come up with the next time around. No boycott here—let’s just say I’m hoping this album delivers a solid blow…
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Fucked Up – Year of the Dragon
It’s time for a taste of Toronto courtesy of Fucked Up, Canada’s premier progressive hardcore sextet. No, that’s not an oxymoron, but I must admit, it’s pretty fucked up (in a good way). This three-song EP features an 18-minute title track backed by two covers of semi-obscure local 70’s punk-rock bands. Cuz really, what else where you…
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OFF! – Wasted Years
As good or exciting as it might be, most of the hardcore punk made in the twenty-first century misses the original spirit of the music really cleanly. When it started, there was precisely nothing thought out or “calculated” about hardcore; it was very urgent and reactionary music recorded in a hurry (in part, so it…
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The Shrine – Bless Off
I was pretty impressed with these guys when they opened for Red Fang last month. While they’re not reinventing the wheel, they sure know how to roll it, bringing down some brief blasts of heavy vintage tuneage. It’s almost like one of those semi-obscure heavy bands from the early 70s (Dust, Bang, Gun, take your…
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Mutation – Error 500
By Bill Adams Iggy Pop was once quoted as saying that the sound The Stooges were aiming for in their early days was “something monolithic – something loud and annoying.” It worked of course; The Stooges made sounds which were loud and annoying and ended up laying the groundwork for an entire sub-genre of rock…
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Black Flag – What The…
By BIll Adams With all the lawsuits, controversy and other such nonsense surrounding the name iconography of Black Flag bubbling up to the surface lately (the short version is that guitarist and SST Records owner Greg Ginn recently has tried to sue the members of FLAG, then he threw singer Ron Reyes out of his…
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The Melvins – Tres Cabrones
By Bill Adams It might be a little late in the game to try and call what The Melvins have done on Tres Cabrones a mid-life crisis. The average age of the band’s members is around fifty – no one tries to call that mid-life with a straight face – but there’s no denying that…