Review by Guest Contributor Chris Petrozzo EVERY TIME I DIE’s latest effort, Ex Lives, their sixth studio album, comes galloping out of the gate in an absolute cacophony of guttural screams, searing riffs, and cymbal crashes – and it rarely lets up, save for a few intermittent moments. While ETID’s sound is, by now, so [...]

Let me botch an article of faith: I never connected with OPERATION IVY. Whatever baggage CLASSICS OF LOVE carries from Jesse Michaels’ earlier art is of little interest to me. What is of interest to me is in how much this thing shreds. There are shorter records, but Classics Of Love, occasionally has a chorus [...]

Things you can count on with a new TOTAL CHAOS album: (1) song about punks and cops; (2) song about political oppression; (3) song(s) about hooligans, massacres, riots, the system, the other system, Nazis, squatters, and freedom (from the system). Fifteen year old me was enamored with TOTAL CHAOS, (what better way to smash the [...]

First impressions can sometimes be a facade. When No Sleep signed XERXES, I gave them a quick listen and thought, “welp, No Sleep is jumping on the TOUCHE AMORE bandwagon”**. If I was right about that, who could blame them? TOUCHE AMORE took hold of an influential torch most recently held by MODERN LIFE IS [...]

Jubilant. Fast. Joy. Speed. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sometimes, words get in the way. Tycoon resonates, deeply with me. It’s in the momentum. It’s in the delight. It’s in the revelry, the energy. I know we get into punk rock because of the spirit, but the vocalist of NO TRIGGER Tom Rheault has a nearly perfect [...]

Okay. I hope, hope, hope this is one of the few times I do this, but you know how in my review of SIGNALS MIDWEST’s Latitudes and Longitudes, I said I couldn’t quite get a feeling for what distinguished each song? A Flash Flood Of Colour by ENTER SHIKARI, I can promise you, does not [...]

Since Bullet Tooth launched a little more than a year ago, I’ve been waiting for the label to find its first signature hardcore band. Sure – the label had FIRST BLOOD and MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD as holdovers from the Trustkill days, but I’m talking about new blood (so much blood…); a young, hungry band looking [...]

Latitudes and Longitudes is mostly mood and mies en scene. The mood feels like SMALL BROWN BIKE in 2012. That’s a good mood. I like that mood. But beyond that, I can’t tell you a difference between a good seven of the ten tracks. What I don’t like is 45 seconds of loosely related instrumentation [...]