There are feelings of great hesitation with a release like this, “the comeback“ record. With Small Brown Bike’s final full-length The River Bed, the band had branched out using more guitar and vocal effects, showcasing a slightly mellower disposition and hinting towards what would soon become a highly popular post-rock sound. The end results tended to be polarizing amongst fans. With Composite, Volume One, Small Brown Bike return with something both recognizable and slightly new. [more]

Balance and Composure's prior EP, I Just Want to Be Pure was a fairly ambitious yet nervous worship of '90s emo somewhat funneled through the genre's more modern presentations. One sensed the band could go one of two ways from there -- either towards overly precocious and perhaps glossy meandering, or tread more raw and gritty, desperate catharsis. While the band's newest endeavor, the four-song, 20-minute Only Boundaries EP, sort of leans towards the latter, it's really just staking out its own unique and overall mesmerizing territory. [more]

Hardcore is all about hard work, and there's no denying that Ryan O'Connor and the rest of Outbreak had to severly step up their game after hitting some unfortunate speed bumps. The odds were against them, but they said "fuck the odds" and wrote the best album of their career. Punk as fuck, right?

Yeah, it is punk as fuck, so it's no surprise Outbreak has taken on a traditional punk/hardcore sound rather than their old thrash ways. [more]

The three years that separate Oh! Calcutta!, the 2006 Lawrence Arms full-length, and Buttsweat and Tears, the band’s new seven-inch, shouldn’t feel like a huge gap. First of all, it has only been three got-dammed years. Plus, fans were treated to side projects the Falcon and Sundowner during the interim. And yet...and yet....the last time we heard from this Chicago three-piece, George W. Bush was president. The housing market hadn’t gone to crap. The seminal film The Marine starring John Cena was still months away from hitting theaters. [more]

With Our Circle Is Vicious, Rise and Fall have created a punishing record of thoughtful hardcore that successfully integrates melody and establishes textures similar to Deathwish heroes Modern Life Is War. However, unlike MLIW, Rise and Fall is especially brooding and heavily drop -tuned; it's a fitting soundtrack for the coldest of autumn nights.

"Soul Slayer" begins as a tension builder via snare drum before breaking down into a twangy riff with touches of delay and lots of excess noise -- a good example of what to expect. The recording is not particularly tight or punchy. [more]

David Bazan is probably a polarizing figure around here, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that his music is not of the short, fast, and loud variety; Bazan plays folk rock songs that are slow, deliberate and melancholic. The second is that Bazan gained popularity under the name Pedro the Lion, where he sang about God through a Christian lens. While Bazan's musical style has not changed dramatically since dropping the Pedro moniker (though he has infused a greater pop sensibility than before), his perspective on the divine certainly has: Bazan now considers himself an agnostic. [more]

It’ll probably be considered heresy to say, but when I first heard Chuck Ragan’s Feast or Famine -- specifically “The Boat” -- all I could think was “this is what he should have been doing all along.”

Don’t get me wrong; I love Hot Water Music. I’ve followed them since No Division and I celebrate their entire catalog. But something about Ragan’s solo material is different. Something about it is truly special in a way that most other singer-songwriters can’t even hope to understand. He feels so comfortable. So at home. [more]

In a year where bands like the Bouncing Souls and Paint It Black avoided full-lengths in favor of short seven-inch bursts, Strike Anywhere rallied ahead with their fourth full-length, Bridge Nine debut, and possibly best album ever with Iron Front. Maybe it’s fitting, given that the Iron Front, the circle with three declining lines that decries communism, monarchism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and pretty much any other jerk belief system ever, has always been Strike Anywhere’s symbol. Iron Front describes the band’s aesthetic more than even an eponymous title ever could. [more]

I didn’t care too much for the first Doomriders record, Black Thunder. It seemed that the band had a very defined path they wanted to take, but in indulging these specific ideas, the whole ended up slightly less than satisfying. I wouldn't say I didn't like it -- it was moreso just OK. The band seemed to be going for a nostalgic mix of early Black Sabbath and '80s skate thrash with a healthy dose of guitar harmonies and droning repetition of barreling riffs underneath Nate Newton’s masculine scream similar to his work in Old Man Gloom. [more]

It’s hard to believe that Death Before Dishonor is ten releases and almost as many years into its career. Harder still to believe that the band has improved by such leaps and bounds just over the last three albums.

It's not so much an indictment of the band as it is acknowledgement that hardcore bands have short lifespans and don’t often show as much release-to-release improvement as some of Boston’s finest have. [more]