Apeshit

¡Apeshit! does Brooklyn well with their brand of raw and chaotic, emotive hardcore. Well, with song titles like "Your Chewbacca Boots Are Making Me Thirsty," maybe not so much emotive, but definitely raw and chaotic. In all, it's an original, promising blend that draws lightly from such disparate `90s signifiers as Born Against, early Locust and Gravity Records.

This 12-song, 11-minute release quite obviously breezes through rather quickly, and yet ¡Apeshit! display a sickening number of tempo changes. A distorted bass rings in the background all along while the band either painfully move slowly through bleak, morose soundscapes or a set of flailing, loose drum fills and riffy guitars wrapped inside a vicious pace. Of course, this would be nothing without the tortured, nonsensical scream up front, and that gives the album its full picture: a narrator that's lost, desperate, and completely directionless. Really, the mood couldn't be expressed much clearer.

With a 12" split with Tigershark out soon, it looks like -- unlike their fairly promising debut -- ¡Apeshit! isn't slowing down anytime soon. And frankly, that's perfectly okay if it means better and better songs.

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¡Apeshit!