Hardcore ain’t dead. It done moved to Portland, Maine.
“Lock & Key,” Cruel Hand’s 3rd full-length and second full-length with Bridge Nine Records, is just good Hardcore, plain and simple. Cruel Hand delivers fast, hard, classic Hardcore peppered with Thrash and Metal solos and hooks reminiscent of late 80′s Agnostic Front, Leeway, and Cro-Mags at their best and most experimental, with vocals similar to Madball at their peak. Like most good Hardcore, the album is just a pleasant tease–it’s not the culmination of the Hardcore experience. Rather, the gauge of the success of a good Hardcore album is how badly the album makes you want to see the live show. With “Lock & Key,” Cruel Hand have executed some fine Hardcore and the promise of a sick live show.
Refreshingly, the band is not afraid to travel beyond the traditional barriers of the genre and deftly include some other influences that more “discerning” Hardcore fans all too often raise their noses at. (Their elaborately tattoo’d hardcore noses). Specifically, Cruel Hand liberally embraces more metallic means to complement the traditional Hardcore musicianship and it benefits the piece as a whole. They manage to accomplish this without the misstep of slipping into any of the myriad asinine -core labels. (Hehe…***Dashcore). The title track, Lock & Key is a classic Hardcore opener, ripping the album open in the usual fashion and experimenting with some not-quite-unlike Testament vocalization. Day or Darkness features some metallic solo work to accompany and offset the three-chord aggression and finishes up with some nice low-toned blues-based solo work during the breakdown. The ubiquitous sing-along-cum-slower breakdown shows up on Broken Glass .
One Cold Face is the album’s opus at 3:21. It creeps open with a slow intro that sounds eerily similar to the opening of Anthrax’s Be All, End All. It rages for about three minutes and finishes up with some more metal solos. Dismissed is classic hardcore — angry, simple, loud. The Bottom , another AF-like metal/hardcore hybrid, ends the piece.
As mentioned –it’s just good Hardcore, plain and simple. This album rocks it. No borders are broken down with this record, but the execution is masterful. Simply put — if you dig Hardcore, you’ll dig this. And you can’t wait for the show.
***Dashcore– A snide and derisive term for the various and dubiously categorized Hardcore-descendant Metal genres, i.e., Metalcore, Buzzcore, Grindcore, Sludgecore, Orgcore, Mathcore, etc.
I call that one, it’s mine. You all just witnessed the birth of some brilliant shit. In a way, I don’t feel like I coined it — I feel like WE coined it, together. Except I get the writing credit. – D.
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