1. My Shame
2. On the Road
3. Coming Home
4. Call to Arms
5. Want You More
6. Inside of a Monster
7. All Alone
8. I’m Sorry
9. Burning Down
10. Threshold

I’ve heard some good things about Low Value, so my expectations here were pretty high. I wasn’t disappointed. With all the Millencolin and Hi-Standard influences, especially within the vocal style, Low Value certainly stick to the skatepunk roots with some bits of technical guitar work, screams (at least in “My Shame”) and chock full of double-time drummery.

“Coming Home” is certainly one of the most euphoric tunes (although with an effective juxtaposition of sad lyrics) I’ve heard for a while, with killer verses and even killerer (?) choruses. The guitar solos are nothing if not original and each lead line has a unique personality, whether it’s the bendy, smooth silliness of the one in “On the Road”, the metal-influenced divebombing discords in “Call to Arms” or the Strung Out style double-tapping in “Want You More”.

Some of their tracks are a tad long and over-the-top, and Low Value don’t quite regain the energy and punch they blasted out in “My Shame” through the rest of the album, but it’s an enjoyable, full-length that is certainly high value.

www.myspace.com/lowvalue

1. All Singing, All Dancing, Baby!
2. Headlights & Halos
3. Kids of Cancer
4. Raise Your Glass
5. Save Us From Sorrow
6. Sunsets

I remember the first time I heard Saves the Day was on MTV2 (or something) when “At Your Funeral” was becoming popular and the vocals had such a tender quality to them I couldn’t help but love them. Anglesey’s Through Colour have that same endearing charm that defined Chris Conleys vocals for me back then, but with a heavier, punk-influenced-commercial-rock sound popularised by bands like Paramore. What a great combination that is, and it works so well; there are great tunes laid over this solid backing and lyrics that serve a real communicative purpose, thoughtful and full of emotion, yet still with room for interpretation for the listener to be able to find their own meaning.

I seem to spend more and more time in my car recently, going from one workplace to the next like some sort of music-teaching rent-boy, and so I was listening to this album over my car stereo towards the end of the day when I was pretty low on energy, When “Kids of Cancer” popped on and lifted my spirits entirely. It’s probably one of the least original tracks on the album, but they’ve chucked all the right musical techniques in there to push my buttons and fuck me if I wasn’t headbanging in my own little imaginary in-car-moshpit during this track, which is damn near perfect (apart from the unnecessary and bland half-time mid-section).

Through Colour don’t have all the hooks and harmonies to please the chart-topping-single-buying public just yet, but they’ve got a great, powerful sound that sets them apart from the field. I’m sure they’ll be up there touring with the big guys soon.

www.myspace.com/thisisthroughcolour

1. Crooked Hands
2. Misery King
3. Her Casket Holds No Bones
4. Nausea
5. Matriarch
6. Sea of Teeth/Bleak Eyes
7. Heir of the Dog

I was not prepared for such anger and volume of screaming and passion. You can’t fault the performance in this album, they’re bleeding every drop of sound out of every song and I love and appreciate this more than anything else in a band. The massively downtuned guitars create a dark backdrop to this hardcore rock and they have a neverending cache of effects and ideas to create their original sound: from the ringing minor 3rd in the guitar over most of “Her Casket Holds No Bones”, the polyrhythms of the vocals against the drums in “Nausea” and stop time stabs between the punched out vocals in the breakdown of “Misery King”, Bastions certainly are creative.

If you listen to this, actually, when you listen to this (because you really should) you’ll be sure to be blown away by those vocals, which crack and roar with an anger seldom heard. Unlike many hardcore vocalists who seem happy to scream at the same level through every song, the singer of Bastions manages to exert expression yet never yield in the brutality of the sound.

http://www.myspace.com/bstns

I was quite surprised that they hadn’t got round to soundchecking before the doors opened. That’s one thing that really bugs me. I don’t want to hear a band soundchecking just before they go on; it screams of unprofessionalism when you have to hear the neverending avant-garde poetry of the stage-hands – “one, two, two, two, two, check, check, check, check, two, two, one, two”. Anyway, the lights went down, everyone whooped and on came Lost Alone.

These were a very likeable band with fashionable haircuts, catchy emo/pop-punk songs and lots of energy. I especially enjoyed their original 3-part harmonies that were absolutely spot on, smooth and zipped around in contrary-motion, which coming from a 3-piece band is always impressive. For a 3-piece band also to come out with a sound so rich and full gives testament to their skill of setting up their instruments correctly and arranging their songs well. A great set that put me in a great mood for the night. So I went and bought some over-priced, watered-down lager. 7/10

I’d read a bit about Street Drum Corps briefly before I went to the gig, and it sounded a pretty impressive idea, experiment with mixing various percussion things with punk rock. So their slot began (after some more tedious sound checking) and 3 masked guys were hitting some upturned bins with sticks along to some backing track. Now, as a spectacle, this looked impressive, as they were bang on in time to the backing track, but everything was mimed, these bins weren’t even mic’d up, which made the whole little charade seemm like it would be more at home on Britain’s Got Talent than a punk rock show. I’m certain that it would still have sounded pretty cool if we could hear what they were actually doing.

They then started to get down to business, which is essentially rock and roll with a punk edge like Randy or Electric Frankenstein. The percussionist at the front had an array of floor toms, oil-drums and cymbals, which again was a good spectacle and was something different to see in a punk band, but you couldn’t hear a single thing he was doing apart from the odd cymbal crash. Not even when he was hitting the oil-drums with a baseball bat could you hear it as there was not a single section in the music that offered some space for this percussion. Whether it was the cheesy, over the top backing track chock full of synths and electronic drums or the main drums themselves, it made the percussionist at the front nothing more than a dancer who hit things. Take away the entertaining image of this on-stage chaos and the great stage presence of the camp frontman and what you’re left with was a badly mixed, mediocre sound that I’ve seen and heard a million times at local venues. 5/10

I saw 30 Seconds To Mars at the Give It A Name festival in 2008, and they put on a real good show then. Since then of course commercially they’ve gone from strength to strength, so I expected they’d have even more money to burn from their record label and would put on a mind blowing performance. I wasn’t wrong. Happily, the reason for their good performance was the way they structured the whole show, which demonstrated a superb thought process into what would give the most entertainment. Some of these structural effects were the way the curtain came down before their slot to hide their preparations, their quick transportation right to the top of the seated audience to do a couple of acoustic songs, the moving to a stage in the middle of the floor to give everyone a new angle on the band (which, incidentally didn’t stop the moshpit at the front from going crazy with some good-natured circle pits) and getting loads of audience members up on stage to sing their encore of Kings and Queens alongside some inaudible (as always) military drumming from the Street Drum Corps (see the video above that I recorded). I’m glad they spent all their time preparing this performance with truly effective ideas such as these rather than gratuitous special effects and props. A superb, enjoyable gig. 9/10

State of Mine
1. Opening Sequence
2. Conspiracy Earth
3. Burnout
4. How to Survive Emocore
5. Last Chance to Dance
The Octopussys
1. Burger Kiing
2. Succubus
3. Burning Calories is Bad for Business
4. State of Emergency
5. I Fucked Up Again

Once the dull instrumental of the “Opening Sequence” is out the way, we’re actually onto some fun skatepunk provided by Belgium’s State of Mine, hitting us with decent political lyrics over a tight backing with plenty of jumps and syncopations. The single-string lead guitar over a lot of the chord sequences sounds very No Use For a Name-like and really rings of the 90s, and is maybe a little overdone as the lack of a second guitar leaves the sound a bit thin in places. The vocals have a great edge to them, like early Guttermouth or Jughead’s Revenge and even the backing harmonies sound raw without too much shine and polish.

The Octopussys (also from Belgium) take the second half of the album with something a lot more poppy, a bit like the Donots or Vanilla Pod, but with slightly more self-depreciative lyrics despite the superficial jollity of the overall sound of most of the tracks. I must admit though, their tracks were washing over me somewhat until I heard “State of Emergency” which really blew me away, with its different mood and technical soloing not unlike A Wilhelm Scream.

A good fun split album, to compare the bands would be like apples and oranges because they’re both pretty different, but I’m sure if you like one, you’ll like the other. There’s a lot of promise from both bands and still a fabulously raw feel to it all.

www.myspace.com/stateofminebe
www.myspace.com/theoctopussys

1. Villain
2. Honor, Not Pride
3. All Because of You
4. Hanging Up
5. Lost Control
6. Bridges and Breakdowns
7. Sick of It all
8. PSA
9. Sitting Down Drinking Beer
10. Deciding
11. Numbers
12. Scarlet Letter
13. The Fight
14. Gone Before You Know
15. [secret track]

The Down and Outs begin the album with an old-fashioned 90s style of skatepunk with simple chord sequences and tunes, shiny vocal harmonies and a touch of ska, not unlike early Millencolin or even 88 Fingers Louie. So I was listening to the first half of this album and pretty much the only things that crossed my mind were “yeah, skatepunk!”, “this song is quite long” and “hmm, their style is quite nice”

The Public Service Announcement in the middle of the album confused me a bit, I thought I was listening to Spotify and one of their adverts had kicked in, until I realised the sheer randomness and non-sequitur nature of the content.

After the PSA, the album improved considerably, with a few short riotous songs and some edgier Bigwig style power, altogether a lot more creativity and variation in the songs, some standout bass riffs and classic little jumps and chugs in the rhythm. It felt like I’d listened to a split album of two artists, and while not much really grabbed me on the first half, there were many more times on the second half that made me think “hey, that was fucking cool!”.

www.thedownandouts.com

1. Of Our Lives
2. Snakecharm the Dead Whale
3. Syncopated Heartbeat
4. Warship Lanterns

I’ve always loved that poppy post-hardcore sound of bands like Silverstein, Circa Survive and the like, but are Avosetta sufficiently unique enough to produce something that differentiates them from the swathes of bands producing this stuff through the past decade? Well, no not really. Does it matter? Not to me it doesn’t. A good friend once said to me during our formative years of discovering good music “The good thing about liking punk music is that there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll like pretty much all punk music”. There’s obvious exceptions to this of course (which have become very apparent during my years as a reviewer), but generally it’s nice to be able to like almost a complete genre of music and many of its sub-genres and related genres.

Avosetta do what they do well, and wear their influences on a sleeve of post-hardcore pastiche. Complex lyrical structures and disjointed melodies remind me of Panic at the Disco and the softer parts of the vocals have a tone like Jimmy Eat World. All this is skilfully layered over heavy but tonal metally riffs, almost constant lead guitar lines to create a complex but listenable texture and interspersed with some intense screams to add a harder edge to the music, resulting in a combination of sounds that has been heard many, many times before, but there’s no real point in re-inventing the wheel arbitrarily.

There’s no point in pretending this is ground-breaking, but there’s great skill in the performance, song-writing, nice production and the structures of each track build up and break down at just the right moments. In short, if you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a good chance you’ll probably be into this.

http://www.myspace.com/avosetta

1. Resistance
2. Dependence or Faith
3. Make your Spirit Burn
4. In the Dark
5. Blue Smoke and Mirrors
6. Words
7. Fourty Two

Endzweck have a great sound – that good blend of hardcore vocals and melodic guitar that made all hardcore bands from Shai Hulud to Comeback Kid endlessly popular, although with Endzweck their chord sequences perhaps owe more to skatepunk and screamo than hardcore.

The progressions don’t have a lot of direction and don’t create much tension within the music, this means that the feel of the music can be a little flat on some of the tracks. Ok, I might be getting a little bit technical for what is essentially hardcore punk, but this mini album isn’t as thrilling as it could be and I’ve been trying to work out why; all the ingredients are there for an amazing album of music, but my attention wanders somewhat.

There are some real high points on the album – the breakdown in “Dependence or Faith” has a proper fresh change of mood which builds up back up into double speed with relentless energy, and the one minute of mayhem that is “Words” manages to cram in loads of sections while still remaining coherent and emotional.

Good stuff this with nice production and cracking blend of sounds, have a listen and see how you enjoy it, but for me it did drag somewhat.

http://www.myspace.com/endzweck

1. Dandelion
2. Chinwag
3. Paperthin
4. Daytime Dilemma (Dangers of Love)

I loved Pickled Dick from the first time I heard them (which I think was supporting NOFX at a gig or something); such amazing harmonies and no-nonsense pop punk. Since their identity change to the more radio-friendly named Mike TV, they’ve not changed a great deal. Perhaps their songs are a little more mature in their subject matter (you can’t really write songs about pirates and jungle animals your whole life!), but only a touch; Mike TV are still as fun as ever with this release.

I suppose with this kind of power-pop-punk you can’t expect ‘progression’ and immense technicality, you’re just looking, essentially, for a good tune, catchy lyrics and a nice production for a shiny sound. This release certainly has all that with bells on, but for me doesn’t stand out as their best release, although I suspect the Stopgap E.P. might be a bit of a grower and i’ll soon learn to love the songs. This happened for me with Nerf Herder’s “How to Meet Girls” album, which I bought and thought it was kind of boring for a start, but now it’s pretty much one of my favourite ever albums. Without the benefit of foresight I can’t exactly predict if this will happen or not, but i’ll update this article if it does.

As it stands right now the tunes don’t seem quite as strong as their last album and the production isn’t quite as sharp, but from the title Stopgap E.P., I presume it’s just to tide us overr until they release another full-length.

Oh yes, the other benefit of this album is that it’s available for download with one of those fancy “pay whatever you want” schemes in mp3, ogg and it’s even available in lossless FLAC format so you can’t really go wrong.

I don’t think this release will suddenly gain Mike TV a whole new swathe of listeners, but for the fans – this is a really nice early Christmas present.

http://miketvmusic.bandcamp.com/

1. Revolution Radio
2. Fight Back
3. Faded Dreams
4. Manners & Respect[with King Django]
5. Culture Sucks the Life Out of Me
6. Hang ‘Em All High
7. Goodbye Inspiration[with Joey from the Briggs]
8. 007/Rudi
9. No Way Out
10. RCH Punks
11. Out of Luck
12. No Pasaran!
13. Las Brigadas Internacionales
14. Hard Times
15. Social Control

So, at first I thought I was listening to KLF’s “3am Eternal” when I put this CD in, with the initial sample, and then in kicks the punk rock in a style very similar to old Anti Flag, in both the vocal style, politically charged cliches and overall sound. There’s a few more Dropkick Murphys style songs too (“Faded Dreams”, “Hang ‘em All High”, “Las Brigadas Internationales”), and for these ones the singer affects the appropriate mimicking style of that Hellcat Records style. There’s a few tracks on there that are a little more original, such as “Culture Sucks the Life Out Of Me”, which although based on a distinctly old-school style, has a nice arrangement of gang-shouts and a more non-cliched lyrical subject.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Hellcat Records wannabe band without a nod to some ska/reggae. Obviously I’m being cynical, but it actually does give the album some much needed variety and it does that with an arrangement of “A Message to You Rudy” in “007/Rudi”, with altered lyrics championing a unity between reggae and ska.

So, yeah, it’s loud punk rock and if you’ll probably dig it if you like US Bombs, Dropkicks et al. For me though, there’s just not enough variety in this album to warrant another listen through the whole album (maybe just the odd track here and there). Some of it gets a little tiresome, I mean there’s only so many ‘whoa’s, major-key power chord sequences that always end on the tonic and chorus mimicking lead guitar lines I can take and The Strawberry Blondes certainly do all of those pretty much ad nauseum.

http://www.myspace.com/strawberryblondes