I saw Pears play live twice and both times I was just awed by the fantastic energy of their live show, mostly thanks to their fantastic frontman Zach Quinn. This new record contains 14 fantastic songs and Pears still outdo themselves with their combination of ferocious and fast hardcore punk mixed with melody and their New Orleans sludgy song parts. The speed, melody and catchy guitar riffs are topped with fantastic Zach˙s vocals and I am still amazed how this guy can transform from angry shouter punk to gentle melodic singer and back to screaming his guts out, with noisy and dischordant riffs suddenly becoming warm and melodic riffing, just to get back to beastly hardcore. All of the songs are just superb, but if I must choose some that would be Comfortably Dumb, Worm and Funerals. Superb album!
Shellz are post hardcore or modern hardcore if you like it, from Germany. This ten songs are done in a best quality way of modern hardcore with punkrock, hardcore and metalcore influences, coupled with some electronics background to couple the atmosphere of the songs. This nothing new or revolutionary, but it is done in a quality and way to appeal me as a music fan, and all of you who read this zine know that I am usually not avid fan of modern style of hardcore. The vocals in the songs vary from screaming and shouted to nice beautiful pop punk clean vocals and I am sucker for such bands whenever I hear one of those. Anyway, my favorite songs on this record are Life Of A Sheep, That˙s What I Need, the title songs. Decent one indeed!
Blacked Out are from Vancouver and this is their new e.p. out with Thousand Islands Records. There are five songs on this e.p. The music of this band is fast energetic hardcore punk, leaning more on melodic side of things, more like skatepunk. But, they are enough technical to satisfy fans of technical skatepunk, yet leaning enough in the nineties old school genre waters, to satisfy also fans of old school melodic punk with some metal thrown here and there in the song structures. For me the best songs on this e.p. that I recommend are I Don˙t Know and Tribalism. Nice one indeed!
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 