Melodic/pop punk legends New Found Glory released new acoustic album with Revelation Records. These legends made some milestone albums, covered soundtrack songs in punk versions, and now it is time for most personal acoustic album which contains 7 new songs and 7 renditions of old classics. I will concentrate on new songs here because I think this is the most personal work to date, due to serious illness of one of the band members. These songs are full of hope, full of wishing to get healthy again, yet remaining in mind that battle might be lost. Songs like ‘Get Me Home’ and especially ‘Watch The Lilies Grow’ brought goosebumps and tears to my eyes, because I am currently also ill and sometimes see no way out if and it eats me down and there are better days, but also bad days too. But, never lose hope and never lose the will to fight and love like ‘Kiss The Floor’ says. This album is full of love, hope, most heartfelt personal emotions and lyrics, so I love every single minute of it.
Time for a bit of melodic hardcore to grace the pages of this webzine. Fucked Up are hailing from Ontario, Canada and they recently released their new album containing ten songs. Although the name already says it, this is hardcore par excellence. Fucked Up play their vision of melodic hardcore punk with many stop and go change of tempo, modern hooks and melodies but remaining with both feet solid in punk rock roots rather than metallic hardcore that more and more takes over the scene these days. This vision of hardcore is harsh in vocals, but also melodic and up tempo and sometimes made me fell good and filled me with energy listening to this one. Songs like ‘I Think I Might Be Weird’, ‘Nothing’s Immortal’ or ‘One Day’ won me over with their humor, real life lyrics to which you can relate, auto irony of sorts and above all great songwriting. This is a good band and good record.
We didn’t have a Finnish band for a while here on the pages of this webzine. Anzillu are from Helsinki area and they formed in 2019. After four singles this is their debut full length opus. This one contains 9 songs. The music is basically thrash metal, but so much more in these songs. ‘Needles (On My Nerves)’ is a classic thrash metal 80-ies influenced song, but I was surprised and blown away by hitter ‘Mental Graveyard’ having blast beats and aggression of blackened thrash metal. Songs are raw and brutal, with screaming vocals but also angry shouting fine vox done by Teemu Kemppainen, with chainsaw buzzing guitars, speed, but also couple of modern groove thrash hooks and catchy melodies here and there, like only Finnish bands can do. Lyrics deal with some personal surviving themes, anger and state of the world, anti corporate and about war, also they are pretty misanthropic and self nihilistic and that is what I like about this band even more. Also, being a thrash metal record, there are blistering guitar solos, courtesy of guitars Jesse Kämäräinen and Sami Katajainen. This is an all out aggressive thrash metal attack so have a listen and go get this one.
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