I heard of Another Victim from listening to The Oath That Keeps Me Free . Between two of the songs, Karl Buechner thanks a number of bands, one of which was Another Victim. So when I saw this EP for sale somewhere I immediately snapped it up. It was right along the lines of the music I was most enjoying at the time, something like a slowed down Hatebreed, but with a bunch of straightedge lyrics.
This is still decent. A little slow perhaps, but Nothing amazing certainly, but I certainly enjoyed listening to it, and listening did not come with the twinges of shame that seem to have been so common lately on this project. That doesn't really sound like a ringing endorsement, and I suppose it's not, but given the right mood I'm totally down for Apocalypse Now.
This one had been on my list stretching back to day 0 when I was still finding out about bands from Victory Style. The song Systems Overloaded was on there alongside a bunch of others I liked that I have already mentioned. Once I picked it up, I discovered that Systems Overload was my favorite Integrity record. It some really fast songs and some of the slower ones, and what it lacked in spookiness compared to Seasons In The Size Of Daysit definitely made up for in fury.
I love Integrity, which is probably at this point abundantly clear, so getting to listen to this instead of thisis great. I might prefer other Integrity albums at this point, but I'm not sure. Systems Overload is a fantastic addition. Charlie Manson!
Breed The Killers was the first (non-live) Earth Crisis album to be released after I started listening them. The anticipation with which I waited for this release was massive. It came out in September of 1998, but I don't think any of the stores in Winnipeg got it in until at least October. I eventually managed to pick it up at Sam the Record Man.
I was not disappointed. I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to this album. Lots of my favorite things, most notably straightedge subject matter, but now with much more vaguely revolutionary rhetoric to "inspire" a teenage boy, and even a little millennial fear-mongering! Great! Even a good re-recording of Ecocide from the All Out War EP. It was all still in line with what one would expect Earth Crisis to produce, and I certainly was not looking for them to reinvent the wheel.
Too bad it didn't have the staying power. Destroy the Machines and Gomorrah's Season Ends were both better albums with better songs, and it is almost certain that if I find myself in the mood to spin some Earth Crisis it won't be this album heard from the speakers. Although I am enjoying this right now, even if it is largely for some nostalgia value.
Broadening my horizons by checking out the Equal Vision Records website, I learned of a number of interesting bands, which is how I came to be aware of Converge. What an improvement over the last few records i had bought! Converge were like nothing I had ever heard before, especially compared to the other bands from Boston that I was familiar with like Slapshot and Blood For Blood. The songs were varied and exciting, the vocals were frantic, and it was scary sounding. Not in the Integrity way of apocalyptic visions and heresy, but more like rabidity, less directed, more wanton.
This album is still a favorite, having bought this not long after its release, it's nice to be able to say I was on board for at least one band that almost a decade and a half later are still respectable. Converge are critical darlings today, and they deserve it. Thirty four records into this, they play a big part in redeeming my young record collection.
Eventually, Victory Records did release For Those Who Were Crucified. So ten records and about 5 months after picking up Truth In The Age Of Lies I grabbed this record, some time in the fall of 1998.
Compared to their previous effort, this one was somewhat more consistent in its tempo. Instead of the longer passages of slow moving rumble, this played a little more like a slower thrash record. The increase in speed really tickled my eardrums, but I liked the vocals a little less. It was mostly just their lead vocalist and his fairly one-dimensional squawk, and very little of the heavy gang vocals and death metallish growls.
This is still a good metalcore album, though it still doesn't compare to great examples like Hatebreed's Satisfaction Is The Death Of Desire. One thing that is annoying now that did not really bug me before is the fact that three of the songs on this album are just re-recordings of songs from the previous one, including the last album's title track! It seemed like a lot of hardcore bands did this sort of thing then. In any case, thumbs up for this one, I still listen to Burning Season once in a while.
A little foreshadowing from a couple of posts ago suggested that I had later purchased further Vision of Disorder albums. Well, it wasn't too long after buying their self-titled album that I picked up Imprint.
For some reason I did not like this one as much. Something about the production I think. Too crisp or something. This meant that whenever I was in the mood for VoD I more than likely did not end up listening to Imprint, preferring instead their self-titled release.
I am not sure why this was the case, because Imprint is actually quite a bit better. There is no problem with the production in relation to their earlier album. This sounds better. The singer's clean vocals, which I criticized before, are actually much improved here, and the non-clean vocals are better too. The songwriting is actually much more interesting as well. So while it is not exactly the type of thing I really like listening to these days, I enjoyed this and I can appreciate it a lot more now than I ever did back then.
Oh boy. I bought this on the same day as the last record, which makes my track record for that particular day not so good. Yet again, the Victory Records catalog is to blame.
This one too would take some getting used to due to some awful clean vocals. Other than that there was definitely a real tough-guy thing going on, which may not have been all talk. There were some pictures of some pretty huge dudes in the liner notes. Some of the lyrics were appealing, like Inbred Hate, a song about lynching racists (although the guy does say "yankee doodle style"), but some were even too laughable to a sixteen year old boy. Do Or Die is a good example. It seems to be about playing cards, but you know, tougher.
I cannot really say that this was a great choice. I must have been desperate at this point in life for some new music, because apparently my standards were pretty low. Enjoy this video I discovered while writing this entry.
I bought this Vision of Disorder CD around the beginning of the summer of 1998. It was the first record in my collection on Roadrunner records, and I had heard about the band from a dubbed cassette given to me by a friend. It was some sort of live New York hardcore compilation, but considering the representatives for NYHC were these guys, and I think 108 and No Redeeming Social Value it was perhaps a little misleading. Two songs on that cassette that are also on this CD are D.T.O. and Suffer.
I remember liking the vocals. Well sort of. I liked the screams, but the clean vocals took a little getting used to. Nonetheless I listened to this a lot that summer and was later inspired to buy other records by these guys.
If you were to guess based solely on the album cover and band name you might think that this is not a very good album, and you would pretty much be correct. It definitely holds some nostalgia value, but the clean vocals really are bad. I can get behind some well done vocals of any stripe, but these are really no good, and the songs aren't quite strong enough to make up for it. Certainly not the worst stop on my adventure so far, but let's just say that I would have liked at the time that I really liked this to think that my taste was pretty good.
Another Victory Records release, this one came from an Integrity side project called In Cold Blood. It was also the fourth CD in a row whose name or title had something to do with blood. These guys sounded a fair bit like Integrity, but a little less metallic. They also had a bunch of songs that were way shorter, in the tradition of proper hardcore. In fact this album took only a little longer to play through than it took to write this paragraph.
Short as it is it was also pretty good. I had not listened to this in a while, but every once in a while one of these songs comes up in a shuffle, and I never skip it. The album is short enough and good enough that I'm going through it a second time. It is always nice to listen to something you got when you were teenager and not cringe.
As I recall, I got this a day after my birthday, from a different store that I wasn't able to make it to on the big day. Yet again, the Victory Records website directed me towards this. Boston hardcore with a bitterness reminiscent of Slapshot but without all the straightedge and hockey references. A bitterness that was somewhat comical even to the surly teenager that I was, so cartoonishly angry were the lyrics. My crustiness prevailed however and I managed to take these guys (mostly) seriously.
Leaning more toward the hardcore end of the music I was listening to, Blood For Blood was close enough to punk to appeal even to some of my less hardcore-inclined friends like Jules. Somewhat appealing anyway.
This is still a pretty fun listen. It does the trick that it is supposed to do, but I would not say that I would go out of my way to listen to it very frequently. Some of these slower songs are pretty terrible, but otherwise this record can still make me smile.
The last of the records from my sixteenth birthday bonanza was this doozy. I had heard a couple of Bloodlet tracks on both of the Victory Style compilations that I had, and in particular I had enjoyed Eucharist, which is found on this album. The rest of Entheogen did not disappoint. I really liked the super riffy songs and the darkness of it was something like what I found with Integrity. Too bad I was such a boring jerk and was mostly interested in things with lyrics I could get behind, otherwise I might have appreciated Entheogen a bit more. Most of the songs on here grabbed me, and whenever I made a new mixtape I would invariably include a different song to go along with the usual suspects from other albums.
I don't know why I don't listen to this more often now. It is actually really good. As I listen to it right now, every time a new song starts I think to myself "oh yeah this one!" and I am never disappointed. Heavy! It is always satisfying to listen to something years later and to enjoy it more than when you first picked it up. I will have to put this in the rotation more often.
Certainly my least favorite of the treats from my sixteenth was this record of dubious worthiness. Often likened to Earth Crisis, except with swedish women. I had heard Doughnuts songs on the Victory Style compilations and thought that the novelty of an all female group did not outweigh the fact that they were not really that good. Then again, Victory signed plenty of bands that weren't great, and I'm pretty sure they have kept that tradition alive to this day so perhaps someone at the label heard something I did not.
I did like a couple of songs of theirs in spite of the vocals sounding either like a woman pretending to be a man having a heart attack, or a woman having a heart attack pretending to be a man. A subtle distinction I know, but I could not decide. One of the songs I liked, called Impure, was not even on Feel Me Bleed, but on some other release that I never got. In any case, I gave this record a chance.
It should be obvious how much I liked this since apparently when putting my entire collection onto my iPod I did not even deign to include this on it. As such I didn't even get to listen to the whole record. Instead I listened to a couple of songs on YouTube, and yeah, I can't say my opinion has changed.
I love Integrity right? So why not just grab this without looking right? Well that's what I did. It was a compilation of alternate recordings of a bunch of Integrity songs from Seasons In The Size Of Days and a bunch of earlier demos. A bunch of the songs on here were ones that I did not have elsewhere and the opening track, a version of ATF Assault had Lemmy from Motorhead introducing the track, which is kind of cool. Other than a few tracks like Kingdom Of Heaven, March Of The Damned, and Rebirth this is mostly stuff I already had or had heard somewhere.
As I have mentioned before, I still really love listening to Integrity. There is some good stuff here, but it is a bit too much of a mishmash to really get played instead of one of their proper albums. Except maybe the last track, called Those Who Fear Tomorrow which, although I don't know if it is the original recording, is all good and this is the only recording of it I have.
Further joy on my sweet sixteenth, I picked up Everlasting due in large part to my love of Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent. Too bad I didn't like this EP quite as much. That being said I really enjoyed it, even though it was perhaps a little less heavy. Too bad I was so single-minded at age sixteen otherwise I might have listened to this more, though the lyrics were attractive to my teenage sense of the world being unfair.
Short and sweet this thing plays through in under twenty two minutes. Punkier than I liked back then, I can enjoy this a little more musically as my heart has mellowed, and a little less lyrically as the same heart has hardened somewhat against their teenage-pinko politics with time.
Birthday disc number three. Like Hatebreed, I heard of these guys first through the Victory Records website. Victory was set to release For Those Who Were Crucified in the near future, but this Gain Ground release just happened to be sitting in the metal section at The Cellar and so voracious as I was for new music, my fistful of dollars and I picked it up.
Definitely somewhat akin to Hatebreed in that they had much more of a metal influence, this got lots of play back then. This was probably the heaviest thing I had, at least in the guitars department, though the vocals did sap some of the thickness. A little screechy, except for a few bits featuring guest vocalists doing something like an actual death metal growl, which was a novel thing to my ears.
I had not listened to this all the way through for years, and I actually really enjoyed it this time around. Today I can appreciate the more ponderous, more atmospheric bits that as a teenager only slowed me down. Some of the songs still do drag a little, but I am enjoying this, and I found it tough to choose a song to include!
Another 16th birthday present to myself, this one I saw in the Victory catalog, I believe touted as an inspiration to Earth Crisis. More militant vegan straightedge hardcore was pretty appealing to me at the time. Sadly this may have influenced Earth Crisis, but it's not nearly as good. The first five songs were alright, but the rest of the tracks were older material and they sounded pretty bad. That coupled with buying this on the same day I did the Hatebreed album from the previous post meant that this fell a bit by the wayside.
Thirteen years later it has not aged well. That is not to say that it that I hate it, but it has not grown on me at all. The vocals are pretty terrible and the songs are boring, but those were the problems with it in the first place, so I guess it has not really gotten any worse.
Check out: Blood Green
We reach my sixteenth birthday. Being a teenager, I received cash and very promptly spent all of it on CDs. At this point the internet was starting to be useful and so I had found out about some new bands via the Victory Records website, which is how I came to hear of Hatebreed.
These guys turned out to be a bit of a big deal, but at the time I had no idea. All I knew was that I liked what I was hearing. Thick guitars and heavier sounding vocals, but with discernible lyrics, songs that were short and sweet, and consistently faster than anything that I was really listening to already. This fast became one of my favorite albums to listen to, and they quickly challenged Earth Crisis for the number one seat.
I still listen to this album all the time, and it is still my favorite of theirs. This holds up to the test of time way better than anything (except maybe some Integrity) I have previously mentioned. Start to finish.
So I had been given some dub of some New York hardcore compilation, and 108 was on there. Whatever was on that tape I did not find on One Path For Me Through Destiny. I figured I'd probably like anything. Turned out that;
1) This is a live recording
2) This is terrible
So whatever it was that attracted me to this band in the first place was sorely lacking here. Not that I only listened to it once and never spun it again, but considering in particular what was to be my next acquisition this did not see a lot of action.
Listening to this today, it is only worse than it was when I was 15 and a whole lot dumber. So much cringing at all this krishnacore nonsense but I got all the way through it.
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