This is super-tight Canadian hardcore with vocals one imagines might be described as “melodic.” That, I’m afraid, is the good news. The rest of the news goes like this: Well, for starters, the drums often do that thing where they just start playing twice as fast as everything else, for whatever reason. That doesn’t come off as much more than a beacon of contrived intensity when NOFX does it, and it doesn’t fare much better here. Next, the song structures and chord progressions appear to be determined in real time by some sort of algorithm based on a continually updating random number generator—they’re constantly shifting around and flying all over the place, with little apparent rhyme or reason. From a standpoint of ramming “we can do this and you can’t” down a listener’s throat, I guess it’s a great success. From a standpoint of creating a song to which I’d actually feel like listening, it is markedly less so. All I can think of is that it must suck to go to practice and try to learn how these songs go. But, one person’s meat is another person’s moo goo gai pan, so who am I to be critical? In the end, I think I’ll just say that they sound like a band All would have taken on tour as an opening act in like 1993; swoon or cringe as your tastes dictate. BEST SONG: I honestly have no clue. BEST SONG TITLE: Either “Intensive Suicide Encouragement” or “Thoughts and Prayers for Spaghetti and Meatballs.” FANTASTIC AMAZING TRIVIA FACT: The logo on the cover looks chillingly like the old Michael Schenker Group logo. –Rev. Nørb (Wasted Wax, wastedwaxrecords.com)