When you review something, it’s almost like the language is prescribed. You choose words and phrases from a vast catalogue of appropriate clichés. So when ‘urgency’ popped into my head as an indicator of the record I did a double take. Urgency always gets bandied about when hardcore records are reviewed. I often wonder what it means. I guess that in this recording the urgency is Cry Wolf have transferred the frantic delivery of their live performance into permanence. Basically, it’s an impressive ten song outburst distilled into a mere thirteen minutes.
Preamble aside, the recording itself is solid, violent and raw without being messy. The guitars bite and sting while the vocals punctuate through the layers perhaps a little too loudly. However, in that loudness, the lyrical content is unmissable, unavoidable. It’s great to hear drums that sound like they have actually been played, with dynamics that are natural and not automated. My only real criticism of the recording is that the bass is lost and because of this the mix sounds a little top heavy.
Lyrically we hear a litany of social and personal failings, spoke through a narrative of disgust. At times it’s pretty powerful, but their real strength is the originality of the imagery. It creates a new perceptive on the familiar.
My favorite songs, Satisfaction and The Push are a fresh look at the nature of man, obsession, addiction and discontentment. In Satisfaction’s final lines it sums “I’m the last ride home, you missed me.” Meanwhile, The Push personifies human obsession. “Even when he slept, even in his dreams, he buried himself further, and the water rose, he drowned, a worm, alone.” It’s the honesty coupled with the imagery that sets the lyrics apart. That and the conscious avoidance of stale hardcore rhetoric. I do however wonder why the qualifying and best line of Parables is absent from the recording but present in the book.
The guitar work in similarly innovative. Minor chords, punctuated stabs and metallic riffs give the impression of deliberate constructions rather than accidental composition. Added to this the strength of the drumming, it becomes quite hard to critique. Reminding me at times of One Must Fall, from blast beats to fills, the drums carry the recording where at times the guitar is lost.
The artwork / design adds the finishing touch. Simple and bleak , it thematically compliments the whole package.
It’s a 4/5 for me.
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