4 out of 5

Label: Equal Vision Records

Produced by:

If you’re a follower of my reviews – which I realize is a silly statement, given that we can consider the entire music (and, arguably literary) industry as being held up and guided by my very valuable words, a factual statement I’m sure I in no way need to prove – you’ll have heard me question, on occasion: have I forgotten how to listen to stuff? Like, I’ll go through a run of bands who I’ve read good things about, and sampled tracks from and get some positive vibes, and have heard some respected opinion-havers opining on said bands’ awesomeness… and then I’ll get the album in hand, and I just don’t get it. Like it won’t be bad, but I’m not able to hear what others are, or even really tap in to whatever I heard in my initial sampling. So with some decades of collecting behind me, and having officially aged into a bracket where I can refer to “the kids,” there can be a looming question: am I maybe just getting too old? Like I’ve hit my limit for appreciating new tunes, and my brain will just short circuit to hearing echoes of stuff from the 90s?

Nah, we’re all good. Bitter Branches exist, they are awesome, and all is well.

Now, granted, the Bitter Branches crew is made up of folks who date back to some of the times I’m talking about, but they’re also being discussed / written about in those same places as the bands with which I’m not connecting, so sometimes… you just need the reminder of what that experience; of actually feeling the music. (And like… I guess people can have different tastes or something, I don’t really get it.)

On the single for ‘Along Came a Bastard,’ I remarked that the song felt like the group couldn’t find its ending. Recontextualized as the opener for debut full length ‘Your Neighbors Are Failures,’ it makes so much sense: it’s stuttering, then explosive announcement of disgust with the pretendments of society is very much structured as a lead-in to the nine further invective-laden takedowns to follow. While there is definitely a version of the song that builds and then explodes, ‘Failures’ is very much about paralleling passion and disappointment, with the latter represented by singer Tim Singer’s occasional relapse from shouting to rambling; or the flashes of “hope” found when the group bridges some post-punk rocking to indie rock asides.

The latter – occasional moments where the blast of hardcore peels back – is a definite feature-not-bug of the album, and has an absolute plus in that it provides a great juxtaposition for the songs to bounce off of, into those screaming conclusions that ‘Bastard’ avoids (and kudos to BB for also not abusing that structure), but the minus is that these moments aren’t fully wound in to the overall flow of the music, meaning tracks can lose me as soon as they divert. But again: the bounce back is intense, so it’s a tradeoff.

Musically, BB does inevitably have some Deadguy influence thanks to Singer’s vocal energy / sound guiding things, but the music crosses over from Deadguy’s punkier rushes to thundering rock a la Nomeansno, to – and I say this as a compliment – even some funk-metal elements of something like Orange 9mm. It is a raw sound, given sharpest teeth by some really wrecked, angry lyrics.

And since the kids are liking this, but olds like me are still digging it, that seems like a good sign that this is a band to keep track of, and watch how they continue to prop up classic hardcore sounds while paving paths for new ones.