3 out of 5

Label: Hawthorne Street Records

Produced by: Chris Owens

Sometimes a band comes along – you hear ’em live; you pick up the album on a whim – and you wonder: why isn’t this band a bigger deal? Brain Banger’s hardcore punk swagger is intimidatingly great: the oppressive, always-shouted vocals remind of Harkonen; the way tracks play fast and hard and collide into one another feels like punk from decades back; and there’s a nice grooving hook to most tracks that tickles that Fugazi / DC hardcore bone.

While your brain is trying to figure out who these guys remind you of, you start to glance at the players’ resumes, and: oh yeah, that’s why they’re not a bigger deal: with pedigrees from Breather Resist, Young Widows, Coliseum, and Lords, it clicks that BB is kind of cherry picking from these one-step removed peers, but also not turning those pickings into something greater than the parts’ sums. In other words: those other bands kinda did it better.

That doesn’t make Yellow Belly a bad deal by any means, as the pluses above all remain intact, and Nick Thieneman’s lyrics, while treading familiar post-punk dissenchanted waters, do wander around some interesting – if incomplete images. Most songs arrive with an instantly head-bobbing rhythm; Nick yells with passion; the drums bang on and we get to some good breakdowns, then the band is out and onto the next one before you can assess how effective the first one was. That is the trick of Brain Banger’s approach, but also, ultimately, their limitation, and kind of wrapped up in the cherry picking: as though afraid of the exact comparisons I’m making, the group doesn’t seem confident enough to just let some tracks ride, and take up some more space, and so when some of the best tunes on the album build to an awesome climax… they also just end, without much more to say.

A good summary of the disc as a whole. If you’re a fan of any of the above bands, this album should float through your player at least once. It likely won’t stick, but you’ll get that “if only…” thrill several times throughout its short runtime.