3 out of 5

Label: Expert Work Records

Produced by: Carl Saff (remastered by)

A solid dose of youthy hardcore, compiled by the caring experts at Expert Work and restored to impressive sleekness and weight by remasterer Carl Saff, Breaker Morant occupy one of those particular spaces in musical history: one in which If You Know, You Know.

I… didn’t know, and thankfully get the chance to learn, thanks to labels like EW bringing some of this stuff to light, but part of being of that of-the-time in crowd is that sometimes the magic doesn’t fully translate after the fact. Which sounds like I’m out to trash the band, but it’s more that Breaker Morant’s sound would become one that we would hear a lot more frequently during the early 00s – post-Fugazi punk, mingling more and more with emo – and get kind of specialized by bands working in Breaker’s space and add even more flavor to it. At the same time, I’d say Breaker Morant existed on the axis between groups like Jawbox streamlining the Dischord sound and bands like mewithoutYou or Thursday taking that J. Robbins crispness, and running with it in particular directions, briefly capturing the zeitgeist; that left some more experimental acts like Breaker hanging out exactly in the middleground highlighted by this discography: the end of the 90s indie rock and grunge; the start of the 2000s poppified hardcore.

Ben Graham’s earnest vocals on Breaker lean us more toward the emo camp, but the lyrics are tighter – less navel-gazey – and the samples used and the breakdowns are very much of the early Dischord school; stepping back: that is sort of the Midwest formula of hardcore, which can’t quite give into the yearning of emo or the bluster of other hardcore scenes, but bands are ready to hold back the tears while they’re throwing down riffs. And though we can absolutely give Saff a ton of credit for getting this recordings up to snuff, there’s only so much he can do, meaning you’ve gotta give it up to a three-man crew of guitar, bass and drums (Sam Dothage, Joshua Browning, Todd Ramsey, respectively) for creating a goddamned amount of power – this really does sound more like a band coming at you with two or more guitars, but nah, it was just an industrious four-piece.

Expert Work furthermore does their usual shtick of going the extra mile with packaging, giving us an expansive booklet with lyrics and some history, lots of flyers, and a fun timeline which shows how many damn bands these young punkers tended to float into and out of along the way.

So while the actual content may not be the most impressive to a brand new listener, the presentation and some consideration of the history adds a lot of weight to it, and makes it a notable chunk of music to be able to experience.