5 out of 5

Label: Hydra Head

Producer: Matt Bayles

I love hearing albums with fresh ears.  I can’t trace my exact path the hardcore, but somewhere along the lines of the instrumental post-rock and punk in my listenings, I kept seeking out something with a bit more of an edge.  But I’d always brushed off hardcore as, I dunno, growly guys.  Cave In was the first band that really opened my ears to the possibilities of the genre, which clued me in to Hydra Head Records, which pointed me to Botch.  And at the time, Antietam had just come out, so I got that, and I got We Are the Romans, and thought I had discovered the holy grail of hardcore.  That album and that EP are technically amazing, the tightest of the tight in terms of mastery over each aspect of the recording – Bayles’s clipped and electronic production style was used to great effect to shear off all the insane licks and beats and vocals leap on the album into exacting edges.  So when I picked up American Nervoso, it just wasn’t as direct sounding.  It’s a rougher recording.

Which it is – it’s a younger Bayles, and a younger band.  So now give my ears several years to warm to hardcore, to understand it in my own right and explore what it has to offer, and re-listen to those Botch albums.  We Are the Romans is still masterful – but the precision of it isn’t as appealing anymore.  Instead, listening to Nervoso, I am blown away by the purity of the recording.  Bayles or the group smartly use a trick that Dave Sardy does on a lot of his hardcore recordings to add some grit – the vocals are masked behind distortion for a lot of the album.  Don’t get me wrong, that dude can shout or growl my head off, but where as Romans hits you with its clean sound, Nervoso is just dirty enough, and the lack of tightness makes it feel like a live recording.  Not that you’d mistake this for lack of tightness if you hadn’t heard Romans – there’s a reason that Botch and Converge and all those bands tied together sorta blew the doors off the scene – it’s not fretboard wankery, it’s just an experimental mashing of chords and time signatures and beats that still really hasn’t been so energetically captured as it was on Nervoso.  Many bands seem like they’re trying to play in this genre, where this album just sounds like it was born for it; like you can’t stop it from being this way.

The “youth” of it also peels back a layer of metaphor to the lyrics, which is actually a good thing.  Romans steps a bit too far, here and there, in trying to be clever with its writing, and again, Nervoso just feels a bit more honest and thus accessible in comparison.  Blah blah blah: music.  Ears: bleeding.  Thanks.