4 out of 5

Label: Acerbic Noise

Producer: Vox Humana?

A dasha’ Dazzling Killmen, swirled with Fugazi, then taking the Nick Sakes a degree further to Sicbay, brewing it all in a hardcore pot, and bingo bango – bottled Vox Humana.  But flavor with some inventiveness and ingenuity, since the influences are there, yet the band is far from a knock-off.  Stomping out of the gate with a low-end heavy rumble, Vox is the most confident sounding of the early Acerbic now-digitally-available stuff, the band oozing together with a punky momentum that rarely belies doubt in structure or style.  ‘Before the Wall’ evokes Killmen’s off-kilter pacing, Vox’s lead singer getting a bit more throaty at moments but nailing the talk / yell thing, lyrics dribbled with aggressive imagery.  Follower ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia’ steps into a groovier Fugazi role, and then the band fuses things for a special hardcore punk blend for the next few tracks.  The ratio of singing to playing is in a great balance for most of the recording, with songs creeping toward being instrumental thrashes before the vocalist will punctuate things with some yells, but the flipside of this is that its hard to rate the effectiveness of the singing in the mix, meaning that it’s hard to say if its used as an effective element in the songs or if the guy’s just shouting ’cause he wants to be heard.  Either way, it truly doesn’t take away from the power of the songs, it’s just not presenting you with quotable gems to scribble on your Trapper Keeper.

All of this goes off without a hitch until the last two 7+ minute tracks.  The pairing of these on the record’s tail end is questionable and really interrupts the flow, perhaps things faring better had they been switched.  ‘The Result of Excess’, penultimate track, being aptly named as it starts off in eye-rolling territory as Vox pulls a Vehicle Birth move and plucks at instruments while the guy just speaks some non-sequitors.  The song makes good on disparate elements when it builds to its instrumental shudder at the end, but its then diluted by the followup ‘Theology From the Perspective of A…’ which doesn’t allow itself to stick to a riff for more than a minute, and doesn’t bother to tie the new riff in.  Both tracks seem like experiments in breaking up the sound.  Only one would’ve been needed to close things out.

But the quality of re-listenableness of what comes before (plus, despite the name-checking, the prior 6 tracks exist in their own world of sound, something most of the early AND stuff doesn’t) far outweighs these final stumbles, especially since the tracks taken on their own aren’t bad.