Alfred discusses and reviews various punk, hardcore and beyond from the 21st century
 

Sup. I'm Alfred.

I making this thread mostly to justify me going through my entire music collection and listening to all of my 2000's punk, hardcore, subgenres, etc in alphabetical order. I hope to rediscover a lot of this music along the way, and hopefully people will enjoy reading my thoughts.

I realize that I already have a member's journal, but I like to think of my member's journal as a more broad, neat collection of reviews and discussions. This thread will be focused solely on punk and hardcore music of the 21st century, and will be pretty no-frills as far as the writing and organization goes.

Expect something shortly.

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I'll be kicking this thread off with A Flower Kollapsed's album "Orsago". A Flower Kollapsed is (according to their last.fm page) an "emo violence" band from Italy. Their name, song titles and genre are all stupid, but their music itsself is stupid fun. It's all over the place: random outbursts of screaming, dissonant guitars, and some delicious three-chord skull-crushing riffs beneath some dude screaming about flowers or girls or orange juice with Predator. In between these minute-and-a-half outbursts are some odd ambient? tracks that go nowhere and ultimately serve as filler. They fortunately don't last long, and the real deep sh*t gets brought back soon enough.

A Flower Kollapsed ultimately don't bring much new to the table with this album, but "Orsago" is a pretty fun, loud, dissonant, and hard rocking screamo album while it lasts. You're not going to want to give it many repeat listens, but it can't hurt to give these Red Bull-chugging emo kids from Italy a little bit of your time.

I give it 3 stars of David out of 5
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3500th post

Sounds interesting, DLing now. Looking forward to more reviews.

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The next album under examination is A Wilhelm Scream's "Ruiner". A Wilhelm Scream perform a melodic, intricate, often poppy style of punk rock complete with enough gang vocals and whoa-ohs to satisfy all types of punk fans. They're a hard band to pin down though. The glorious opener "The King Is Dead" sounds like an apolitical Propagandhi song, whereas "In Vino Veritas II" can hang with the catchiest of commercial pop-rock tunes.

That being said, not being able to figure the band out should not be mistaken for them being diverse. It's more a question of "how seriously should I be taking these guys?" When they moan about being "so f@#&ing bored" I can't help but shrug at their childishness whereas other times this immaturity can be a lot of fun such the random shouts of "F*CK!" in between repititions of "The king is dead!". And then they get a little more serious with "Me vs. Morrissey in the Pretentious Contest" where they drop odd one-liners like "Tell me a doll once came dead from above" followed by a bunch of possibly metaphoric bullsh*t.

In the end there will be a high correlation between what your expectations are and the amount of enjoyment you extract. Ignore its polish, the stupidity of half of it, and the lack of direction. Just sit back and sing along.

I give this one 3 Vans Slip-ons out of a possible 4
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I have never heard any of Against Me!'s albums previous to "New Wave" but the general conensus is that they're better compared to the newer "mainstream stadium rock sh*t". Now, I can feel these fans. I'm a much bigger fan of Alexisonfire's older, rawer hardcore sound as opposed to their new, straight-up, more mainstream-friendly sound, and I'd imagine that's the same type of thing Against Me fans think. I guess, yet again, it's all a matter of expectations. I was expecting a collection of punky singalong songs and that's exactly what I got.

Lyrically, the album is harsh and literal, but musically, most of the bands that flood MTV couldn't do a better job of bringing the catchiness. The lead single, "Thrash Unreal" is one of the most infectious songs of the previous decade. Even the more punk-based songs like "American Abroad" and the title track bring in the hooks.

So I'm gonna go ahead and recommend that everyone listens to this album first or else you'll be like their other fans, bitching about how they've "sold out". Those people need to move on. This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb anyone?

I give it one Etnies shoe out of a possible Vans.
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Dude nice thread I like your taste lots.

Thanks James! Very high compatibility on last.fm I see. :)

Yes same favourite band so it's a given. *high five*