“Energy” would be a fitting one-word description of this demo. Like bullets being fired from an AK-47, the eleven tracks that make up this ferocious piece of music come at you savagely and without mercy. A chaotic and frantic assault of hardcore to the senses, picking up where VOID left off and paying homage to the masters of hardcore. This will make your blood boil.
Imagine if a band worshipped (and studied, or just felt) KORO the way that DISCLOSE was obsessed with DISCHARGE, but in addition to being able to write songs that do justice to all the idiosyncrasies of the 700 Club EP, they also attempted to hypothetically fill in the gaps as to what a few subsequent KORO records might have sounded like if they had expanded on their initial sound (think DIE KREUZEN’s EP to LP transition, for one), but not lost any of what made them vital. I don’t think that’s what NOSFERATU has actively set out to do, and I’m not about to project any mythology here, but it damn sure sounds like it. I believe this LP collects everything not on the Solution A LP, which is not only great to have in one place, but my sole complaint about their Sounds of Hardcore EP was that it was mastered too quietly, and so it’s nice to have it at the volume it deserves. We are lucky to exist at the same time as these manic masters.
Musically, NOSFERATU hasn’t changed much since 2016’s Sounds of Hardcore EP, but the recording on Solution A is better and overall I think these new songs are more dynamic and interesting, even though I love the EP. On Solution A, NOSFERATU plays fourteen songs in seventeen minutes. One side flies by, flip the record, and then the next side ends. Repeat. There are a couple of mid-tempo flourishes here and there and a few moody-ish songs like “Under the Sun,” “The Act of Fear,” and the instrumental outro “Solution Absolute,” but overall this is fast and tightly-wound traditional hardcore. The songs are memorable with neat guitar sounds, drums that rarely stop rolling and galloping, and vocals that are snotty and have lots of attitude and reverb. Tracks like “Dictated in Red,” “Attack,” and “Application of Reason” are likely to be stuck in your head all day after a few listens.
