Reviews

Amerikan Aesthetics

City of Industry Conspire Conspire Conspire LP

Gasping, anguished and anthemic indie rock hardcore from Seattle. The rock-steady pace is exciting and optimistic, contrasted by the dooming tone of the bass. Guitars play longer than usual bridges that create a more unique landscape of reflection between the chorus moments and attacking vocal verse. Lyrics are confident, romantic in the renaissance sense, and poetic, almost delivered with hip hop flow and NYHC aggression. Parts ACRID grinding doom, FOURHUNDREDYEARS creativity, CAVE IN post-hardcore vibes in all their forms. CITY OF INDUSTRY opens up the flood so you may walk right in and collapses with tidal wave form. Production is pummeling. Toward the end I’m feeling some elements of MORAL SUCKLING and FUCKED UP. To be totally transparent, this is not the style of hardcore or punk I generally go for, but I am thoroughly impressed with the pace of all songs, the meter and the passion in this release. The cover art is romantic again, and well designed from a graphics standpoint. A tapestry of florals, harkening back to my renaissance comment. This may be renaissance-core.

City of Industry False Flowers LP

I confess that I don’t think I spent enough time with this record to really try to capture it with words—but in my defense, I think that False Flowers will keep maturing in its own grooves for many, many listens to come, a sonic fermentation process. It’s easy for bands who are all over the place to sound…well, all over the place. Disjointed. Lacking cohesion. But CITY OF INDUSTRY flows with purpose between monstrously powerful modern hardcore to emotionally introspective to blastbeats to an acoustic piece that closes things like a damn WEAKERTHANS track before exploding into fifteen seconds of raging crust—and it feels natural. This is a record realized; there’s no “why the fuck are they doing that?” but there is plenty of “holy shit, they are doing that!” and it all works. They could have settled for just melting faces, and they would have melted faces. They could have chosen to make their listeners cry, and we would have cried. They could have written a record where all of the kids would have clenched their fists and shouted along to every word while they listened, and we would have clenched and shouted. Instead, they did all of that, and they did a lot more. So I’m just going to leave this here, to be continued.