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.