Stand & Fight

Look at the album cover and title (upraised hands emblazoned with permanent-marker Xs, guys with buzz cuts gathered around the singer's outstretched microphone, expressions of fierce intensity on their faces) and you think you know what to expect: straight-edge hardcore on the old-school tip. But the music is actually a little more complicated than that (not much more, but a little more): despite all the straight-edge iconography on the cover, Stand & Fight's music feels a bit more like metal than hardcore, without metal's bloviating excesses (average song length is about one minute and 20 seconds). There are plenty of wide-open headlong dashes, but also lots of palm-muted power chords and a few moments of almost moderate tempo. That's more true of the first six tracks, which actually form the main body of this EP; the next six tracks are taken from a 2002 demo and hew a bit more closely to hardcore orthopraxis. Highlights? Hard to say, but "Excuses" thrashes especially convincingly and the rhythmic change-ups on "Pressure Builds" are worth noting. It's all been said before, of course, but then that's true of most music.