Cold World – Dedicated To Babies Who Came Feet First

Upon the release of No Omega kids went nuts, I didn’t understand, it was just their old songs and the 2 songs from the War Hungry split. Keeping this in mind, I wasn’t about to get all hard and stoked on their newest release, but still , I checked it out giving it the rightful chance it deserved. Cold World has an interesting attitude towards hardcore, by using an urban attitude they get the chance to express themselves using the polar opposite of hardcore, mixing in hip-hop cuts the album has an overall chiller feel to it. Although the band has a clear love for hip-hop, they never forget the words of Slapshot:

“Hip-hop and hardcore, thats so fucking gay
Crossover sucks, crossover sucks”.

In all honesty, this album is great, I had extremely low hopes for it, and they were fucking shattered, its reminicent of Ice Grillz but is much better produced, has more technical parts, and hey, lets be honest, some great mosh parts. Alot of the album has a little bit of a d-beat influence, but being Cold World, is definitely not a d-beat record. They have began to do a little of singing, some of it is really awkward, but some fits really well (see track “Boom Bye Bye”). It is a heavy record and I would seriously compare it to an Integrity album, Humanity Is The Devil imparticular, it has that same, deep and fast kid of feel. If you were any kind of fan of Cold World, this will not disappoint, and anyone who was not impressed at all by Ice Grillz, give them another chance with this. Don’t listen to the track “Whagwan”, it is just upsetting.

Growing Up

Everything we do is one of two things, action or reaction, do whatever it takes to be both, never be silenced, never let someone else tell you what to believe. We are who we are and noone knows whats best for us except ourselves. Overcome your obstacles, your fears, your greatest failures, be something you never thought you could be. Destroy the walls around you, fight anything that gets in your way, bite the hand that fed you, kill everyone.

The Standard Reaction

It will never seem to lose the humour when someone asks me, “What kind of music do you listen to?”, “hardcore and punk”, I usually reply. They seem to be fine with it, and upon offering them a taste, they are more than willing. As the headphones slide on to their head, the same words are always spoken, “Not too loud”, accordingly, I turn it down a little bit. As the reverb at the beginning of a song, a cringing face is made, almost out of disgust, the face itself speaks the mind of the person, “How can you listen to this?”, which are not surprisingly the next few words out of their mouth. As the headphones are returned, they are accompanied by a small giggle and then it is over, the same thing that happens every single time. It will never lose its humour to me and it will never be disrespectful or annoying.

New Lows

Knowing that at the end of the work day I am going to go to a show and have the glorious chance to lose my mind with my friends is the best feeling in the world. When a band like New Lows come, you know it is going to be a good fuckin’ show. Accompanied by Eating Glass, four Molested Youth songs and the debut of Come Clean. New Lows set up and got ready with could be percieved as a sort of innocence, as if, noone knew what was about to transpire. As the few first notes were played, it began, one of the best sets I have ever had the pleasure to see, there was mosh, literally the entire set, from beginning to end, with each hard note, and every breakdown. Two girls even got their push mosh on, which by any standards was unreal, and before we knew it, the set was over. I personally dont listen to New Lows, but what a fun band, and what a fucking hard band. It is rare that I want to see a band badly that I don’t listen to, but I would love to see this band again…

WORD.

Offsides, Connecticut Hardcore

As a 17 year old kid, I am just that, a kid, and I love to have fun, I love fun music, and I love having a great fucking time at a show, and a lot of bands don’t do that, they just play their set and look hard. Offsides is a hardcore band from Connecticut, plain and simple, hardcore music in its most purest amazing form. With unreal similarities to Fired Up, they still add an unreal flair to their music doing so with speed, strong emotion and a female singer. This band knows whats up, great attitudes, good music and an unreal live performance. One thing I love most about this band is the age range of 16 years to 26 years, these guys still have a teenagers mentality and it is amazing to be able to relate to these guys. They deserve 100x more credit than they will ever get, order their EP from RevHQ here or buy it from them on their current tour with No Harm Done.

New Found Glory – Tip Of The Iceberg

For many hardcore kids, the extent of pop punk that they listen to is some old Lifetime records, but with this album New Found Glory shows that hardcore can be more poppy than that. From the poppy breakdowns to the wonderfully executed Lifetime and Gorilla Biscuits cover, this is more of just a fun record, that hard dudes can have fun to when they listen to it. It has the standard pop that New Found Glory obviously possesses, but adds a little more of a hard personality to the music, as noted on the track Dig My Own Grave, with a decently heavy breakdown and more aggressive vocals than usual at certain points. This record is overall much faster than the usual New Found Glory record, which is important to note because this is not the usual, New Found Glory wanted to record a hardcore record that would go back to their roots and they did a great job. The aforementioned Lifetime cover of Cut The Tension is probably one of my favourite hardcore covers ever. All and all if I rated things on a scale this would be high but not too high…Fun band, legit band, good music. Keep in mind this record was released on Bridge 9 and is available in their webstore.

Oh, and the other half of this release, The International Superheroes of Hardcore…. its just not good.

RAH – Intelligent Design

It is such an amazing sight to see a local band do such amazing and progressive work as a group, RAH is the definition of progression while keeping firm roots. July 5, RAH played their record release show with Forfeit at Studio BLR and fucking ripped it, hard. Upon beginning this record, you get what you would expect from any hardcore band, pissed off music, but RAH does it beautifully and not with too much anger and most definitely a side of fun. Ripping guitars and dirty vocals make this record sound so great, as displayed on the song Reality Check which begins sounding like an Iron Age song but quickly picks up into their own brand of thrashy hardcore with obvious infulences from Judge. Their sound is fast enough to make you want to move across the floor and the their preformance is great enough to make you want to stand and watch the whole set. RAH is what hardcore is about to me, cool guys, making great music who just want to be heard, so much so they are willing to let you download the record for free(click the cover image above). This is sincerely one of the best local hardcore records I have ever heard. Whether you download or buy the 7″ from the band, make sure you check it out, make sure you check out the track Time Will Tell, the angriest sounding tune on the record and I promise, you will not stop nodding your head the entire time. Case and point, this band is doing what it takes these days to get their name out there, and they don’t play too many shows, but when they do, they knock it out perfectly. Check this band out, buy a 7″, come see them play, support them.

www.myspace.com/wearerah

Intro/Ceremony Interview

I know a small number of you who will read this have gotten your hands on one of my print zines by the same name, alas, I can’t afford to do it anymore, the time and monetary investment is just not possible at this time. So this is my “Webzine”, I will post some good stuff on here, I promise, such as what follows…

Ceremony came to Toronto with Sabertooth Zombie and Life Long Tragedy on June 1, it was an unreal show, each one of us was soaked in sweat and emotion jumping over one another to get the chance to scream the words. It seemed almost every single body in the place was there for Ceremony, with each and every person in sight, losing their fucking mind when they began playing. It’s hard to express how I feel and how I know everyone else feels when you can go off like this, you don’t care what anyone else thinks, and you have no intention on slowing down. If you read the interview with Ceremony in the print edition, it was with Ryan, as Ross explained off the record, they used to do interviews like complete jokes but have since stopped, Ryan didn’t get the memo, so I asked all the same questions to Ross. This is an interview with Ross.

Who are you and what do you do in the band?

My name is Ross J. Ferrar and I do the vox in the band, and I do the lyric writing, some of the art, most of the conceptual work really.

When you started this band did you have any real goals in mind?

Not really, when we started the band we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do with it, originally in the very very beginning it was going to be called Violent World, which is a take off on The Misfits but we decided to change that. We were going to play slower music too, like more sludgier kind of New York kind of slow hardcore, but then we changed that, and we were like lets just do fast hardcore, just do old school type of shit, and that was sort of the start of Ceremony. You know the EP has slow songs and fast songs, Kersed was kind of the beginning of Violent World, but then we wanted to do different shit like, Its Going To Be A Cold Winter, thats when we wanted to start doing more thrashy music so from then on we started to do some more thrashy music, and we kinda wanted to keep it fast and agressive we do slow stuff of course but we like to keep it fast.

Playing music as pissed off as you do you have to have some sort of inspiration and source of your anger?

I do most of the lyric writing like I said, and I’m not a very angry person most of the time, I can’t really…the muse for the music is more when I am in certain times in my life, if I am going through hard times, I will write about Ceremony, I don’t really write about anything in ceremony when I am in a better place and have a good piece of mind, a lot of the music has been written while I was in jail…for various crimes, and thats kinda the best way to do it, its mostly times of desperation when im writing lyrics and doing stuff like that, Anthony writes stuff all the time because hes a musical genius, but lyrically its mostly societal shit and the government and religion and all the shit you read about in general.

You don’t tour a lot, but when you do its with sweet bands, what your favourite tour you have been on and what made it so rad?

Favourite tour is the tour we are on right now because we are with all of our best friends from the city we grew up in North Bay, we’ve only played about 7 shows but its still the best tour because we are surrounded by the people we love and we get to have alot of fun and fuck around all day, its great.

How do you personally feel about downloading music?/ people downloading your music?

Nah, I don’t care about all that.

Whats your favourite album right now?

Probably the beatles sgt. Pepper, because i dont have an ipod or anything right now, so I’m just kinda listening to everyones music on tour but thats probably been a solid album for the last 3 months.

Whats the worst thing about hardcore right now?

I don’t really know, I’m not really political in hardcore or in the scene or anything.

Whats the best thing about hardcore right now?

Probably Sabertooth Zombie, they are very much an inspiration to me, being around Cody the lead singer, he is very much a muse in my life, and he is very eclectic and excentric and articulate and all that shit. He is a very amazing front man and person.

Last words?

Still Nothing Moves You.

We then got up and commenced walking back towards the venue, on the way he explained the whole joke interview thing and how they did it because Black Flag used to to it. Then a few sets later Ceremony went on, this is what happened…