Dead Hearts

Item: No Love, No Hope
Author: Christopher Thomas

No Love, No Hope

(2005)

Reviewed by Christopher Thomas

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Label Reflections RecordsDecapolisSeptember 2005

hardcore melodic hardcore

I'm no hardcore aficionado. There are only a few bands I like that can even be loosely associated with the term. So I'm not going to pretend to know the history or know the various distinguishing features of the many subgenres of hardcore. But I will say this: this record is good.

The songs are super-short, no business hardcore. Yelling/screaming, crowd vocals, lots of violent imagery. This is definitely of the classic hardcore sound, and it reminds me bit of a band like Bane. Fast, loud, hard. These guys mean business. No cheesy guitar leads. No grandiose breakdowns. And no singing. It's all screaming, and if you don't like it, they will eat your face.

Lyrically, the themes include self-examination and tearing down the fakeness in our lives. Very angry, with a good dose of posi. It's generally a bit more "emotional" than I would expect from a band of this type, but you can tell that Vocalist Derek Dole means what he's saying.

The artwork for this release is also really good. At first I was put off by the skulls/hearts combination, because it's the kind of thing that has been done a gazillion times. But everything works so well together, that the cliche is mostly obscured.

This is the kind of hardcore I can sink my teeth into.

3/4