Scream Over The Silence? With Gel, Knocked Loose, Fire Toolz, Thotcrime, & SeeYouSpaceCowboy: Rapid Fire Reviews

It's that time of year when I apologize to some of the more outside-the-box music genres for focusing a little too much on pop, rap, indie, rock, and R&B. Let's give both hardcore and screamo, and some records that exist within the folds of both, a chance. 

Persona EP - Gel

Last year Gel rode in a huge wave of hype to deliver one of my favorite debut album of 2023. When they the pummeling single Mirage earlier this year it made it seem like they would continue climbing that mountain whenever their next project arrived. That next project is Persona, a 5-track and 13-minute EP that's only a few minutes shorter than the album that preceded it. The new project serves up songs like Martyr, a similarly short but surprisingly versatile and unrelentingly fiery two minutes that would have fit in well on Only Constant. But it's the very shoes the EP has to fill that handicap it from hitting as hard as it should. 

Take a track like Shame whose vocal layering should make for a pretty riotous moment. But compared to the ferocity of Gel's best moments in the past it doesn't really have the same impact. Similarly, the frenetic title track delivers a snarling attitude that aims for uncompromising but lands somewhat cartoonishly despite the tracks impressively driving instrumental. What Gel serves up on this EP certainly isn't bad. In fact, they occasionally prove again why they deserve a level of attention above the heads of their hardcore peers. But this EP also contains some stuff that simply falls short of both their best work in the past and their potential going forward. 5.5/10

You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To - Knocked Loose

I haven't had the chance to talk about Knocked Loose very much on this blog. This is only the band's third album in a decade of existence and when their previous outing dropped in 2019 I wasn't yet covering much hardcore of any kind. But since then I've gotten much more into their music including the riveting singles that led off this new album. The headliner is Suffocate, which features an absolutely electric Poppy feature that really took me back to the first signs of the internet-girl embracing her metal stylings in the first place. I'm an even bigger fan of another single, Don't Reach For Me. It uses stopping and starting tempo shifts to set up pummeling moments of sheer ferocity one after another in a way I find completely irresistible that makes for the best track on the album for my money.  

But those are hardly the only highlights. Early on the album serves up Piece By Piece, a bouncy yet unstoppable piece of blistering hardcore with crashing metallic drums and mind-melting screams. I also love the surprisingly poetic lyrics which display quite a bit of poise in their presentation of breaking down "piece by piece." The brief but unwavering Moss Covers All and the way it transitions into Take Me Home is another killer moment on the record. Later on the lead single Blinding Faith bounces constantly between passages in a way that didn't click with me immediately but has grown on me a bunch since. I've been singing "Fall in line now bow your head" to myself for weeks. The record concludes with its longest track Sit & Mourn which even makes time for an instrumental intro before it erupts. The song deploys more sonic space than almost any other on the record and delivers the album title drop in a fiery and memorable moment, guiding the record to a killer close. 

Occasionally the record dips a bit when it wanders from its comfort zone. The sloppiest track on the album Slaughterhouse 2 contains it's only other feature but I don't think it ever really reaches the point of matching the heft of the rest of the record. But that is an anomaly as for the most part the record is remarkably consistent at delivering intensity and brutality on a scale I haven't heard anywhere else this year. In the years since their last album the band honed their sound on an impressive EP, but that turned out to be nothing compared to one of the heftiest and most ferocious albums I've heard anywhere in 2024. 8/10

Breeze - Fire-Toolz

Fire-Toolz is the prolific and impossible-to-define project of Angel Marcloid whose music I've discussed on the blog before but I've never fully dove into a review for one of her new albums. This finally felt like the right time to break that streak and crack open her newest record, whose influences arguably expand even further than ever before. At the core of the appeal of Fire-Toolz is a vision of screamo that gets filtered through a much cloudier vision. Harrowing screams appear on nearly every song here and yet they so often take a backup role to the cloudy mixing of vaporwave synths and future funk interludes present across the record. The record gets off to an incredibly strong start doing just that with the opener Everything & Everywhere Is Grace. Then it's immediately followed by the single that put this album on my radar in the first place, the excellently titled To every squirrel who has ever been hit by a car, i'm sorry and I love you. The sprawling nearly 7-minute cut features a whirlwind of sounds from screams that bounce between skramz, extreme metal and death metal to an instrumental that brings together lush vaporwave passages with industrial metallic whirr and even what sounds like some occasional hip-hop beats. 

The hard way to review an album like Breeze would require breaking down its every artistic whim, each individual sonic push and pull across a 53-minute runtime. Just two songs took up the entire first paragraph of this review, and a pretty bulky paragraph at that, without even touching the full extent of their reach. Instead, I'll point out some of the moments that really stood out to me. Sibling Sun, Sibling Moon and Thin Neck Of The Woods are  a very strong moment directly in the record's center. In particular the latter, which is a jittery piece of electronia that seems to want to change its entire demeanor as much as possible in just a few minutes time but serves up one great textured sound after another. 

Asparagus Pee is a bit of an experiment in abstraction and ambient space. It features a variety of distinct sonic moments, my favorite of which is probably a drum breakdown in the middle of the track. But is all exists within this cold ambient haze that persists throughout and even drowns out a lot of the vocals on the song. It's a really interesting listening experience each time through. Before we completely leave the subject of texture, It Is Happening Again is a fascinating combination of hazy vocals, new-age instrumentation and some absolutely insane electronic sounds. The grinding manipulations sound like a soup of Sophie and Matmos and present another fascinating stop on the record's unique journey. 

Ultimately I was delighted by just how much I enjoyed Breeze. Though the record does sometimes drown in the mix of its influences and the refusal to settle at almost any point in the tracklist, that same quality creates many of its very best moments. What results is an absolute tailspin of a record yet one that I was always willing to follow to its every whim. This album is both confrontational and abstract in ways that will limit the scope of its appeal, but for me it was one of the most interesting things I've heard all year. 7.5/10

Connection Anxiety - Thotcrime

Before anyone tries to lecture me on the nuanced ways that cybergrind exists outside the bounds of even the broad scope of genres like screamo and hardcore that are defining this set, I already know. But the genre's niche specifications and the tendency of its artists to not release proper studio albums in the first place means I would likely never get a chance to talk about Thotcrime without including them here. That would be a shame as the band has developed a reputation as a ferocious touring act, one that I've caught multiple times in multiple different cities in the past few years. 

It's been just two years since Thotcrime last unpacked trans anxieties through their playful take on the harshness of cybergrind and Connection Anxiety picks up right where it's predecessor kicks off. Though the opener A Better World Is Possible isn't exactly easy on the ears mix wise it's both surprisingly optimistic and sonically easy to digest with a sun-kissed instrumental that feels like something from last year's Angel Electronics record. That optimism persists onto We Hope Some Good May Come Of This though it's presented in a far more jagged manner. The track is just barely 2 minutes but features plenty of room for dueling screamed refrains and mounting synth arpeggios that sound impressively driving. That song contains one of the record's two features and the other pops up on another highlight Garden Court. By comparison, it's a much cloudier song with much more sentimental refrains but they're performed earnestly, especially on one of the record's best hooks. 

I'm not quite as enamored with the second half of the record as the first, but it certainly has its highlights.The title track Connection Anxiety is one of the funniest moments, though I can't tell if that's entirely intentional. I fully understand the seriousness of the subject matter but in some of the record's most audible lyrics Thotcrime muse on digital diaries as a place to put dark thoughts that can't be held inside without inducing fear. It's a pretty interesting conceptual note that can be fittingly grafted onto numerous songs on the record. I'm also a fan of one of the album's hardest moments, the ferocious closer My Final Escape. It also deploys a touch of optimism but it feels like it arrived there in the most bloody and brutalized way possible. Once again I think Thotcrime delivered something that is not only compelling to listen to but also incredibly unique. The band walks the line perfectly between having a distinct and recognizable sound but also continuing to push themselves in new directions. The results are dynamic and worth tapping into if you're a fan of the genres the band plays with. 7/10

Coup De Grace - SeeYouSpaceCowboy

Completing the trilogy of bands developing a highly-touted tour ethos we have SeeYouSpaceCowboy who have spent the decade since Flowers Taped To Pens broke up becoming a must-see live act. Three years after their second album hit even more on the frenetic intensity of the band's wiry peak, their third album is an attempt to expand their sonic scope. The most obvious way is the contrast between pummeling hardcore and the baroque passages slipped in throughout. The album opens this way with an alright lead-off song that begins with that gentle dramatic sway before erupting into something much more familiar. 

This hasn't been the opinion held by many fans in reaction to the record, but my favorite points on the record see the band fusing pummeling screamo with the far wimpier MySpace equivalent on soaring highlights like And The Two Slipped Into The Shadows. But even those songs aren't immune from my broader issue with the record, a general dulling of the edges of the band's sound. On a track like Lubricant Like Kerosene they seem to be aiming for a dancy, tongue-in-cheek take on screamo like if you forced Panic! At The Disco to make a screamo track at gunpoint but without any of their cleverness, at least early Panic's cleverness. 

That certainly isn't to say that the entire record goes by without much intrigue. As often as the baroque elements sound like theater-core, they are also frequently interpolated in magnetically charming ways. My favorite single Silhouettes In Motion leads directly in from one of the album's interludes and provides a fiery contrast to its subtlety and beauty. Even if the lyrics about the devil having a fashion sense can make me cringe a little this is one of the most purely intense and catchy songs I think I've ever heard from SYSC. Rhythm and Rapture is my guilty pleasure on the album. Even though I've never been a nothing,nowhere fan this song just has hooks for days and the ways the energy is passed off between vocal styles throughout is pretty infectious. 

While Coup De Grace has its moments, it can often feel like one step forward and one step back on the record. While the softening of their sound may make SYSC's music a little more appealing and accessible, it doesn't capitalize on the ferocity they've become known by reputationally. The album is certainly worth a listen for fans as it's more good than bad and it has the chance to deliver some new favorites, but this isn't quite the caliber of album necessary to meet the expectation that's been building up. 6/10