No Gang Colors Honorary Cop
Grindcore Karaoke
Suburban punk and grindcore kids have been appropriating cop-hating hip hop tropes since at least Plutocracy roamed the plains, but it seems like it’s really flourished in recent years with bands like Magrudergrind and Marion Berry swiping urban culture trappings to spruce up their otherwise traditional grind and power violence beatings, making it a permanent part of their aesthetic. The latest three-songs-and-an-intro outing from No Gang Colors revels in mashing up a new wave of power violence/electronics savagery that sears and seethes, using hip hop samples and other urban accoutrements to underscore the EP’s overall anti-cop raison d'etre.
Overall, Honorary Cop is more atmospheric than This is Your God. Instead of beating you about the head and shoulders with digitized Man is the Bastard-style prostrations, No Gang Colors this time out prefer to burrow under the skin with crackling electronic ambiance, seeking out the arterial highway to the cortex to attack your thoughts at the source.
Honorary Cop is nearly synesthetic in approach, approximating sound as a physical force – a buzzing, swarming sound that snaps with washes of overdriven white noise, crackling the edges of the instruments and the vocals, melting all the components into a single, blurred sledge of blunt-edged noise.
I'd have liked for Honorary Cop to be a tad long - a mere five minutes is a bit of a dick tease - but it's another great hint at what this young band is capable of bringing to bear should they break out into long player territory.
[Full disclosure: the band sent me a review copy.]
2 comments:
Great review. I really like the direction he's going in
Just to give a heads up to the readers, you can actually get this as a free download on Grindcore Karaoke, and yes it is every bit as good as Childers says!
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