By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring two records pulling from late ’90s and 2000s aesthetics, including uponbrokenapologies’s metalcore EP SILENCE AND SORROW and Nihilistic Easyrider’s post-grunge alt rock album DELUXE EDITION!
uponbrokenapologies – SILENCE AND SORROW
Genre: Metalcore
Favorite Track: “Severed Lies”
It takes a lot these days for a demo to really stand out, especially in metalcore. The genre has seen such an explosion in popularity that Hellfest, the legendary New York/New Jersey hardcore and metalcore festival, was resurrected after twenty years. (It was awesome.) So it says something that uponbrokenapologies was able to coast for two years off the strength of a three-song demo.
That demo, February of 2023’s DEMONSTRATION OF PAIN AND SUFFERING, was a scrappy, lo-fi affair; the band, hailing from Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley, was clearly schooled in the genre’s leading lights from the late ‘90s and early 2000s—evident in the demo’s cover artwork and thin production. Songs were heavy, real heavy, incorporating death metal growls and anguished spoken word interludes and breakdowns after breakdowns.
There was a lot of hype when they announced their proper debut EP, and it more than delivers. SILENCE AND SORROW aptly builds off the foundations of their demo without retreading old ground, and uponbrokenapologies add new tricks to their arsenal without watering down their sound or giving up what made DEMONSTRATION OF PAIN AND SADNESS so promising.
SILENCE AND SORROW is a bit less cluttered than the demo, the production a bit more polished without sounding too plastic; the most significant change, probably, is the addition of clean vocals. Barring the instrumental intro track “Memory,” every song on the EP incorporates singing, and oftentimes it’s quite catchy, as on “Tyrant” and the title track. Don’t think they’ve gone Octanecore, though, between the production and the hooks—like Balmora’s been doing, they employ clean vocals for a single verse as a palette cleanser, and then it’s right back to brutality.
At their best, they make it all sound seamless. On “Severed Lies,” uponbrokenapologies plumbs the deepest crevices of their sound, laying melodeath riffs over caustic breakdowns before breaking into a melodic verse without missing a beat. The epic title track clocks in at five and a half minutes and it encapsulates everything this band’s ever done in that time, feeling like both a cap to the EP and a journey in itself. SILENCE AND SORROW is the sound of a band stretching their (angel) wings and demonstrating why, after so many years of slop, the genre still has a ton to offer. Grab one of the year’s best melodic metalcore releases on Bandcamp. [Zac Djamoos]
Nihilistic Easyrider – DELUXE EDITION
Genre: Alternative Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Getaway Plan,” “Well Kept Secret,” “Smiles and Cries,” “Weekend Fever,” “Facedown”
There are a handful of summers I’d love to be transported back to, but the one I return to most often these days is the summer of 2003.
I was 11 years old and about to enter the 6th grade—in Scottsdale, AZ in the early 2000s, Middle Schools were only 7th and 8th grade, so I had one more year of Elementary School where I was about to be top dog on campus (whatever that means when you’re surrounded by literal six and seven year olds). I was in that in-between phase of kind of liking girls, or at least starting to have crushes, but still being a pretty carefree kid with kid specific interests. Some of that summer was at my friend Brendon’s house; we’d swim all day, his mom would make us “nachos,” which were really just Tostino Scoops (still pretty new at that time!) with some cheese melted in the middle in the microwave and some Trader Joe’s salsa. We’d play TONY HAWK PRO SKATER 3, and play with Legos, and his sisters would run around playing teacher. We’d sleep over at our friend Jacob’s house, where his parents didn’t really care how late we stayed up, and we’d watch SNL compilation DVDs, and we’d play his copy of THE SIMS ONLINE, a version of the famous game that was a MMO where you could try and have sex with strangers who were also playing in distant states or countries. I didn’t pay taxes and I was still the light of my parents’ life.
Every time I hear Nihilistic Easyrider’s DELUXE EDITION, every detail of that summer comes rushing back to me. Jacob Duarte made a 35-minute nostalgic exploration of what 105 degree days of an early 2000s Arizona summer felt like, offering an album filled with slushy snare drums and record scratches and MTV ready rock hooks that I can imagine blasting from the shitty Magnavox boom box we’d keep near the pool. And for Duarte, this nostalgic transformation is the ultimate goal; the liner notes name check all the right things: Incubus, Deftones, Graham Hunt, Momma, and “a wide-range of stylistic references, from saccharine Y2K emo and young-dumb-and-full-of pop punk to Soviet fuzz fueled alt and pure Evan Dando-core verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done pop rock.”
The album can be summed up in its first three tracks. Opener “Getaway Plan” is the ultimate turn key, a big, jangling post-grunge pop song that would sit beautifully right between “Flagpole Sitta” and “The Middle” on any mix radio station today, let alone in the 2000s. “Weekend Fever,” is a more downtempo change-of-pace cut built for staring out the back window of a 1998 Nissan Pathfinder, but again capturing a unique navalgazing sense of what that era’s “ballads” sounded like when they had huge production ambitions—let Nihilistic Easyrider cover Lifehouse or Collective Soul. And “Facedown” is a sendup of the era’s prevailing crossover punk moments, an explosive minute long blink-182 sketch by way of Title Fight or, sure, Duarte’s other project Narrow Head.
The whole album is a top to bottom treat, not only one of my favorites of the year but one that’s perfect for both end of summer celebrations and back-to-school blues. Who knows if Nihilistic Easyrider continues on beyond this album or if the mining of late ‘90s and early 2000s rock was a one off, but DELUXE EDITION is the unique blend of nostalgia worth celebrating no matter what happens next. Give it a listen over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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