Labels: Forcefield
Review by: Andy Malcolm
First impressions were less than favourable. Terrible artwork, two coloured vinyl, one sided record. Ok, lets see what we got here. WOAH! It’s noisy emo (EMO VIOLENCE!) done mostly right! Goodness me. Basically here you have a band that has gone back to the old framework of shouting instead of bad screaming, over the top of screeching guitars. The only real negative is that rely a bit too much on the mathiness occasionally, but for the most part this an emphatic release of the hectic. It reminds me of stuff like the Exelar or Apeshit, with a bit of Burnman in there for quirks, so if you get a kick out of that kind of music, I think you should check this out as well. There’s not a lot of songs on here (FIVE), but then again, who wants to listen to 40 minutes of guys shouting and playing a bit off kilter? For me, I generally get taken by a band of this nature when they bury a rather down-trodden melody underfoot, and Outclassed are more than adept at that. Somewhere in each song, amidst the helter-skelter, there are traces of something that you can follow. It’s perhaps not quite as raw as I’d like, the production seems thin rather than the muddy lumpen mess that I tend to enjoy, but that’s a minor negative. All told this is a good listen and I am high fiving the wall that there is a band out there playing this kind of junk again.