Labels: Pigdog
Review by: Andy Malcolm
I am annoyed. I somehow contrived to leave my wallet on the bus. I made an immediate phone call to the bus station, and the nice lady was very helpful. My wallet turned up about 10 minutes later. Sans money. Some bunch of kids had nicked it. This town is beyond belief. Luckily, I have a whole pile of 7″ singles that I ordered with other money (and no bastard kid can steal them), plus a CD by a band called Annalise. Over the next few hours I am going to immerse myself in all this music and I can forget that my naive notions of decency and honesty are apparently wasted when there are other people who don’t give a shit. So fuck Harlow and the kid who probably will spend my £30 on a new shell suit. You can rot in Essex hell, which I guess is a just punishment.
Ah. Just listen to that. The pounding guitars. The hardcore. The tune. The high volume. Lyrics that mean something. Its music to my ears. Melodic hardcore, and its just what I need.
6 tracks on here. Opens up with “England Eats Its Young”. I’m not really sure who to compare this band to. The mix of hardcore and tunes has been done many a time before, but Annalise squeeze more of a tune out of it. Its certainly as good as any American band that deals in this brand of music. They even stray over to a spot of emo-core at times, particularly on the classily tuneful “Millenium Breakdown”.
And the rest all rocks as well. Track 3, “Somethings Got To Give” even features some saxophone, before “Revolution Food” kicks off with a raging 30 second long hardcore intro that neatly preludes a more laidback emo tune that brings back the smoking ‘core right at the end again. Smart. And then they switch effortlessly between the two once more. “Games People Play” is more pounding, with chanty vocals, then “Gone” rounds it out with some more emo-core which one moment is doing it indie style in the verse, only to come out of the more powerful chorus with some brief but truly head-crushing guitars. Whomp.
Annalise are pissed off. So am I. Right band in the right place at the right time. Bet it’ll still sound this good next week though.