Review Summary: I'm not locked in here with you...
I'll save you the history lesson on how the five-piece from New Jersey inadvertently became the ground from where pertinent names like Converge or Nails would bloom like grass on pavement. In a short interview with English webzine Vice published some 12 years ago, frontman Charles Maggio recalls his chemotherapy sessions to combat a life-threatening Hodgkin's disease, which used to cripple him for three days straight, while giving him enough time to recover for the shows during the weekends. These were shows filled with so much sweat, smoke and bile that you could almost bite, chew and spit the air around you.
Those were the days.
Rorschach's debut is a horrifying peek into a ghastly future for the human kind, coming out of the excess and decadence of the 80s and straight into the imperative despondence of the 90s, with the prospect of a new millennia looming in the horizon. Maggio, an accountant and father of twins at the time of said interview, recalls how these feelings, amped by the increasing awareness of his own mortality during his long-fought battle, made their way into
Remain Sedate in a way that would change the American hardcore scene forever. Rorschach’s first record is a bleak, impenetrable slab of hardcore, so brutal that it transcends whatever genre nonsense bands at the time wanted to believe they were doing. In fact, it almost feels like the band didn't know exactly what they wanted to play, but they knew HOW they wanted to play it.
Remain Sedate is a merciless bat to the head with unrelenting force. It's a relentless assault of turbo D-beats and crushing riffs led by the tormented and hollow screams of Maggio.
In little more than twenty minutes, Rorscharch discharge twelve tracks as if the world was about to end. There are no highlights, no fillers, no bull***.
Remain Sedate fires on auto-mode from the moment "Pavlov's Dogs" blasts out and it doesn't stop until the dissonant chaos of "Opress" dies out. Chris Laucella's bass sounds like a giant python around your neck while Andrew Gormley's drums keep pummeling your chest like a steam hammer. This is the raw, unhinged sound of five dudes channeling the horrors of the world in the same way that Alan Moore made Walter Kovacs gaze at the abyss in his acclaimed graphic novel The Watchmen. With
Remain Sedate, Rorschach will test your will, and the results are not gonna be pretty.
