Review Summary: The Recession's debut is nothing groundbreaking, but follows the paths of established noisecore bands such as Coalesce,Botch,and Deadguy.
Blood & Ink records has a string of picking up decent bands, with the except of a few very average metalcore bands.
The Recession are not one of those average metalcore bands.
More akin to the "genre" known as noisecore, the Recession lack the sloppiness usually associated with other bands of their ilk, but still manage to keep things loose enough so as not to sound machine-like.
Most of the songs on
Time,Arithmetic & Other Elementary Subjects Not Well Learned are onslaughts of catchy and melodic off-beats and breakdowns, emphasizing the space between heavy and slow and fast and furious.
What the band seems to lack, however, is a strong will to take any sort of venture out of their genre, sticking to mostly the same formula of a pressing, intense opening leading into a huge, drawn out breakdown.
When the band does break away from their formula, as on
Night Shift and
Paradigm Shift, the Recession shows what they can become if they continue to expand their songwriting forte.
Nonetheless,the album begins quite literally with a roar, the sounds of a motorcycle starting up, leading into one of the best tracks on the album, the intense
Justification For A Roman Holiday, which is chock full of slashing guitar and bass parts and huge swaths of blast beats on the crash and snare.
The next few tracks follow a similar style to
Justification,never relenting until track 6, the brooding assault that is
Night Shift.
The calmest track on the album, for the first 50 seconds or so, plods along on the strength of huge cymbal crashes and the unrelenting vocals of bassist Reid Otto, the song then plows into the breakdown, a huge and slow part pierced by cries of "You've Got a Face Like Norman Bates", eventually spiraling into just rim clicks and guitar backing Reid and his frenzied calls.
The only track on here that I felt was a bit of a let down is
Unsilent, which is a recording of a song slowed down to a ridiculously slow tempo, lending every cymbal crash the sound of a huge steel bar being beat over and over.
The song serves it's purpose as a creepy intro to the last track,
The Suicide Bomber Blew Himself Up Today, but I can't help but think that it was not necessary.
All in all, this album is nothing groundbreaking, and if you don't enjoy this style of hardcore,
Time,Arithmetic & Other Elementary Subjects... will not convert you.
If you do like the Recession's style of abrasive music, I suggest you go pick this album up.
