Detonating in the back of your mind is the realization nothing is going the way you planned. Silently walking down the street about to burst of rage you find a few muggers in action, so you ignite your emotions and kill them. No one cares you did good because now you’re scum. No one can perceive anything outside their own walls and just hope the bad things go away, but you, you will suffer and you will lose someone, you will be defeated. That is the immediate realization you come to right as the first song takes off.
Hardcore has a few gems every now and then, and this is certainly one of them. Travels is overflowing with disgust, rage, even some happy moments, but always with a message. However, they don’t care if you like it, because you can tell this band needed to write this for themselves, and if they get fans in the process then that’s great. They try to take poetry to tell their stories letting the music instill mood, just in case the lyrics aren’t pissed enough.
This takes a lot of a mindset from older hardcore with its arrangements and spastic topic jumping, and utilizes many tempo jumps throughout each song making things seem very human and almost improvised. The guitars don’t care if they hit too many strings, and the drummer doesn’t bother with merely keeping time. Every instrument is draining themselves as if they will be killed if they don’t play with every ounce of emotion and heart they can muster. Rather than just being a giant record of distortion, however, the band throws in a few acoustic sections… and they’re upbeat. The vocals are even carefree at that point, and it sounds like neo-folk, a significant jump in tone. The vocalist even has a decent singing voice. Obviously you can’t predict the whole record like most hardcore, not that it’s a bad thing, this just makes it stand out in its own way.
With the six minute closer of Cowardice, the record vamps from in your face and straightforward to slow crescendos and bursts of intensity. The whole band is playing in a new style just for the epilogue of their tale, to bring it to a righteous conclusion of this chapter. Perhaps this will be the band’s way of transitioning to the next record, but it could just as easily be their one and only. Either way, they have humbly presented a gift to anyone who cares to listen, and whether you like it or not, you will sense a darkness coming.
