Review Summary: Dangers takes all of the frustration pent up inside them and unleashes it in a vicious and intelligent flurry of hardcore.
At this point in the musical timeline, the hardcore genre isn't really hardcore in a musical extreme sense. In the 1980's, there really wasn't any other way to describe this style of music. Nowadays, a large amount of the teenage/college age population wouldn't consider this all that extreme or hardcore.
Does Dangers care? Hell no.
This is their art, and they know how to express themselves better than just about any other hardcore band i've come across that started post 1990.
Anger is still an envelope pusher in the genre, though. Dangers makes fantastic use of strange arrangements, and stranger instrumentation for a hardcore band. Whether it be "Break Beat", which is drums and vocals only, or the trumpet intro into "War? What War?", Anger is a truly unique entrant into the genre.
Every instrument on this album is well mixed, vicious, and quite good. The guitars feedback as loud as possible without overwhelming the mix, and the riffs they spit are fantastic, spinning from circle pit rhythms to snarling power chords, and in the intro of "Half Brother,All Cop", they even have a bit of Southern twang. Before they tear your ears off, of course.
The bass chugs along audibly and in a few songs is the most driving force behind Dangers' assault, and the drums are precise and intense, if not a little standard as far as the genre goes.
Vocal wise, Dangers gives you the sense that if they were playing somewhere and the PA went out ("We Broke the P.A." seems like a realistic claim these guys could cash in.), nobody in the audience would have any problem hearing every word. The vocals really are that intense.
One of the highest points of the album is the lyrics. They are intelligent and scathing, and not solely political, although most admittedly are. If Dangers were one of the mant hardcore bands around today with lyrics about nothing more than brotherhood and "staying true" it wouldn't matter. But on Anger, every song's lyrics read as if thought out on a subject that has been ignored. While some are political, ("The Great Wall of California" and "War? What War?") others are social and criticisms of the current state of punk and hardcore written from a personal perspective instead of a third person account. In "Half Brother, All Cop," the vocalist screams "I've heard you say wetback. I've heard you say beaner. And behind my back you probably called me a ******. *** you. Man in blue." When the music breaks and this part spills out from my speakers, my heart rate increases,and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
While Anger is about anger, a lot of time when reading along with the songs I find myself getting angry at the complaints listed. There is more range of emotions than just anger though. Take for example "My Wonder Years Never Got Cancelled," which is about growing up too fast.
All in all, Anger is one of the best hardcore releases of the 00's, and probably even further back from that. They have compressed all of their fury and anger into a short, 23 minute burst. If you like hardcore or punk, don't even THINK about passing up on this album.
