When it comes to blind digital submissions, I tend to lean towards the side of "I don't have time for that, so please don't do it". Yet, someone related to this release felt the need to give it a try so I had some time and decided to give it a listen. I'm not sure who sent me this because the press release as a PDF and the return email weren't the same but I'm glad that they sort of broke one of my unwritten rules because this just shreds. I only feel badly for all of the other people out there who should happen to send me digital submissions blindly because this has set a standard that is going to be very hard to reach.
The music of Politess is violent. It's heavy and filled with screaming. On the surface it falls somewhere between hardcore and metal. At times, it has those hardcore-borderline-punk sounds of something like Sick Of It All, and yet at other times you can just hear the piercing metal of a band such as Nora. It's Every Time I Die on some level and some combination of other bands I just haven't heard yet. It's a band on Equal Vision Records back when they were still releasing quality music and I was keeping up with them, or just anything from what I consider to be the glory days of when hardcore met metal. (Though the scene never really disappeared, I did)
What you have to understand though is that as great as this is at just being fast, heavy, kicking you in the teeth the entire time it is played at maximum volume there is also this other side to it, a side which you cannot put your finger on but there are audio clips and horns (which I believe there is at least a saxophone) A shining example of how this can remain so hard and yet have these other factors to it is a song such as "LA PATÈRE", which is almost at the end.
And so when you think of bands that have that hardcore presence to them (Because whatever combination of metal and punk this might take on, it is hardcore at its roots) one of two big ones come to mind for me when I think of what is added in extra to these Politess songs. On one hand, the horns make me think of Dillinger Escape Plan but this album comes off more in the way that hearing Dillinger Escape Plan for the first time did than actually being a copy of them. And the other is Backstabbers Inc, who I perhaps know best for their use of audio clips though Politess does not use them the same way either (Though there is one I like about Alice in Wonderland)
I'm sure that at some point people thought that the hardcore scene was over and probably different people have thought it on different occasions. And yet bands like Politess continue to prove them wrong as this music stays alive by taking on sounds previously unheard of and yet delivered in the most powerful of ways. You can't just spice up the hardcore scene by throwing in some random sounds (Sorry, Folly) and this album by Politess just proves that what is old can be new again and there is still room left to be impressed because I am just so impressed and thrilled by these songs.
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