Bi-hawks and studs are really hot Emo kids whine, but i'll give em a shot Tight pants-skinheads with bodies that stack This whole damn scene makes my eyes roll back I LOVE HARDCORE BOYS, I LOVE BOYS HARDCORE!
cold stare is the best band in california. period.
seeing them makes me think of how john joseph describes seeing the bad brains; it's awesome how mindblowing, different, and intense the band is. i really hope they put out another record, their demo is great but the new material sounds even better.
It's only their sophomore album, but Chula Vista's Cold Stare are already having a pretty serious identity crisis. They made a name for themselves playing relatively straight forward youth crew hardcore with a 90's edge, but their new material stretches for something more. It's apparently not enough for these guys to be an awesome hardcore band, they felt the all too common pull to "transcend the boundaries" of hardcore. Some bands can pull this sort of thing off and some would be better served sticking to what they do best. Cold Stare haven't quite fallen off entirely here, but The S/T definitely doesn't match the intensity or quality of The Things We Carry.
The first apparent step to becoming a more "creative" hardcore band is playing pretty much everything just a little bit slower and making the guitar work as sparse as possible. It certainly worked for Modern Life Is War and Blacklisted so why not, right? Here's why not: Because the majority of these songs feel less like a punch in the face and more like a soft tap on the shoulder. There's nothing wrong with many of these tracks per se, but this record lacks all of the impact of Cold Stare 's first full-length. I lost track of how many songs feature a part where the guitar dropped out (or at least down to single notes ringing out) while a simple bass line and hi-hat tried to make the vocals seem more intense. In their attempt to become less formulaic, Cold Stare simply traded one formula (that worked quite well, for the record) for one that just doesn't fit them.
The lyric sheet is a great metaphor for the band's supposed maturity, neatly displaying the band's lyrics as poetry but omitting all of the profanity, as if certain words are fine to sing but not sophisticated enough to appear on paper. It's as if these guys are trying their hardest to prove that they're more than just a hardcore band but it's just not in their natur
GO TO THIS SHOW!
