Reviews

The Unseen, a band from the streetpunk/oi tradition of Boston, MA, are in my opinion one of the best straight-ahead, spit-in-your-face, fuck-em-all punk bands.  The new CD, Explode, is easily their best effort, in follow up to Anger and Truth.  For anyone unfamiliar, they play a traditional streetpunk sound, a-la bands like The Casualties, or The Nerve Agents, with fast punk-rock drum beats, almost exclusively power chord guitar tracks, and a constant shouting singing voice which gets shrill with strain.  Musically, this CD takes no chances, sticking with the routine and within their genre.  It starts very well, with the opening track False Hope and second song Your Failure is My Revenge.  False Hope gives a pretty good idea of the lyric-writing with “Fuck the government, fuck the world, I hope it all burns down,” although, notably, there is a more personal touch to the lyrics than usual—for instance, the song Tsunami Suicide waxes poetic with “hurricanes of love and pain, tsunami tides of suicide”—usually focused on depression and anger.  They have been the subject of some amount of scene backlash after playing the Warped Tour, but lash back with So Sick of You, where they take shots at hardcore fans who cried sell-out.  This is their best CD so far, and prior fans will like it.  It is very short though, with twelve songs clocking in at only 21 minutes, and no songs over two minutes and thirty seconds.  For me though, the short length actually helps it a bit, because it doesn’t give it time to become tired and repetitive.  Overall, I liked it, although I don’t think it will see much time in my CD player.