Reviews

Due mostly to the genre restrictions of hardcore, a lot of bands wind up making music we've all heard before. It's tough to create something original and unique while sticking to the speed, content and vocal styling that tends to define the genre. In order to avoid being hardcore-by-the-numbers, you've either got to be really good or pack your album full of great breakdowns, guitar flairs or ultra catchy bass lines that break things up and separate your band from the proverbial pack.

So when considering England's The Steal, I was essentially looking for these cues that would push their debut self-titled release over the line of hardcore obscurity and into worthwhile and enjoyable modern punk. The band amply provided.

The Steal has mastered the balance between straying completely out of form and maintaining straight-forward musical bombardment. Every song on the album moves from center at some point without sounding like a forced add-on. In the album's opening track, "Breakout," the band took a basic song and added different layers in the chorus, the middle, the near-end breakdown and the final close. For a song that's less than two minutes long to seamlessly change over four times and still have the punch of hardcore is pretty impressive.

"Waiting for the Simple Life" moves fast, pounding through forty-five seconds, when it suddenly halts and then switches to a slower beat, stand-out guitar and some "Whoa-ohs." It's rare to see light-hearted moments like these in hardcore, which is unfortunate since it balances the brash delivery of the album perfectly. The same happens with the vocal harmonization in "World Wide World," which contrasts the tough, gang vocals.

Unfortunately the lyrics don't break any molds. Actually, the Steal sticks very carefully to a traditional hardcore song construction: the accusatory "you." The songs are all framed around calling out some generic douchebag. "You" are ignorant, "you" don't care about the community, "you" are not about the music, "you" are a hypocrite because you smoke (I don't get that one at all but I guess that's how the Steal sees it). It's probably unfair to criticize the Steal for doing something countless bands have done, going as far back as Minor Threat. Nonetheless, the accusatory "you" song tends to make the band utilizing it sound really self-righteous. The Steal's scene criticisms and slightly straight-edge stance don't help much in removing the self-righteous tinge.

Despite this relatively minor complaint, the album as a whole is the verbal and musical assault any hardcore fan is looking for: there's no time lost between song, which rarely breach the two-minute mark, yet every song has a few individual elements that make The Steal's self-titled debut stand out.