Like the quick and brutal crunch of hardcore’s beloved “hooded mosher” curbstomping your skull, Bitter Truth’s Perfect World album just dropped digitally, and stomped on our collective eardrums.
As first reported here on No Echo back in February, the record comes to us courtesy of Patient Zero Records, and putting in on for my first listen it wastes no time in immediately evoking my own personal memories of when I first heard now revered bands such as Backtrack, Product of Waste, Down to Nothing, and The Warriors.
Not because they rip any of those groups, or even sound exceedingly similar, but because you can feel the actual aggression with which this release was crafted, just like every offering from each of the bands listed above.
Depending on which track, as a first-time listener, I can hear bits and pieces of influence from all over the hardcore map on Perfect World, a little NYHC here, a little Midwest Blood-style mosh there, all overlaid with singer Mnasse’s angry, grit-filled vocals.
Similarly to how my ears pick up a sampling of various musical influences, so too are they confronted with varying (yet always poignant and pertinent) lyrical subject matter… touching on everything from classism and racism, to confronting friends who’ve fallen from grace, to police brutality and corruption, and wrapping up the album with a track about finding comradery among our fellow so-called “misunderstood” family here in the hardcore scene.
None of this is meant to say that Bitter Truth’s sound is all over the place, or pulling from too many different places, quite the opposite actually; all thanks to their SOLID ability to mash their influence and personal creativity together before very effectively blending it all together into a consistent and distinguishable sound that is definitely their own. Going through the full length several times now, I think I can say my favorite single track has probably gotta be “Between the Lines," for all the reasons mentioned above.
It’s always funny to me when I hear the jaded folks that we all know in the scene say things like “there’s nothing original left in hardcore." All it takes is for a band like Bitter Truth to come along, taking familiar ingredients added to tried and true formulas and yet creating something that honors what we all know and love while still presenting something interesting and fresh, to prove the jaded grumps wrong.
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Thankfully, with the prevalence of vaccines and venues being willing to take the initiative in maintaining safe live show environments for all of us, more and more hardcore shows are finally starting to pop back up all over the country. And luckily for us all, that means the fellas in Bitter Truth will be showing up on those very stages regularly again as well. In support of this new full length, the band plans to continue to play regional gigs and will be joining the roster at Tulsa’s upcoming Promcore Fest in October.
So don’t miss your chance to catch them when they’re nearby, and make sure to get your hands on one of the awesome vinyl colorways that they’ll undoubtedly have on the merch table!
Perfect World is officially out now on all streaming platforms as of this week, and vinyl pre-orders are officially live as well (including the awesome limited variant cover art version that rips Dr. Dre’s The Chronic)… in other words, “the fuse is lit, and there’s no putting it out."
Tagged: bitter truth
