I have zero information on Baltimore's Drip, but that hardly matters when their debut record is THIS FUCKING GOOD! Translating what sounds to be deeply personal lyrics through fifty flavors of NYC and east-coast hardcore, Drip are as potent as they are preternaturally slick. Despite how heavy Kiss of Life is, there are almost no edges on it. It's presented as a singular, viper-shaped, mobious strip of sound, perfectly produced and fabricated for the varieties of punk they are personifying. Drip's debut is beaded with the blood and tears forced out into the open air by a thousand lacerations around their ego from life's overabundance of indignities and personal tragedies, with slices like the title track ticking down the list of existence's woes to the tune of Kingdom of Sorrow cannonballing into a VOD groove, complete with lement-laden, reverb-capsulated vocals to help you choke down the hurt. "Strike Out" takes melo-hardcore chords and places them into the train of a metalcore meltdown, "Blood Drops" takes a more contemporary power-violence approach, with workman-like grooves, akin to a Madball informed version of Harm's Way, a constellation of elements that continues to shine, albeit with a timbre of Hatebreed, on the following track "Hard Pass." Later, Kiss of Life plunges the shifter into top gear for the Agnostic Front fueled, razor-lined, steamroller "Pocket Knife," before finally finishing out with the rumbling and violent surge of existential despair that is "Lost Ones." The fact that Triple B hasn't picked this thing up yet will have me questioning my sanity, and my trust in them as an institution, for the remainder of the year.
