I find it frustrating that the half-life for how long you can talk about a great, or even excellent, hardcore record is about half a week. By the week following its release, the discourse has moved on, the hype is elsewhere, and the excitement for the record has burnt down to embers. It's kind of ridiculous given how much sweat, tears, (sometimes blood) and straight-up passion goes into these records. I mean, Knocked Loose dropped a straight-up banger of an EP last week. On top of that, the album was released with a mesmerizing stop-motion animated, short film. And now, not even five days later, it feels corny already to even mention how straight-up baller that all is. It's kind of fucked up. There might be something wrong with the way we're experiencing music now that causes this to happen, or even more likely, the way it is something messed up with the way we are introduced to things on social media and streaming platforms and the way the music press's buzz cycle squeezes things out before music fans even have a chance to fully metabolize a piece of work. I try to break out of these dumb patterns as much as possible on this blog. That is why when I find something I love, or even just a record that gets stuck in some part of my brain, I take the time to shout it out. One of those records, is Pain by the downtempo metallic hardcore band Falcifer. Falcifer has a very deep, resonant sound, and it would be easy to simply comment on this aspect of them call it a day, but there is some profoundly compelling songwriting here as well. They remind me of Harm's Way in that respect, in that they are able to take that sense of vicious, overbearing power collapsing in on you that some melodic and industrial death metal band do so well (basically, Godflesh-core), and transform it into something targetedly kinetic and propulsive. It feels like the songs on Pain have as solid of conceptual structure as any Brill Building tunes- except that the songs on this record would likely cause a '60s sock-hop to devolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario (more so than it already was), or a mass, ritual blood carnival. The savage emotions it exsanguinates from the band reek of bile and retribution and have a spellbinding effect on the listener. The only way to survive with your mind intact is to plunge forward into it and hope that the scars it leaves in your body aren't so deep that they are born upon the blameless flesh of your future children- a type of spiritual branding for the trauma suffered by their progenitors. Falcifer called this thing Pain for a reason. It is as much a descriptor as it is a warning.
