Walk the Wheel is an album that I wish I had discovered before the end of 2023, as it would have almost certainly made an appearance in the discussion I had with Full Blown Meltdown about our favorite albums of the year. I'm an easy mark when it comes to hardcore that sounds like it heralds the roaring return of Revolution Summer, though. But Truth Cult doesn't simply sound like a band that Ian Mackaye would sign... I think they're the kind of band he'd still like to be in- a bundle of contradictions and web of dissonances that coheres despite the chaotic energy it is superintend to. A collection of cross-firing chords that slap at your senses like a wild cat trying to open an oyster that's washed up on the beach, booted along by a rhythm section that feels like it's set up a kick-ball course along the length of your spine, with the alternating currents of Emily Ferrara and Paris Roberts vocals guiding the escapade through a series of reckless peel offs and conscious reconciliations. Like a junk-yard-reared Husker Du or a two-faced breed of Inside Out who's just as likely to comfort the hand that feeds as sever its thumb at the joint. Opener "Squeeze" sounds like it was written and performed by a creature that lives on all fours and thrives on scraps and spite, while the following track "Resurrection" embraces a cool kind of rapture that lifts one's mood with the heavy exuberance of breezy vocal trade-offs and fluid arrangments that flow like water slipping down the naked face of a window pane. The secretive seal of "Heavy Water" submerges you in a slip of quicksand riffs and sinking revelations, "Unstoppable" is a blues-balanced, coat-pulling ballyhoo with a righteous, burning swagger, "Awake, Asleep" nearly blinds with its furtive, buoyant bursts of bright guitar flashes, leaving you positively floaty and ready to be gusted by the soft rush of its whisper pitch vocals, while "Naked in the End" exists as a kind of cyclone of sensation and recollections that pass through you like plummeting starlight, fracturing at your core to splinter outward in a constellation of laser-bullet outlined beasts that stalk and play around you in a menagerie of crucial mementos and fleeting memories. That's about as straight as I can describe a band as hard and determinately dulcet as Truth Cult on Walk the Wheel. Anything more concrete and I'd feel like I was dropping trailer wedges in the way of your full experience of their compulsive momentum.
