The Sailor Jerry Blog

09/10/2007

Cloak/Dagger - "We are" CD

Holy shit! Jade Tree's done it again.

"What's 'it'," you ask? Well "it" is totally surprising me with another amazing hardcore release. And not "hardcore" in the "my mom is taking me to the mall to buy some eyeliner", Alternative press sense. Hardcore as in raw, hard hitting and powerful. The kind of record with enough built-in aggression that it makes you want to either put your head through a wall or sing along. Or both.

So I must admit, I was completely in the dark about cloak/dagger. I half expected this release to be emo-esque judging it entirely on the name, album cover (stark white with 4 small hand drawn daggers) and the fact that it was on Jade Tree. But when I turned this sucker over I saw the dudes in the band and the names of the songs and decided to jam the record at full volume on my way to NJ to buy some guitar stuff.

What came out of the speakers was a mix somewhere between the Regulations (Sweden) at their finest and Fugazi (Duh). I think the Fugazi reference is mostly due to a combination of an Ian tinge to the vocals and the a-typical chord and song structuring in a lot of the songs.

The whole record has that mix of Garage, Punk and Hardcore styling that's very in vogue right now but it doesn't come off in a copycat way. Cloak/Dagger sound like every word and note on the record was painfully exorcized from them and not lame, sound-of-the-moment posturing.

In short, the record is pretty fucking rad. And this is coming from a guy who dislikes 98% of hardcore because it bores the living shit out him.