The Rock Blogger

Loma Prieta . Last City . 2008. 3.5 stars .

Short and sweet, thats how I would describe Loma Prieta’s Last City . This Oakland CA band plays speedy hardcore/screamo jams with impressive technicality, running through time signatures and epic melodies with incredible ease. As the mathematical riffs swirl around cymbal crashing and rapid fire rhythms, the howling vocals provide the emotional release for all the tension that’s built up. The occasional piano melody and gentle guitar parts help balance things out as well.

As these tunes move at feverish pace, most of them clocking in at around 2 minutes, it comes on like an adrenaline rush, leaving you in a state of shock and exasperation as you wonder what happened to that lovely and mellow post-rock guitar passage. Oh that’s right, it was destroyed under a barrage of drums and screams. But that’s ok, this is a screamo album after all and its focused on angst-ridden catharsis, throwing raw emotionalism like red paint to a wall.

Lyrical themes? Hard to discern at first. The phrase ‘Last City’ recurs, so this, along with the general tone of the album, tells me that has something to do with urban alienation and escapism. ‘The name "Loma Prieta" itself might be a reference to the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake , so maybe the anguish here is about wanting it all to fall down - or maybe they’re just observing it - either way its a fitting name.

I would recommend this to fans of any kind of punk music, well except that radio-friendly bullshit, as its hardcore attitude and complex musicianship will give your day a quick and brutal shot of energy. While its very short, and the vocals could have been a little more understandable, its still an entertaining and refreshing listen.

Follow the Loma Prieta link above to be taken to their Myspace page, where you can find links to listen to this album for free.

Today is the Day. Sadness Will Prevail. 2002. 4.5 stars.

A tour de force of misanthropy, Sadness Will Prevail is easily one of the most psychotic and disturbing albums you will ever come across. Sprawling across two discs and 30 tracks, this magnum opus is the tortured psyche held up for display, with abrasive mood swings and psychological fits that are compositionally complex and brutal in their honesty.

Today is the Day take elements from hardcore and noise rock, with grinding drums, menacing bass lines and terrifying shrieks, and melds them with an almost avant-garde flair for atmosphere and horror, utilizing film samples, sound effects, field recordings and ambient touches to stir this album’s bleak emotional undertow. There are dramatic shifts between songs here, raging between spastic riffs and pummeling drums a la Converge , and despairing passages of acoustic guitar, ambient noise and angular piano compositions.

The wide array of sounds being explored here is not merely a novelty to set Today is the Day from the rest of the hardcore pack, but serves to enhance the intense catharsis taking place, giving front man Steve Austin a claustrophobic space for his demons to run amok. With less concern placed on fitting within genre conventions, Today is the Day tread into blacker compositional territory that gives prevalence to thematics and naked emotional outbursts.

Sadness will Prevail, needless to say, is terrifyingly dismal and requires a certain fortitude to approach. But any effort made in entering the band’s uncompromising and insular black holes will be a rewarding one, if not to appreciate the vast subtleties and nuances awaiting within the madness, then to come away with an understanding of how unmitigated experimentation can release the artist’s most demented and pained sensibilities. For its unfiltered and unrelenting spasms, Sadness will Prevail remains not only a landmark for hardcore, but for dark and aggressive music as a whole, standing alongside NIN’s The Downward Spiral as one of the greatest expressions of self-destruction and personal torment.