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Death Before Dishonor

Better Ways To Die

Written by: PP on 01/09/2009 17:00:40

Bands like Death Before Dishonor provide perfect ammunition to people who hate hardcore. They're just the typical tough guy hardcore band that plays uncompromising, metallic, straight forward hardcore that fails to show its face outside of the 2-stepping hardcore culture they're so deeply involved with. Their new album, "Better Ways To Die", is supposedly their best album yet according to what I've read, but yet it offers nothing else but aggressive, super tight chugga chugga hardcore that merely variates between medium pace genericness and in-your-face hardcore punk. There are a couple of decent choruses, but most of the songs are so fucking generic that it hurts.

Basically, this record's hardcore to its bone, and it won't appeal to anyone else than the camouflage shorts, wife-beater wearing hardcore kids who make once so fun mosh pits a dangerous place for one's life these days. They try hard not to be lumped into the tough guy hardcore category, and succeed in doing that on a couple of tracks, but unfortunately there are too many overly serious, boring hardcore tracks that you've heard time and time again in underground venues that do just that to the band. A few tracks are genuinely great, showing some potential of Death Before Dishonor actually living up to their status/hype as one of the most promising and interesting hardcore bands around (see "Peace And Quiet", and especially the very melodic "Remember"), but all too many tracks are completely anonymous to the listener.

The whole record's over in just over 24 minutes, which may sound like a too short running time for a 11 track album, but trust me when I say that you couldn't take any more of this unless you're one of the hardcore kids depicted earlier in this review. But even if you are, honestly both Terror and Hatebreed do this type of sound much better, not to even mention Agnostic Front.

Download: Peace And Quiet, Remember, Better Ways To Die
For the fans of: Terror, Hatebreed, Agnostic Front
Listen: Myspace

Release date 28.07.2009
Bridge 9