Forever After Nothing

Formerly known as Amendment 18, A18 makes its Victory Records debut with this powerful onslaught of post-straight-edge hardcore, treading gracefully the line between airless precision and sprawling emotional self-indulgence: their ensemble sound is tight and at times complex (notice the time signature changes on "Broke the Blue,") but the guitars themselves sound organic and human, more like thunder than machinery. The lyrics are angry, but not entirely despairing — despite the gruesome images of suicide that dominate the cover art and the pages of insert booklet, and which will give the casual listener a mistaken impression of the band's general message. These guys aren't actually interested in dying themselves — they're more interested in seeing you die, which will help them feel better about all the horrible things you've done to them ("Your pain is more pleasure than I deserve," "The gift I had in mind was along the lines of you choking on broken glass," "Never forgive never forget," etc.). If hardcore in the 1980s was primarily about politics and social commentary, since the 1990s it seems to have become a form of psychotherapy, a sort of EST for tattooed twenty-year-olds. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on the amount of childhood trauma you're trying to work through yourself. In purely musical terms, you could do worse than this band.