The RadioActivist

Ashers are a five-piece hardcore band from Boston, Massachusetts formed by Mark “Unseen” Civitarese with members of Crash and Burn and Deadly Sins. While the Unseen has been quiet since 2007’s Internal Salvation, Ashers have been busy, releasing the Cold Dark Place EP in 2008 and touring the U.S. and Europe for the past several years. Since the Unseen was embracing an almost distinctly hardcore sound with Internal Salvation, Ashers isn't a huge change for Mark Unseen and company. The songs on Kill Your Master are short, aggressive and angry, but have enough variety to stay interesting through the 25 minutes of music. Beginning with the savage title track and through the two-minute slam-pit anthem “Faith Denied,” Kill Your Master rarely lets up. Gang shouts, slicing guitars and head-pounding rhythms populate most of the tracks, with an occasional guitar solo thrown in for good measure. The only big departure comes on “Blood and Grain,” a sludgy rock number written and sang by guitar...

Since Slapshot has been virtually inactive over the last couple years (there’s a new record in the works, apparently), it makes perfect sense that Boston’s Refuse Resist would step in with the same gargly hardcore punk as Choke and the boys to fill in the temporary void. While not a dead-ringing clone entirely, Refuse Resist (presumably taking their name from the left-leaning human rights campaign of the same name) plays a very similar brand of straight-ahead, old-time hardcore as Slapshot, and vocalist Shawn Refuse does the world’s best Jack Kelly impression. Coincidentally, while Slapshot featured Ed Lalli of the Welch Boys filling in on guitar for Digital Warfare and Tear it Down (which came out on Thorp Records), Socialized features the Welch Boys’ Mark Powers standing in on bass and is also out on Thorp Records. As if that wasn't enough, original Slapshot guitarist Steve Risteen is now shredding axe as a member of Refuse Resist. The cover of Socialized is marked by one of the...

While there aren't any photos of the dapper young gents of Bulldog Courage in the liner notes of this album, it’s probably safe to say they’re not the kind of folks you’d want to encounter in a poorly lit alleyway. Of course, that’s only based on the testosterone-filled anthems that comprise From Heartache to Hatred, but it’s hard to imagine a more telling testament than what’s heard here. For the most part, Bulldog Courage seem to come from the Blood for Blood school of hardcore that is by nature heavy, machismo, and certainly not straight-edge. Strangely though, there are some rather endearing tracks on this record, and rather than gloss over exactly what makes this album good and what makes it bad, I’m resorting to the ol’ Amazon.com individual song breakdown system, beloved by amateur critics everywhere. “Where I've Been”: A fairly trite but not horrible beginning to the album; the chorus of this paint-by-numbers hardcore is “I don’t know where I’m going / I sure know where...

Female voices have been a part of punk all the way through its evolution, from Nico and the Velvet Underground to X-Ray Spex and the Avengers through modern bands like Lemuria and Deadly Sins. But frontwomen have been markedly less abundant in the hardcore scene, clustered mostly among crust and thrashier styles with bands like I Object and Bring That Shit. But there aren’t too many bands playing Comeback Kid-styled youth crew revival with female vocalists, and that’s where Reaching Hand comes in. Hailing from the unlikely sanctuary of Portugal, Reaching Hand has made inroads into the U.S. on Thorp Records and covered Europe via Chorus of One with their debut EP, Threshold, after forming in 2007. In five songs -- all hovering around or below the two-minute mark -- Reaching Hand effectively demonstrates their fresh take on hardcore while drawing parallels to many of today’s biggest names. With seemingly little time for intros, outros or breakdowns in their succinct songs, the opener “Ti...