I picked this band to review because it was at the top of my post-hardcore recommendation list, which is only influenced by two artists. The Catalyst is closely tied with Brainworms.
Frankly, I'm surprised Last.fm's most common tag for The Catalyst is post-hardcore. There is enough about them to convince me that they are current-hardcore. Is that a pun? Anyways, this is just straight punk stuff. I love it. This is like Ultra Dolphins, except instead of psychedelic narcotics they favor alcohol and marijuana.
The album opens up with distortion, just like a lot of punk albums do. It seems to never get old. After that it's just throbbing hardcore. Most of the songs aren't fast enough to mosh, but it's good stomping music.
There is a... well I don't even know what I should call it. In track 3, Assholier Than Thou (some of the titles are quite clever,) the song goes great until some kind of sloppy guitar solo occurs. I can excuse it just because it's a minor imperfection in a good album, but it's just thrown in there at a random time and just doesn't sound good. Luckily, it's not very long, and the song goes on back to it's original greatness.
In Small Town, Big Mouth (track 5,) the tempo is fast enough to do some fun moshing, given the crowd is up to it. You know there's always some dude that brought their girlfriend to the show and doesn't want to go home and bang a girl with a black eye. Don't be that guy.
The next song, Werewolves of Washington, is much slower, and the guitars even have delay on them. There's another guitar solo-type-thing, except it fits in this song and sounds cool. It's a total stoner song.
42012 is an instrumental adventure, opening up for the last two tracks of the CD. I'm not normally a fan of these, but this one's not too bad. Making it shorter couldn't hurt though.
The last two tracks are rather uneventful though, but this album really is some good music. It will stay on my mp3 player, and I will listen to it while cycling.
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