Eyes and Nines

VINYL FORMAT. "They've adhered to their established less-is-more ethos, ten songs totaling seventeen minutes - previous releases have averaged about a song a minute - and largely remain in the realm of thrashy, downtuned HC with no solos or choruses. How abrasive or extreme you find it will largely depend on your level of immersion in the various micro-styles they assimilate. The most direct practitioners of late-Nineties powerviolence (Charles Bronson, Asshole Parade); Canadian icons Cursed and various parts of their family tree; sardonic Dutchmen Das Oath: all these have paved the way to Eyes & Nines, should you already be a paid-up fan of Trash Talk and up for some backtracking. Joby J Ford of The Bronx is the man behind the producer's console here; The Bronx are friends and former touring partners of TT, which presumably also goes to explain the presence of Bronx frontman Matt Caughthran on 'Explode.' He's certainly not here because his appearance is essential to the song, which regardless is pretty banging. Sam Bosson earns his percussive keep with some monstrous drumming and the band as a whole make keen use of the 150 seconds by tapping into that nu-skool crust aesthetic - anyone who bugs out to bands like Tragedy or The Holy Mountain should be able to get down with this . . . Eyes & Nines will probably not make legit stars of Trash Talk; more likely it will cement their status as a hardcore band for people who tend to listen to indie rock or metal rather than hardcore. This isn't meant in a snooty way: unless your listening habits are deliberately framed within a finite number of genres, chances are that your tastes encompass tokenism in some departments too. Prior to this album, though, their ability to draw fans from outside of the hardcore lifer clubhouse seemed to be in spite of what they sounded like, rather than because of it. This isn't so much the case now. It's not that it's a wimp move: the band can still kick up some serious dust, Spielman's throat is sounding better than ever for all its corrosion and, yep, ten songs in seventeen minutes is still cheerleading for brevity." - Noel Gardner / Drowned in Sound