Daddy's Boy: Four Hombres 12"

Daddy’s Boy: Four Hombres 12” (Drunken Sailor) Drunken Sailor Records released Great News!, the debut LP from this Chicago kinda-hardcore band back in 2022, and now they’re back with a new one. I almost let this slip past me without a listen because the band name and album artwork didn’t catch my attention, but I’m glad my trust in Drunken Sailor prompted me to give this a chance, because it smokes. Daddy’s Boy call themselves “questionably a hardcore band,” and that tag makes perfect sense in light of Four Hombres. The music is heavy, hardcore-fast, and very intense, but it’s as if Daddy’s Boy is trying to cram a world of angular and rhythmically ambitious post-hardcore music uncomfortably into hardcore’s loud-and-fast template. The guitarist uses power chords sparingly, preferring squealing, high-on-the-neck flurries of notes that make me think of Fugazi at their most aggressive. The rhythms are similarly diverse, periodically breaking into a hardcore charge only to drift back into odd, syncopated patterns that are nevertheless performed primarily at hardcore tempos. Atop the din, Daddy’s Boy’s singer spits rapid-fire observations on divorce, cell phones, corporate culture, man’s inhumanity to man, and more in a slightly higher-pitched, nerdy-sounding talk/shout-squeal, their nimble rhythms recalling the almighty Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The only halfway decent comparison I can come up with for Daddy’s Boy’s sound is Chris Thomson’s groups the Monorchid and Skull Kontrol, both of whom twisted hardcore into a more musically ambitious, slightly intellectualized form. If this amalgam of artiness and intensity moves you, I encourage you to check this out… I can’t think of a contemporary band doing anything like this with half of Daddy’s Boy’s verve and vigor.