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Exit Order's new EP steps away from the nonstop hardcore of their demo and shifts into a catchier UK82 meets Welcome to 1984 euro punk style.
Our take: Man, this is killer! Debut 7" from this Boston who pretty much take a whole bunch of things I love and smash them together into one absolutely scorching band/record. The basis here is hardcore not unlike the typical stock in trade of Side Two Records (not to mention similar labels like Beach Impediment, Painkiller, etc.), but there's so much more going on than your typical hardcore band. So many hardcore bands' songs sound way too same-y to me... like they had one idea of what the band would sound like and aren't willing to go outside of the overly restrictive boundaries that they've created for themselves, but Exit Order sound fully realized, packing an LPs worth of killer punk songwriting into a single 7". The riffs are just great, sometimes coming at you with that whirlwind of chords, "riffs inside of riffs" style, and other times able to back off and pound out a simple, catchy part when necessary (Jeff calls this the "money riff"). The rhythm section keeps things tight and bouncy... I'd say this reminds me of pogo punk like Sad Boys or Pox, but it's so much faster and more rhythmically varied than those bands that it feels like an injustice. But the star here is the vocalist... they're kind of high-pitched a la Sad Boys (or older bands like the Comes or Nog Watt), but at the same time they're so bruising and powerful. In a lot of modern hardcore bands the vocals work almost like the rhythm guitar, locking into a songs backbeat and just keeping the song marching forward, but Exit Control have bonafide sing-alongs. In case you can't tell, I'm pretty much over the moon about this 7"... without a doubt one of the punk records of the year, so get it dummy!