Gallows – Orchestra Of Wolves
With the ink barely dry on their major label contract, bastions of DIY punk Gallows have chosen to reissue last year’s debut full-length with a bonus CD of unreleased material, mostly comprised of BBC session versions of the same tracks. It’s an interesting enough curio, with two so-so new songs and a nice cover of Black Flag’s ‘Nervous Breakdown’ thrown in for good measure, but hardly essential, and will doubtless piss off those already in possession of ‘Orchestra Of Wolves’. Ethical quibbles aside, the album itself is pretty fantastic, a feral howl of a record which breathes riotous life into hardcore’s rotting corpse. These twelve tracks rage with an intensity rarely heard on modern punk releases, successfully channelling the ferocious energy of their live show onto disc. It’s not merely noise for noise’s sake, though. There is a fierce intelligence at play in the lyrics, and Gallows are not afraid to divert from standard hardcore musical practice; witness the frantic synth underpinning the squalling ‘Will Someone Shoot That Fucking Snake’, or the subtle piano which adds such depth to ‘Six Years’ for evidence that this lot are a class above their dogmatic peers. This is a great purchase for newcomers, then, but existing fans needn’t bother.
Words_Lee Gorman
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DOWNLOAD: ‘Abandon Ship’, ‘Six Years’
FOR FANS OF: Million Dead, Snapcase, Refused
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