Band:	Adversaries
Album:	Wraith
Style:	Hardcore
Release date:	December 2011

01. Low
02. Juicehead Gorilla
03. Viva
04. An Empty Sky Yields No Stars
05. Glass House, Glass Heart
06. Wraith
07. File Under Suicide
08. Parallels
09. Damager
10. The Longest Year
11. Desert Lights

This sludge and black-tinged hardcore album here is the sort of thing that'll get metal fans to leave their caves and attend Vhemtrallies, hand out pro-Chavez flyers, and do whatever else it is that hardcore punk diehards do with their time. Like discuss the innocence of Lee Oswald or some shit. Not because it's overly-political or anything--it isn't at all--it's just some seriously good, brutal, dirty stuff we have here. You get the more, I don't know... "social" energy and attitude of hardcore, but not at the expense of solid, metal-based riffing.

Pretty much, without any self-righteous political babble, the dudes in Adversaries have made an album that will make you want to, with a posse, not alone, go fuck things up. It's got the slightly more collaborative ethos of hardcore and punk without the sacrifice of skillful execution for raw liveliness. And vice-versa. You get your cake and will actually want to eat it too. It's got the hardcore punk spirit, and the emphasis on riffing of lots of metal. In spades. Sure, the same can be said of plenty of more strictly metal albums, it just seems especially true for this.

You can practically taste the interplay and improv-like aspects here. Boil it down to its constituent parts and, like with a lot of hardcore-based stuff, not much about them will seem all that extraordinary, but all the cooperative liveliness on this is fucking palpable. These guys play like they've been playing together for a long time (even though they really haven't). Makes it so all of the little sludgey, doomed and blackened flourishes strewn throughout feel like they're supposed to be where they are, not forced or out of place to please more non-hardcore fans.

In other words, this album is dynamic. Might not be the most original or unique thing out there, but it sounds good. Damn good.