Title: No Faith
Format Reviewed: MP3
Format Release: 31st March 2014
Reviewed By: Ben Chapman
No Faith is a promising mini-album from Irish quartet Hornets. Though I write this on an alcohol-free St Patrick's day, I find the music has a similarly raucous energy to any whisky you could try ply on us.
Stay Free sets the tone brilliantly, with hard-hitting, snare-heavy beats and some restless strumming that must most probably require some sort of attachable wrist gyroscope. There's a sense of an unrelenting power, some perpetual heaviness, completed with sustained treble wailings over the main parts and a brave double-time break before the track returns faster than ever.
It's noticeable just how well produced the album is from the first couple of tracks. In Advice, all the rhythm is tight, the intro shows off an immodest bass tone that's fathoms-deep and full of satisfyingly punchy compression, the screaming vocals are strong but not mixed so loud as to be overpowering: the music still takes centre stage, polished without losing its refreshing strength.
Now Hornets have our attention, they slow things down initially in Jehovah’s Intro. A gradual wave of distorted chords helps make up the thickly plodding groove before instantly running off into an incredibly fast crash of blastbeats. Some dissonant guitar anti-melody writhes around with all the dexterity of an Irish fiddle, but in an intense, warped manner, shredding for the noise itself rather than showing off their evident technical skills. Hornets have stripped away all the offcuts of metal and left a sharp punky skeleton, wildly moshing away, all pointy elbows and dark hooks.
Hard and heavy with a somewhat industrial production, the rhythmic steadiness that endlessly chugs throughout provides an unrelenting sense of doom, particularly in the slow distorted swagger of closing track Behind Me, where the album struts away headbanging from the listener: or the rumble of double kick pedal and skidding bassline on For Always.
The tracks are placed one after the other seamlessly. Whilst each song is strong enough to stand on its own, most of the changes between them are near-unnoticeable, making No Faith an impressive effort from Hornets, who have managed to make a exciting five-track mini-album with a truly incremental force, and one not to be ignored at that.
Don't miss our behind the scenes of the video for Stay Free: http://thepunkarchive.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/feature-hornets.html
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