White Guilt – White Guilt

December 2010 • Video Disease Records

The fact that a hardcore punk revival movement exists in the 21st century is one of my favorite things about modern music. And many of these bands take the traditional hardcore sound and add various spins on it to create some really fresh and original-sounding music while keeping the hardcore sound alive. White Guilt's eponymous album is a good example of this kind of fusion that happens.

Specifically, they put on a very noisy style—lots of distortion, feedback, and extra reverb, creating a very dense yet raw sound, which reminds me of the sound of old-school black metal bands, which is very cool. They also employ a lot of powerviolence's dissonance and alternating blastbeats and slow doomy parts. The latter bit is explored quite a bit with the longer tracks (mostly in "Human Flood II"), which sometimes employ an almost-sludgy sound but don't sound out-of-place among the other tracks. The beginning of closing track "Comatose" is very stoner-influenced, which is a pretty neat element.

Sometimes it gets to be a little too noisy for their own good, though (e.g. the beginning of "Refine", which is a total mess), resulting in some sections that simply don't sound very good. Since the songs are often indiscernable from each other, sometimes it sounds like the band is repeating themselves with some songs. Fortunately, the appropriately-short songs help keep things moving so it doesn't stick to one particular riff or section very long. Additionally there are plenty of exceptions where a memorable or unique riff or section crops up (again, the longer tracks, and some shorter ones like "The Fetus"). Also, at only 22 minutes (and a quarter of that is the last track) the album never gets much of a chance to become stale or overstay its welcome before it's finished, which is always a good thing.

I'll admit that I've heard plenty of modern hardcore and powerviolence that is better than White Guilt but for what it's worth this album is probably deserving of a couple listens. It's fairly unique and doesn't tend to fall victim to a lot of the problems that often plague this style of music, although admittedly it's pretty extreme and isn't for everyone. Still, though, it's another solid addition to my collection.

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