Let’s start the year off with something a little more hardcore.
“Messy, Isn’t It?” is Dangers’s second full-length album, and shows us a band who’s not afraid to do the little things needed to make their music more engaging. Now this isn’t a revolutionary release, but it is, to say the very least, a good one. It’s fun, it’s serious, it’s sarcastic, it’s vengeful, it’s angry. In essence it’s superior to most other bands that play hardcore music. Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just show that it’s still relevant and interesting.
Dangers pull this off with haste and urgency, having songs ranging anywhere from forty-five seconds (“Saved by the Buoyancy of Citrus”), to the three minute closer (“The El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat Preserve”). They know how to play fast paced hardcore, but they aren’t afraid to bring down the tempo and pump up the passion.
It’s the little things in this album that really make it stand out. Take for example “Check, Please”, which spends its first 40 seconds thrashing about like a child mid tantrum, until it hits the breakdown at which point the tempo takes a moment to breathe, finding the bands lead singer belting in French.
It’s at this moment, when hearing the pleas of “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plait, please excuse all the flesh I once ate”, that you realize that even if you don’t speak or understand French, you just don’t care. In the end you find yourself belting those lines out at the same intensity regardless.
“Opposable” finds a single voice calling for the bass to start, introducing the hardcore fury that follows. You then hear vocalist Al Brown snarl “A primate with opposable thumbs, to hold the clubs, to shoot the guns”. Overall another slower tempo song, but this is when Dangers is easily at its most dangerous.
Then there’s “Cure for Cancer” and “Cure for AIDS”, the controversially titled duo that, upon listening, are complete opposites of one another.
During “Cure for Cancer” the band plays at some of their fastest, reflecting the quickness and ferocity with which cancer can strike.
The cure here lies in playing faster, louder, and getting all the impurities out with screams and yells.
While “Cure for AIDS” finds the band slowing it down again, here Dangers utilizes its sound to reflect the way in which AIDS slowly takes a hold of its victims.
From the beginning of the song we hear “You are going to die, your parents, your children, they’re all going to die, slow painful with a methadone drip”.
It’s safe to say that Dangers is not holding back. And while some may find this somewhat tasteless, I find that it makes the band more dynamic and mature for touching on such topics and refusing to back down.
There are countless little things about this band and their music that makes them standout. Even their interludes, “Messy, Isn’t it” and “(Love Poem)”, are engaging while giving the listener a breather.
The latter track is layered by monotone voices repeating over one another, “It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them, when you don’t love them anymore”.
A cynic’s delight, Danger’s “Messy, Isn’t It?” is as hardcore as it is smart and subtle, drawing you in and then tearing you apart. Can’t say I would have it any other way.
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Final Verdict: 4 zombie babies out of 5
