Downers of the World Unite: Digital Teens/Nothing Looks Good
I do not get to review a lot of hardcore or punk on StGA. Growing up in the Connecticut hardcore/punk/ska scene, those genres of music will always hold a special place in my heart. Unfortunately those genre’s of music rarely get promoted to me. But that is not the case with Flint, MI’s Downers of the World Unite. Their are re-releasing their 2007 debut LP, Nothing Looks Good along with their new EP, Digital Teens through Thinker Thought Records.
Downers of the World Unite, colloquially known as Downers, play a brash style of hardcore punk that has drawn comparisons to Every Time I Die, The Bronx, and Deftones. The tracks on Digital Teens are generally fast, thrashy punk; Only one song on the album is over three minutes and most tracks are under two minutes. Musically the band is reminiscent of Cro-Mags mixed with The Exploited. The vocals remind me of Folly which gives the music a little more of a metalcore edge.
The only thing that bothers me about the album is the song structures get old pretty quick. It seem like every song is structure: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-breakdown. While I understand that is the style of music, there are plenty of tracks where the breakdown seems haphazardly stuck on the end just to fulfill the expectations of some unseen judges. The opening track for instance “Married To The Sea” seems to be bridging the gap between garage punk and hardcore. The track’s guitars remind me of The Hives but with a stronger low end to fill out the sound. The song is a perfectly good two minute track but then the song is extended to two-minutes-and-twenty-seconds to fit in a breakdown at the very end. The 20 second breakdown does not ruin the song but it just does not add much to it and makes it feel a tad bit trite.
Analyzing the music, I think Digital Teens/Nothing Looks Good is a little too generic for me. Downers of the World Unite are probably an awesome live band but listening to the album at home I picked out a lot of bland structures that just reek of being too stereotypically “hardcore”.
Rating: 6.0/10
MP3: Downers of the World Unite “Married to the Sea”
Buy: iTunes
Downers of the World Unite: Digital Teens/Nothing Looks Good
