I hate to break up all the metal here of late, but here’s some impassioned, intelligent hardcore for fans of Killing the Dream, Have Heart, Dead Hearts and Passion.

Laced with political angst, Verse’s third album is a collective of confrontational hymns and personal struggles delivered with a sense of melancholy amid the expected power chords, layered, urgent melodies and feral shouts of front man Sean Murphy who at times comes across like Zack De La Rocha plying hardcore, and occasionally goes into some semi spoken diatribes.

It’s not the most heavy contemporary hardcore I’ve ever heard but it does have distinct mood shifts from urgent typical pacing (“Old Guards, New Methods”, “Signals”, “Blind Salvation”) to more brooding tracks like opener “The New Fury”, “Suffering To Live, Scared To Love”, “Scream”. “Earth and Stone” and the excellent three chapter, conceptual center piece, “Story of a Free Man”, which all work really well to add some intrinsic atmosphere and personal mood to the typical hardcore fueled pace and urgency.

The production is loose and slightly jangly, giving it a more organic feel than most slightly more tightly wound hardcore, and the whole album comes across as honestly furious but with bouts of solemn introspection, without being forced. The end result is one of the better, most diverse hardcore albums of the year, but also an album that has some outside the box appeal for other fans.

[Visit the band's website]

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