NO FRIENDS – Traditional Failures
Within the limited confines of creativity that plagues the hardcore punk scene, where plenty of teenagers and twenty-somethings attempt to recycle the blindingly fast and ferocious riffs of Void, Koro, and early Black Flag, every now and then something incredibly original emerges that demands immediate absorption from anyone paying attention. While No Friends’ newest release from Kiss of Death Records, Traditional Failures, certainly demands attention, the originality is a little on the shallow side. No Friends is a sort of punk super-group that consists of New Mexican Disaster Squad’s Sam Johnson on guitar, Alex Goldfarb on bass, and Richard Minino on drums, with Municipal Waste frontman Tony Foresta providing super-charged vocals.
The problem with No Friends is that they sound exactly like New Mexican Disaster Squad, just with Municipal Waste’s vocals — which could be great news if you’re a fan of both of those bands. The six songs on the EP blaze by at the speed of light, as they should, in less than eight minutes, surely causing those with uninitiated ears to ask, “What the fuck just happened?” As soon as the needle touches the purple marble of the one-sided 12”, the album explodes with the Gorilla Biscuits-esque “A Look Ahead.” The song is aptly named as it provides a look ahead at the rest of the album: the songs between the first and last tracks tend to blur together. The title track, the strongest of the album with its honest lyrics, kicks off with Foresta yelling: “Everyone around me is killing time, now I’m afraid that I’m losing mine!”
No Friends have found what works for them in an unbelievably short amount of time, as they’ve only been around for little more than a year. Traditional Failures is a solid hardcore offering that sounds like it came straight from the mid-‘80s. It’s just too bad they didn’t attempt to expand much on that sound.
(Kiss of Death Records, PO Box 75550, Tampa, FL 33675)
