EP Review: Cro-Mags – 2020

Cro-Mags are always at the top of the list when it comes to hardcore bands that influence and invent, as well as being an outfit that never compromise on any quarter.  This release is proof that what ever the world throws at them, they will always watch, learn and report on what they see.

Founder member Harley Flanagan explains “Just by coincidence we recorded 20 minutes and 16 seconds of music, so we simply added a few seconds of real-world chaos. The album cover is meant to look like a calendar – seven squares across, with one picture from 2020 per day.  Inside the booklet there are 12 pictures, one for each month of 2020;  and the back is a shot of something I have never seen before in my life – a totally empty New York City. Coronavirus, quarantine, empty streets, brutality, burning buildings, violence and destruction: 2020 is a year none of us will ever forget.”

Six songs that land in at 20mins & 20 secs, not intentional but all the same it has to be an omen of sorts.  For all the years that Cro-Mags didn’t record or play, this year has made up for this ten times over, with the release of the soon to be iconic ‘In The Beginning’, which stomped its way all over the scene with a swagger.  Not to be seen resting on their smug but grounded asses, Harley is proving that time can definitely not blunt the edges, in fact it sharpens the teeth.

With songs that have the Cro-Mag underbelly of hard-core flowing through every vein, but draped in all the influences that have fed them since the onset, take ‘Age Of Quarantine’ opening with a Hip-Hop mix that soon moves over for a thunderous bass riff, rock guitars hanging their tones all over it are then flung across the floor by the hard-core vocal and machine gun drums.  In evidence throughout the EP is a sense of needing to draw a picture of a year that has been felt more on the streets than the media or governments care to admit or acknowledge, ‘2020’ gives off this in a no holds barred spitting of frustration across a soundscape that is atmospheric, anarchic and at moments truly explosive. 

Oh but wait a minute, there is time for reflection, a dub reggae beat opens ‘Violence and Destruction’ giving you time to catch breath and then be pounded into submission.  The vocal throughout seem to be taking more of a commentary position, although with an air of foreboding, ‘Chaos In The Streets’ speaks for it self and then ‘Crofusion’ gives a musical lesson in how bass alone can tell stories and set tone, an almost funk bass riff drives along a guitar that sings of eastern promise.

All in all this EP is never gonna let you down, it screams of musical wizardry and pounds the living daylights out of 2020! 

Released on Digital 11th December across all streaming platforms, go check it out on your favourite.

Due for physical release sometime in early spring

check out the bands Facebook to keep up to date.