One Win Choice – Never Suspend Disbelief

One Win Choice starts their debut full length album, Never Suspend Disbelief, with a fuzzy sound clip that combines many different people talking politics and change. They then blast in with a solid drum beat and gang vocals that scream “Bury Them!” It pulls you in, grabs your attention and let’s you know what you can expect for the remaining eleven tracks on the album – and not once do they deviate from that course.

Ripping through track after track, One Win Choice is a never ending onslaught of melodic hardcore punk. Heavy drumming lead most songs with a strong focus on the bass drum that would get any pit moving. Dan Kloza’s vocals are crisp and strong despite having a limited range in delivery as he normally stays somewhere between old Rise Against and Bigwig. The vocals are delivered with lightning speed and venomous anger, often surrounded by some gang vocals for a little extra punch. Scattered throughout the album is the occasional guitar riff that blows the mind along with some excellent bass playing. It stays in the same tempo throughout the entire thirty-three minutes, never relapsing or holding back anything; just a continual source of energizing, fist pumping melodic hardcore. Very few songs actually stand out of the crowd as they normally stick to the same structure for each song, but there are enough songs in the album that grab your attention (Powder Keg, Bremen Six, and I Deny for example) to keep you coming back for more.

It fits nicely in between acts like Anti-Flag, Propaghandi and Strike Anywhere with socially conscious punk anthems. But instead of condemning the people and government, One Win Choice takes an internal look at politics and revolution. The theme of the album is change within ourselves, as they shout out in Bremen Six: Now stand up, raise your fucking voice, we can’t let this plague, this poison run it’s course. It all starts in our hearts, in our minds, in our children’s lives. They don’t point fingers but offer a disenfranchised view of the world and America, particularly in New Rome. It’s an album of an awakening with talks of revolution. Sound clips from the likes of Howard Zinn and Robert Kennedy also help cement the ideas they are trying to portray which is, in a way, Adam Smith’s ideology of the “invisible hand” taken out of the context of economy and brought in to every day life: by doing what’s best for ourselves we do what’s best for society as a whole.

Never Suspend Disbelief is not an album that will get radio play or major label backing, but it will flourish in the skate parks, the grimy clubs and the punk rock underground. Fans of Strike Anywhere, Only Crime and Propaghandi will devour it as it’s an unrelenting source of energy, youthful optimism, intelligence and revolutionary ideals without becoming preachy.