Southpaw – Stand for Something

Straight-forward New York-styled hardcore stuff, replete with all the elements you’d expect. You got your gang vocal sing-alongs, you got your sound bites (from Braveheart? What?), you got your pick slides and breakdowns and chugga-chuggas, your high-pitched vocalist that just belts it out in the same range the entire time, all of it. It’s all here. If you’re into that stuff, you just hit the jackpot with this one.

Except that after hearing dozens if not hundreds of bands like this over the years, Stand For Something just isn’t doing a whole lot for me. I mean, the guitarist can shred his way through a metal-tinged solo like a motherfucker and the music is ferocious enough – the drummer’s fucking unstoppable and just about carries this band all by himself – but, well, it’s still NYHC, which is a genre that was pretty played out for me some time back. I’m not laying some holier-than-thou ageist claptrap on you – I’m just saying that I got burnt on this type of stuff around the time that I recognized Roger Miret’s politics pretty much sucked, that Victim In Pain only had about three good songs on it and that this kind of music as a whole is often, well, boring. So it takes a lot to get me excited when it comes to old school hardcore stuff and, yeah, with Southpaw, I just can’t get past that sense that we’ve all been here a million times before.

I’m all for paying homage to your heroes (in this case, Gorilla Biscuits, Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, etc.)… until it becomes entirely redundant, just an aping of that which came before. I’m not picking onSouthpaw explicitly here – a lot of bands do it. Unfortunately, that is about all I came away with after listening to this one.

Still, to their credit, I seriously doubt a band like Southpaw (who were on hiatus from 2000 until 2007) are doing this for any other reason than the straight-up joy they get from doing it. And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they ultimately couldn’t give a shit what some record reviewer dork like me has to say about their record. Which is probably just as it should be.