Bandcamp “GLEN” spends its first seventy-eight seconds as a flat-out crossover blast and then stops dead. What replaces it is a long, reverbed, near-ambient outro with whispered speech underneath, and it is so abrupt that the first time through you check whether the next track has started. Ending a twenty-minute hardcore EP on a horror-film fade rather than a final breakdown is a decision, and it makes the whole thing play as a set rather than a stack of songs.
The names are the frame. Louis, Bubba, Jack, Otis, Adrian, Glen: six first names that anyone who has spent time with horror films will place without help, and the band have said the record follows them loosely. What makes it more than a gimmick is that the music changes to match. “BUBBA” is theatrical, swinging, almost funk-footed in the verses before it collapses into a blast-driven breakdown, with a vocal that runs from manic speech to full shouting. “JACK” is straight crossover thrash, dry and mid-forward, tight enough to hold a clean solo in the middle of it. “ADRIAN” is the outlier and the best thing here, a raw fuzzy grunge crawl in the ugly nineties sense, closer to noise rock than hardcore, ending on feedback rather than a riff. Six characters, six dialects. The EP argues that a band can be this stylistically restless as long as it stays short, and at twenty minutes the argument holds.
They also know what to do with a sample. “LOUIS” drops a film clip in the middle as a hinge rather than an intro decoration, and “OTIS” opens on filtered speech before its uptempo section and lands in a halftime breakdown with gang shouts. This is a band from Northern Virginia self-releasing an EP recorded with Pablo Cabrera at Analog Approach, and the arrangements are noticeably smarter than the format usually asks for.
Where it slips is volume. “LOUIS” and “GLEN” both push their masters hard, and in the densest passages the depth flattens out so that everything arrives on the same plane. “GLEN” suffers most, because the first minute is pinned so tightly that the ambient turn afterwards has to do all the dynamic work by itself. Compare it to “BUBBA” and “ADRIAN”, which were left with room to move, where the snare has an actual wooden crack to it and the bass stays wiry instead of merging into the guitars, and the difference is not subtle. The shouted vocals are consistently well placed throughout, dry and up front, and you can follow every word, which for this style is rarer than it should be.
Nothing here is going to convert a doom purist, and Rust Lords are clearly not asking to. What they have made is a fast run of horror sketches that lands in the right order, by a band with more range than twenty minutes can properly show, and “ADRIAN” is the one that suggests where they might go if they stopped switching costumes.
Vocals are the most consistent element on this EP. They are shouted, dry, placed right at the front, and intelligible on all six tracks, which is not the norm for crossover and hardcore and is clearly deliberate. Underneath them the picture varies a lot by track. The best-sounding pieces keep their transients: a snare with real wood in the crack, a bass that stays wiry and separate from the guitars, and cymbals with air around them. The two heaviest tracks are the opposite, mastered hard enough that the depth collapses and everything sits on one plane, and on the closer that flatness costs the dramatic ambient turn some of its impact. Guitars are grainy and mid-forward throughout with good note definition even at speed, and the low end is tight rather than swampy. The recurring cost is a pile-up in the middle of the picture where distorted guitars and shouted vocals compete for the same range, most audible in the densest passages.
Standout tracks: ADRIAN, BUBBA, JACK
