Frontside Five - Ressurection Cemetery

“Ressurection Cemetery”, 2009
(DC Jam)

Skate punks Frontside Five impressed me when I reviewed DC Jam’s Skate Rock Vol 1 compilation a few months ago.  Their two songs aimed for the throat with an early eighties punk sound.  Often though it’s difficult to gauge that much about a band’s sound when they just have a couple songs on a various artist release.    “Complacent Youth” Frontside Five’s prototype is driving blistering bass and rapidly pummmeled drums complented with a metallic guitar sound.  Dual male vocals are employed in a single song assist the band to a fuller sound in “Cow Fucker”.  One guy is a raw yeller and the other handles the more melodic pieces.

    “Do The Crime”  could be easily for a mistaken Civ or Gorilla Biscuits  track with it’s gruff yet melodic vocals over a stripped down diet version of New York Hardcore.  With its movie sample and near spoken piece over “Nuclear Solution” brings the “metal” period of the Circle Jerks to mind although the song mutates into a punk thrash.  The instrumentals “Hangin With Hightower” and “On Bernal Hill” travel back to a  time when crossover first really started to blur the lines between punk and metal.  With their feet firmly in punk, the band manages to covers a lot of ground genre wise.   Passing for D-beat would be possible if it weren’t for a high falsetto scream in “Destroy”.   Not all the songs on “Ressurection Cemetery” scream out, “Look at Me and Listen” and often its not hard to think of the better bands that they sometimes sound like and as a whole the band come across as searching for their own identity. But overall Frontside Five is a band well worth keeping an eye on.

3/5

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