Stream MouthBreather's new chaotic hardcore LP 'I'm Sorry Mr. Salesman'
Boston’s MouthBreather have followed 2017’s Pig and 2018’s Dollmeat with their first album for Good Fight Music, I’m Sorry Mr. Salesman, which is out today.
“I was immediately impressed by the band upon first listen,” said Good Fight Music’s Carl Severson. “The artwork grabbed me and then the music was just filled with a palpable rage and urgency. It just clicked with me right away. The guys have a great work ethic and a great vision that I know Good Fight can help actualize. Gonna be a fun one.”
The band say they’re just as influenced by bands like Deftones, Primus, Tool, and Underoath as they are by more standard punk and hardcore, and you can hear that coming through on this totally genre-defying LP. It’s a purely chaotic record, with hints of mathcore, straight-up hardcore, industrial, nu metal, psychedelia, hooky alt-rock, and more. It’s absolutely nuts from start to finish, but it never feels like chaos for the sake of chaos. MouthBreather’s sense of structure and songcraft is strong too. Listen below.
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25 Chaotic Hardcore, Mathcore & Sasscore Albums from the 2000s That Are Seminal Today
Black Cat #13 – I Blast Off! (2000)
The Sawtooth Grin – Cuddlemonster (2001)
Racebannon – In the Grips of the Light (2002)
The Blood Brothers – March On Electric Children (2002)
Orchid – Orchid (aka “Gatefold”) (2002)
Since By Man – We Sing the Body Electric (2003)
"We sing the body electric/Sickness says hold on/Would you like to dance, dance, dance?"
That's how Since By Man open "A Kid Who Tells on Another Kid is a Dead Kid" (probably an Over the Edge reference but not a Nation of Ulysses cover), with Sam Macon raising his voice to a harsh shriek on "dance, dance, dance" and totally embodying flamboyant hardcore in the process. That line also gives this Milwaukee band's Revelation-released debut LP its title, and -- for a subgenre that prides itself on shamelessly verbose poetry -- it makes sense that a band would name their album after a Whitman poem. Throughout We Sing the Body Electric, Since By Man deliver a shapeshifting soundscape that bounces between melodic math riffs, clean-sung hooks, and bludgeoning metalcore, sounding like a cross between The Blood Brothers, Botch, and Poison The Well (who Since By Man guitarist Brad Clifford later joined). It's often a fast, frenzied, constantly-in-motion record, but it sets itself apart from dime-a-dozen mathcore with a few atmospheric, slow-burning songs that veer closer to Jupiter-era Cave In. I don't know if this particular album is a big influence on the current punk scene or not, but it sure sounds like it could be; it combines a lot of different sounds that have been coming to prominence in recent years. Some parts of this album sound like early 2000s post-hardcore in a nutshell, but other times it feels genuinely ahead of its time.