No Consent
With modern punk bravado, scorched guttural vocals, meaty hooks aplenty, and serious musical chops that sometimes lean into elements of crossover and metal, No Consent pour their attention on the ills of society with a powerful vengeance and conscience. For people who gravitate towards the anthemic anger of Rise Against, The Casualties, and MDC, this will be a top-notch affair. For instance, tunes like the surging "No Escape" tries to tear down the self-enclosed safe spaces around people in order to expose the police as well as the ecosystem of greed, corruption, and brutality that makes the dire dysfunction all possible. "Fuck All Cops" needs no introduction: the slower, but highly-charged tempo is a backdrop to their belief that cops have become class traitors who disgrace and traumatize communities: with a crushing tempo and gruff vocals, they emphasize the dire need to reform the system that legitimizes brutality in the name of so-called safety. Without arming themselves with loads of leftist books, they make a plainspoken case in the harrowing, uptempo "Division of Wealth" that the money world has reached a tipping point, an inflection: the credit card debt, and the seething gap between the have and have-nots, are not sustainable and are a recipe for piling up grievances against injustice, forced poverty, and exploitation. The band's politics of despair and disorder, raw insight and basic intelligence, are bolted to each word, and none of it feels like a classroom lesson. Other tunes like "Sugarloaf" depict the small-town, fucked-up kids of the gutter-prone night, riddled with pain and alienation, rejection and loser status, while "Alone" feels like a rage against the human machines: the people who try to block, subvert, and repress our wills and energies. Those same enraged sentiments and outlooks also pervade "Live Free," which is a testament to free agency in the middle of a new American authoritarianism. It's a throaty shout-out to a burning desire to shred the plans, inherited ideas, and roles placed on us. And not to be missed, "Bastard Nation" assails "the home of god, hate, and slavery," a dark inherited American history whose myth begins to crumble under the weight of observation, in which the politics of red and blue are just another kind of dope. It's a weighty tune about the power of dissatisfaction, the false promises of a system baring its problems daily, and the fear of an overarching government whose policies are worrisome, at best.