Product of Waste

You Won't Take Me Alive (2008)

FLHC

Product of Waste is a breath of fresh air for me.

The band, hailing from Providence, R.I., plays a style of hardcore that isn't too trendy right now. Most songs start out with blast beats (or super fast thrash 1-2 beats), comparable to Ceremony or Trash Talk, followed by an intense buildup and slowed-down heavy parts. While the formula is awesome, pretty much every song on the album sounds the same. There are some standout tracks, but for the most part, the structures are very predictable. I want to put it out there, though, that this band really doesn't fit into the "powerviolence" category, or whatever it's being called now. It's got a very '80s feel to it and the vocalist's yelling sounds like a scrappy 16-year-old street kid.

Lyrics for the band are a strong point. While POW's vocalist (their MySpace page simply calls him T) is by no means a poet, he does speak clearly and thoughtfully on standard hardcore topics such as cops ("Crook with a Badge") and military corruption ("You Won't Take Me Alive"). In their predictable structure, T throws in some really neat spoken-word parts. I don't mean Leonard Cohen spoken-word sonnets or anything--I just mean the guy barks out a sentence or two out of rhythm before the heaviest part of a song. Case in point, the title track, where a verse ends on a heavy open chord followed by a thick New England accent declaring "Don't come over here lookin' for troops…you're askin' the wrong fuckin' kids!"

This band really slipped under my radar for awhile. I'm not sure how long they've been around but they've put out a split with Boston's Colin of Arabia and just completed a tour with Agnostic Front, so they must be doing something right.

Also, Product of Waste's vocalist has a hip-hop side project called POW Camp. Check it out if you're into that sort of thing; it's really neat.