Restless Habs are a punk band from Cleveland, Ohio. And their sound is definitely entrenched in the wall of guitar, thunderous drums and dirty/clean co-vocalists styling so many bands from that area have come to be known for. Their latest EP No Way to Hide Your Tracks is everything you’d expect from that genre, which has come to be known as “orgcore.” This is good and bad, because when they succeed they pull of a really organic sound, but there are times the sound can be somewhat forced too.

One of the biggest successes on this album is the track “Ragged” where the vocalist with the gruffer voice takes lead vocals. The song brings to mind something you would find on a track off of an album by Nothington, in the best sense of that comparison. The guitars are always in your face, but never sacrifices moving the song forward for the sake of being loud, something that some bands are all too willing to do. The band plays to this strength throughout the rest of the EP, which made this something I caught myself listening to when I would just be driving between work and home in my car.

Getting back to the vocals though, the co-vocalists work very well on some tracks especially when the gruffer vocals are backing up the cleaner vocal approach. However, on the tracks where the band opts to utilize only the clean vocals, the songs lose their immediacy, vocally speaking. Don’t take that the wrong way, the vocals on those tracks are technically precise and aren’t off putting by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that they don’t hit with the same weight as when there’s a little whiskey adding some punch to the vocals. Which at the end of the day, means I’m likely splitting hairs over personal taste as opposed to saying something is definitively good or bad.

All things considered, this is a fairly solid release and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find “Ragged” gets some regular rotation in my car. These guys are definitely a band I would want to checkout live though, because I feel like my issues with the cleaner vocal style may likely be related to production techniques or even just the microphones utilized in the studio. If they ever travel down to southwestern Ohio or I find myself in northeastern Ohio, I hope to get just that chance.