When I first got my hands on the new album Dead Yuppies from Agnostic Front, I pretty much thought 'Oh great... more generic boring hardcore'. This is coming from me, a guy whose heard only one song from the band - Riot, Riot, Upstart - which, and while I'm not sure about this, is probabaly not the best representation of their sound. At least not after listening to this album. I consider myself a fan of the whole hardcore genre, although the amount of bands I would list as "some of my favorites" isn't too long a list - it includes Rise Against, Ignite, Refused and uh... well that's about all the modern hardcore punk I'm into. I don't count a lot of the 80's stuff like Minor Threat, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, etc. I also don't count some of the non-punk hardcore bands I enjoy, or 'nu-metal' (a term which I really don't like), such as System of a Down, Rammstein, or Rage Against the Machine. How punk am I for admitting that those three bands are some of my favorites? Not very, actually. Hah!

So what's the point of that entire paragraph? I'm not really sure, but I think it's to say that I went into listening to this album with the intent of not liking it because for me its pretty hard to get into a hardcore band. So what was the result of my listening to Dead Yuppies? Well, at the time I popped it in, I think had some of that teen angst going. You know, the kind Limp Bizkit sing about? Yeah, I sure wanted to break stuff. Or something. Whatever I was feeling, I was really enjoying some of Agnostic Front's agressive and fast music. They've been around almost as long as I have, and yet they're still really fucking hard and fast. Their first album was in 1986, and while I havn't heard it, I bet it's not too far from this sound.

The album doesn't have that one catchy song that you might find being played on the radio once in a while, like "Riot Riot Upstart" had in 1999. All you hear in this album is some really fucking hard songs with the nasty vocals you've come to expect from this band. For a good idea of what these guys sound like on the album, listen for the song "No Mercy". To me, it pretty much sums up their sound. It's got the fast and agressive guitars, the incredible drum rolls, the melodic yet screached vocals - pretty much what these guys are about.

I can't say I've become a huge fan of the band from this album, but I can enjoy it when I'm in the mood for something like this. If you're a fan of Agnostic Front, you'll no doubt like this album. If you havn't been a fan of the band before, you probabaly still won't be. If you've never heard of the band before, this is a perfect album for you to start on.