Gutter by Foreign is an interesting EP. Firstly, fo those who haven’t heard of them, Foreign are a German Hardcore band, which of itself is a tad eyebrow raising. It might just be me, but whenever I think of German Metal, Hardcore isn’t the genre that immediately springs to mind. In fact, it would even make my top five and would struggle to crack the top ten.
That doesn’t mean that Gutter isn’t a good EP, it is. Rather good, if truth be told. But that leads me to my second observation. Foreign aren’t your standard Hardcore band.
If you say Hardcore to me, my mind usually jumps to the the likes of Agnostic Front, Cr-Mags, Sick Of It All, those types of bands, and even though there are obvious influences from that scene, there’s also a few other genres that make their precense known. Honestly, if you were to ask me I’d say this is as close to Black Metal Hardcore as you could possibly get without stepping across the borderline and encamping deep in the Black Metal territory. It’s unique and I’m all for it.
The music is heavy as fuck, with riffage and chord progressions so weighted that they hang like Coleridge’s albatross around the mariners neck. The bass is a constant thumping, driving heartbeat that pushes Foreign on, and I have no idea what the fuck the drummer is doing but I like it, a lot. Then there’s the vocals.
They are angry, really fucking angry, and whether they are angry against fascism and social injustice – as the press release claims, so I have no reason to doubt it – or this is just one man screaming at the breakdown of his personal life, I have no idea.
Reading along to the lyrics, I fall into the latter camp in my thinking and interpretation as I can see Gutter being the kind of EP that you slap on when your life becomes an unbearable mess and you just need to smash everything you own. Which is a lot more soul cleansing than you’d think…
Gutter by Foreign is a pretty good record and if you fancy something different, that mixes elements of other genres into Hardcore, then you could do a lot worse than checking it out.
RATING: 3 OUT OF 5
RATING SYSTEM:
- 0 – 1: Fucking shit
- 1 – 2: Shit
- 2 – 3: Not Bad Shit
- 3 – 4: Pretty Good Shit
- 4 – 5: Amazing Fucking Shit
- 5: The Best Shit You Will Ever Hear
PRESS SOURCE: Against PR.
