Are Warm Bodies my favorite current hardcore punk band? If they don’t hold the title outright they are very near the top of the heap. Something about what they do just appeals perfectly to my sensibilities. They are undeniably a hardcore band, but when you look in their music for all of the things that hardcore bands typically do you’ll find very, very few of those things. In that respect, Warm Bodies recall a subspecies of “weird hardcore” that doesn’t get much attention these days. I’m thinking of spastic, borderline funky bands like Th’Inbred, the early Meat Puppets, and (to a lesser extent) Rhythm Pigs and NoMeansNo. By and large, the aforementioned bands’ records haven’t aged particularly well, and I’d honestly be surprised if anyone in Warm Bodies had even heard of those bands (much less tried to emulate them), but at the same time Warm Bodies seem to be tapping into this tradition of musically ambitious freak punk that I never even really put together as a genre in my head before. Listening to My Burning Love over and over again (as I have been doing for the past few weeks), I’ve also come to the conclusion that Warm Bodies also have a lot in common with Sorry State’s own Davidians. While Davidians aren’t nearly as fast and manic and their vibe is much artier and more serious, there’s a lot of similarities in the style of riffing, the herky-jerky rhythms, and the guitar-and-bass interplay, as well as how the vocals punctuate the whole thing. I don’t even know why I’m talking about these things because these are comparisons that probably only I will agree with or appreciate, but fuck… I’ve gotta talk about something right? I can’t just emulate Tim Yohannan’s review of the first Die Kreuzen LP where he just writes “This is fucking great!” over and over again, even if that would probably be the most appropriate response to this little bottle of lightning. So just ignore whatever I just wrote and buy this thing. Highest possible recommendation.
https://thrillingliving.bandcamp.com/album/my-burning-love-ep
