Hourglass 7"

Five hectic, chaotic and relatively heavy screamy hardcore songs from this Buffalo, NY band that was active during the (you guessed it) mid-90s. Hourglass may or may not have fit into the "screamo" genre - that tag didn't exist until later - but when it's this good you can call it whatever the fuck you want to. Energetic and pretty frantic stuff that crossed boundaries, blurring the not-so-fine line between emo hardcore and more mosh-oriented stuff, or whatever. People that were into both camps dug this band though, including me, and I think that's saying something. Not too many kids back in 1997 dug Honeywell, Earth Crisis, Warzone, Obituary, and Hourglass, all inclusively. Those of us that did were basically smarter that everybody else.

Hourglass released only two records: an absolutely crucial split cd with Canadian crybabies New Day Rising, and this seven inch, but they also initially put out a five song demo. They had a serious case of recording and releasing some songs, then re-recording most of them for inclusion in their next release, then finally doing the same thing one more time. It would have been awesome to hear some different songs, but I wasn't in the band so maybe they did it because they hated the earlier recordings and just wanted to be happy, man. Or maybe they broke up and didn't have new material. Regardless,  New Day Rising is a pretty good comparison as far as a somewhat similar sounding band goes, so I can very easily see why they shared a record with each other. This was released in 1997 on the then-fledgling but always fantastic Immigrant Sun Records (This is Kill #002), and contains no information about when or where this was recorded. The aforementioned split cd was released by Moo Cow Records and also deserves your attention.

-what a tragedy, you fell on your head today-

Tracklist:
1) Cyl
2) Divide
3) Lovesick
4) The Artist In The Liar
5) Clandestine Whisper