Search - Some Girls :: All of My Friends Are Going Death

A tool, an occurance, or perhaps a social chess move, but no

Jason Harrington | www.myspace.com/mad_trucker | 10/05/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When I listen to a group like Some Girls, The Locust, Curse of the Golden Vampire, or even to a slightly lesser degree, Converge or Give Up The Ghost, part of my enjoyment is the gratification of feeling exclusive. Maybe that's about as cool to say as "album art matters," but both of these statements are sorely true, and proven through this release. This music is an antisocial treatment not just for you ears, but for your whole social environment, and it easily has a numbing effect on the listener. If it's in your headphones then you should feel pleasantly juxtaposed to just about any surrounding short of the Gaza Strip. If it's in your vehicle then chances are you probably have the windows rolled all the way down and the look on your face is completly stoic as fellow drivers neglect to pull all the way up beside you at the stoplight. If you are listening to this while selling music in a record store (yeah, it's still called a record store, don't worry) then it's most likely poorly managed or only sells indie stuff (in both cases we are talking about a dirt hole of a store). There is little point in analyzing the best songs, rifts, or the technique of the musicians. If they don't care then why do you?



I was initially drawn to this work through the a mixture of it being on Deathwish Inc. and the strange slant shown through it's ad campaign: wrapped in a lipstick-esque pearly rougue cardboard dustcover with the letters "SG" cutout to peek through at a modern graphic emulating a stencil-ish collage seemingly representing either a protest, a punk crowd, or an all out riot. In the world of great Jake-Bannon-endorsed merch, the juxtapostion of this cover to the subsequent sound beneath is most masterful indeed.



Some Girls have a very bad attitude. This music is snaling and stand-offish in a way that should make Avril Lavine spontaneously compust for ever using the word "punk" in her bios in any shape form or fashion. Seriously, this music makes Sid Vicious look like little more than a heroin addict.



What's most facinating however, is the execution, having seemingly merged a glossy/shimmery production asthetic with a genre of music which has seldom to never been this well produced, without draining the work of it's intensity. Give up the Ghost tried to do this on "We're Down Till We're Underground" but it came off as being very pre-meditated. No, that is not what we see with "All My Friends Are Going Death." Instead we witness what appears to be uncalculated killing, from very calculated minds. It's like comparing two mass murders, because it's as if SG set foot out of the house with a careful checklist of weapons and absolutly no regard for who might suffer at their hands. The irony, for me, is that the lyrical subject matter is not that far from "We're Down Till We're Underground," unless you pick up on the vibe of how both albums might be less about relationship woes with the opposite sex, and more about their disgust with loosing respect for many musicians they once admired.



Some Girls have reaffirmed that there is something left which can most trully be considered undilluted tear-your-face-off hardcore punk--bursting with an almost masochistic sense of untamed manic fury. This is not a supergroup which borrows from each band members former group, but rather a terroristic assault on the fact that any of those bands ever called themselves hardcore. "Destroy, Erase, Rebuild.""