Idle Minds-Teenage Suicide CS (2013)

Maybe it's the winter blues, maybe it's the terminal lack of leisure options if you're dead broke, but I've been listening to more hardcore lately. As much as I'd like to think I'm somehow too old for it or that I've learned enough to not need obnoxious noise in my life, hardcore is like alcohol. You think you can live without it when things are going great, but those periods are fundamentally transitory and it's always waiting for you, patiently, when you bottom out and your friends leave you in the cold grey dawn.

Melbourne's Idle Minds are ready for you, the next time your life hits the skids, and you'll be met with sweet sonic oblivion. It takes a lot of wasted years to be able to distinguish between different strands of hardcore, but I wasted said years happily and eagerly. So it sounds like Idle Minds is torn between the possibilities of manic fastcore (Dropdead, et. al.) and "emotional," grown-up hardcore like American Nightmare.* I'd like 'em either way, but that's a backhanded compliment: hardcore is either abject teenage oblivion or it's self-conscious, which is to say, it negates its own reason for being.

This tape is as frenetic as a 15 year-old hardcore kid who just gobbled up a month's worth of Adderal, and as crude as the cover art. The songs tear by in a whirlwind of juvenile anger, pulsing rage, and sheer annoyance with whatever's happening when you play this tape. Idle Minds is as bratty as you are in your worse moments, and it's better to embrace them rather than reject them as somehow below you.

Check out Idle Minds here!

*It's only a matter of time before this stuff is popular among yuppies and "cool" parents. Buy your copy of the last AN LP now and start dubbing copies for your grandkids.