Title: The Sound of the Province
Genre: Hardcore Punk with Thrash Metal influences
Time: 22.16 min
Release Date: 11th November 2017
Rating: 89/100
After attending yesterday a fantastic doom metal night with the legendary Abysmal Grief as headliners (expect a nice live report about it in the next days to come!), today you'll read a very enthusiastic article about the third album by MuD! It was released by their label THC DIY Productions along with other many label like Italian Thrash Attack, a kind of cooperation usual for the HC punk albums. But what's more interesting is that Mauro Garbati (also known as AldoHC) sent me a pack with included not only the physical CD version of the album but also the stickers of the band along with the last issue (the 13th one, exactly, released in March 2011) of "10 anni di mucchi selvaggi e ossa rotte in Italia" (Italian for "10 years of wild bunches and broken bones in Italy"). This was a well-written fanzine edited by the guys of the website lovehate80.it and focused on the '80s Italian hardcore punk whose issues had te only problem to be tooo short (only 4 pages) but, at least, the contents were really cool (the issue in my hands contains an interview to Indigesti).
Speaking finally about "The Sound of the Province", this album beats the listeners through a fast hardcore punk (dubbed by the band as "Ignorant Hardcore") with some thrash metal tunes, some breakdowns, and also some gang choruses that gives additional energy to the entire assault, in an approach admittedly influenced by the '90s HC punk. We're talking about something played with a great intensity, so expect to listen to songs that are truly perfect for the wildest moshpit, and, when an album brings to similar reactions, the quality is surely always good!
Honestly, I think that "The Sound of the Province" is so intense also due to the lyrics. In fact, you must consider that many lyrics are about something truly personal, so you can seriously hear the rage of these guys in a very palpable way. For example, "The 4th World" "is dedicated to all the people affected by the earthquake in the center of Italy (...) and Ponzano and Teramo's province" between 2016 and 2017, and MuD comes just from the Teramo's province. Plus, there is need to say that also the cover artwork of the album has this connection since it is a photo taken in Ponzano "after the big landslide and the earthquake". Instead, "Your Energy" remember the late Scilla Ricci (a roadie of the band that unfortunately died due to a fatal car accident sometime in 2017) and all her "positive energy".
The nicer thing is that all this intensity is strongly sustained by a good variety, even though it's (almost) slways focused on a brutality that allows no guitar solos throughout the release. To mention a few, "Head Down", the first real song after the slow intro in beatdown-style of the titletrack, contains even some short passages in blast-beat. The following "The Thin Line (Between Life and Death)" (please watch its official video below) is the shorter song with its 50 seconds circa of pure undiluted fury. Instead, "The Situation" is continuously alternated between massive mid-tempos and demented ultra-fast accelerations.
After all that, MuD continues their homages to the '80s Italian HC punk by playing an intense cover with double kick of "Solo odio" by Impact (this is the only song in Italian, apart the first lines of "The 4th World" where Mauro sings in his mother tongue). As outro, there is "True Sounds of Province", very similar to the titletrack with the addition of some newscast's sketches about the aforementioned earthquake.
Only 22 minutes! This is the fast'n'furious lenght of an album whose my favorite tracks are "The 4th World", "The Situation" and, above all, both "Full Speed Ahead" and "Your Energy". This release is very good from its music to its professional booklet and shows a label that know how to create nice products, included the last EP by Backjumper reviewed some days ago. And we mustn't forget that "The Sound of the Province", after recording and mixing it at the Pupina's Recording Studio by Michele Cerminara, was mastered at an important US studio like Audiosiege Mastering Studio (from Portland, Oregon), so the quality could be inevitably excellent! To promote the album, MuD, after some gigs in Italy, toured extensively in the Eastern Europe so to reach countries like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. And by judging by the documentary that the band did about that tour, this experience was very fukken nice!
1 - The Sound of the Province (intro)
2 - Head Down
3 - The Thin Line (Between Life and Death)
4 - The 4th World
5 - The Situation
6 - Beyond the Shore
7 - Full Speed Ahead
8 - Your Energy
9 - Solo odio (Impact cover)
10 - True Sounds of Province (outro)
Line-up:
AldoHC - vocals
Luca "Frankie" - guitars
Pinto - bass
Lucone - drums
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/MuDHC/
THC DIY Prod: https://www.facebook.com/THCDIYPROD/
Italian Thrash Attack: http://www.italianthrashattack.com/
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