Rock Star Journalist

Gorgeous, wonderful hardcore, where pummeling downbeats meet vaguely positive guitar upstrokes. I had Breakout pitched to me as “Bad Brains meet the Ruts,” and it’s as accurate as anything I can come up with. There’s a sense of 4/4 time, without anything ever being explicitly ska-punk — listen to “All’s Quiet” for a perfect example of that.

However, there’s also the stomping progression of “No Sooner Said Than Done,” which comes in, walks into the room, punches you in the face, and clomps back out. However, there’s “Fill Your Boots,” which might just be the most perfect blend of punk rock’s melody with hardcore’s energy I’ve heard yet this year. It’s a song that again, hearkens to something (I’m going to say Cocksparrer) without explicitly being a streetpunk song.

The energy on this release had me chomping at the bit to put it on my turntable over and over since True Crime came in the mail. There’s just something about the way the low end powerfully annihilates while at the same time the guitar manages to keep everything musically positive. With lyrics like “I stand accused/ Without a voice” from “No Sooner Said Than Done,” this could’ve been a real downer of a record, but Breakout manages to latch onto a sense of getting something accomplished, whether by tooth or claw, and it comes through in each and every note.

Breakout’s True Crime 7-inch isn’t Heartless, but neither is it New Bomb Turks. This quartet reminds me of nothing so much as the harder-edged version of Night Birds, who are pretty much the last band whom I heard and absolutely had to spin their single over and over and over again. Not coincidentally, that release was also on Grave Mistake, from whom you should buy this record.

https://soundcloud.com/gravemistakerecords/breakout-true-crime-7-no-sooner-said-than-done