SPOLIGHT: Recluse Club - Osaka Mechaslug Concern

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a struggling acoustic musician. He was bumbling through unfulfilling shows and watching his far cooler friends rocket up to fame/imfamy and felt like he was wallowing in obscurity playing shit shows to 0 crowds for no real reason.

Just as he was about to jack the whole thing in the aforementioned friends asked some punks who were putting a show on in Worthing if that sad acoustic pop punker could play the show too. He did and then he met some excellent dudes, they liked the things he liked and were awesome and welcomed the acoustic punk as a friend and then played the most ridiculously fast music he'd ever heard and saved his musical career. This man was of course me (you can see some depressing blog posts here from when i nearly gave up) and the band that restored my faith in playing shows was Recluse Club. One of the biggest shames about this band thus far is that they previously only had one shoddily recorded demo to go by. This is now not the case as the guys have the stellar Osaka Mechaslug Concern to please your lugholes with.....

OK lets start with genre definitions. This is a toughy, but melodic hardcore hits the general area, maybe a little Refused esque post-hardcore in there too. I hear a tad of Enter Shikari too, which is awesome since they are one of my best not punk bands.

This EP sounds good. Everything sounds like it's complimenting everything else and is clean enough to  ring the vocals and harmonies nicely whilst still being raw enough to convey the hardcore nature of the band. The opening "Linear" has an almost progressive feel to it, although if like me you think progressive is a dirty word in music don't fret as it's the only instance of it, serving to nicely warm up and  build expectation of the speed fest to come. "Errors" is straight up melodic hardcore and fits in well with anything else especially that you might hear on the continent that would fit in that bracket, a good thing in my book. "Evensong" is the most classically hardcore track with this offering and if I imagine the song as a human they have the biggest balls of all the tracks which is saying something since all these guys play rugby and are firefighters!! "The Crash" is ever so far from least as the last track, it's my favourite of all due to it seeming to hit every bit of 90s skatepunk nostalgia in a technical storm of cool metalish riffage and spot on EpiFat harmonies and blast beat drumming. It's a full storm and I felt a little out of breath just listening to it.

All in all this is the awesome sound I've been waiting roughly a year and a half to hear from these guys, a brilliant effort and one that will be hard to top on the upcoming album (I may have made up the upcoming album news). Remember supporting your local scene automatically makes you 63% better than other humans in your area who don't. so jump over to bandcamp and pick this up as a blinding first catch of 2015.

https://recluseclub.bandcamp.com/album/osaka-mechaslug-concern