Travels tells the story of a fictional man from birth to death and every heart broken life shattering event in between. So yes, this is a concept album and saying that it's a bit ambitious is a bit of a understatement when it comes to a hardcore band nevertheless them tackling a concept album with their first full-length. Yet here I am listening to a concept album by a hardcore band. Wonders never cease.
Defeater just happens to be the type of band that does a concept album for their debut LP. I wasn't really familiar with this Boston five-piece besides they travel around in a vegetable oil powered van and once went under the moniker of Sluts. Thankfully, Defeater dropped the somewhat offensive goofy name got a bit more serious, starting touring their collective asses off in the Wesson-mobile and got picked up by Bridge Nine Records recently.
Bridge Nine is the hardcore label now that Revelation Records was towards the end of the 80's. Revelation might not have had every great band of the time period but they set the precedent of what bands sounded like for that era. Bridge Nine is the same way on a much more global and even genre defining way. And with Travels I see Defeater not only fitting in with their contemporaries like Have Heart and Verse, I also see them as a band that other bands with try to emulate in the next few years.
Not only does Defeater swing a mean bat with the big dogs at Bridge Nine they also have gathered enough Modern Life is War comparisons to warrant me not wanting to even listen to them. The thing is, for the most part Modern Life is War was very monotonous with bursts of hardcore energy trickled through songs about small towns and dead Ramones. Defeater on the other hand, bypass the Modern Life is War comparison by being an energetic mammoth powerhouse that you can feel that the band just puts everything they have into every lyric, every riff, every snare hit... Yeah, it gets you right "there."
I have a feeling that Defeater may be the band that everyone talks about in 2009. They have a formula of emotive hard hitting hardcore that crashes into you like waves during a typhoon. If Defeater would have left off "Carrying Weight", Travels may have been a contender for album of the year. "There is a unlisted folksy acoustic number that sticks out like a sore thumb at a hammer convention. That little misstep cost Defeater a few major points but it doesn't cause them to go head over tail down the mountain either. It's weird, I usually don't care for this over-dramatic somewhat artsy hardcore, however, Defeater tell a compelling story that wraps up the listener into a collision of sounds, hard hitting rhythms, and stabs at chaos. Travels is an interesting journey and one that will be talked about for years to come.
