Destruct – Echoes of Life LP (Grave Mistake Records)

Richmond has been on the loose for quite a while. The amount of bands originating from the state of Virginia has become tremendous over the years, and most of them are overwhelmingly good. No matter if we discuss classic hardcore punk, post-hardcore, crust or d-beat, Virginia has become an unavoidable theme during the conversations about new music. Destruct is undoubtfully one of those bands that stumble upon on the web quite frequently, and that’s certainly with a good reason. The band has published a brand new full-length record, heavily inspired by Swedish and Japanese hardcore, d-beat, and crust punk music. Echoes Of Life is their second full-length album, which includes twelve blasting crust punk tunes lasting exactly twenty minutes, so prepare your hearing apparatus for a mindblowing listening experience. To be more precise, Destruct builds up their sound around fundamentals od eighties hardcore punk, nineties crust punk, and standard d-beat savagery we all dearly love and admire. Enormously addictive d-beat rhythms have been performed with such precision, tightness, firmness, and overexploited usage of cymbals has been nicely produced comparing it to some newer records that are in vein with this particular genre. Unlike many contemporaries, Destruct has done an amazing work by showcasing the chunky sound of the bass guitar almost equally with perfectly polarized guitar channels, and you’ll be positively surprised how basslines can sound so powerful on a crust punk album without being overloaded with unnecessary fuzziness. Both guitar channels are covering a massive pondering of the rhythm section with pleasant doses of distortion. The riffs are sounding so ferocious, powerful, dynamic, but still compact enough to shape up the brilliant sound of the entire band. Vocals are killing it with such a specific technique that ranges somewhere in between screaming and yelling. It goes amazing with the sheer energy of the entire band. Echoes Of Life has been published on black vinyl by Grave Mistake Records, so don’t miss this amazing record by any means necessary.