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Bury Your Dead - Cover Your Tracks
by Travis Becker

Add one part, guys who showed up late to a Sopranos casting call, one part legit hardcore label, and mix generously with serious, New York-style Hardcore.  Let it stew all day, and what do you get?  Gravy.  Also you get, Bury Your Dead and their album, Cover Your Tracks.  Just like good stew, everyone has a variation on the tried and true recipe.  With a recipe that�s been done as many times as hardcore punk, there definitely has to be a secret ingredient that keeps hungry listeners coming back for seconds and thirds.  Bury Your Dead may have found that secret ingredient, now if Duke will only tell us what it is.

Right off the bat, and it feels like a bat between the eyes. BYD grab the listener by the throat and serve notice that there is a new sheriff in Hardcoreville and he�s running the show without any delicate vocal interludes or nuanced jazz drumming. Cover Your Tracks, by contrast, is all Cookie Monster and blast beats.  Songs like �The Color of Money� and �Legend� are powerful statements of purpose and while they don�t always handle their largely brutish themes with any subtlety, they more than make up for it with sheer conviction.  There is more than a little metal tossed into this record for good measure.  For the record, your eyes do not deceive you; all of the song titles on BYD�s record are the names of Tom Cruise movies.  They left out Days of Thunder, though, which if they were following a theme, could have been an apt title for the record as a whole.  The record has a power and a sense of confidence that leaves little room for introspection.

The detailed production is what really places this album a rung or two higher on the Hardcore ladder, which is littered with the bodies of dozens of other bands that strive for a similar sound.  The song writing is nothing new, although, the songs are arranged so as not to become bland or formulaic as many albums in this genre have a tendency to do.  The playing is tight, but it has to be to even get in the door at Victory Records.  The way the album is recorded is the clincher.  From the opening salvo of �Top Gun� there is a layered, almost cascading, effect to the vocals that make the listener feel as if a gang of thugs is assaulting them from all sides. 

The feeling may have been heightened by a quick glance at the photography inside the CD.  The drums are rather low in the mix at times and the guitar overwhelms the other instruments occasionally, but that�s hardcore.  Notes and little bits of feedback and distortion are buried here and there making Cover Your Tracks well worth repeated listens.

Running in the front of as rabid a pack as Hardcore has become is no small feat, but Bury Your Dead course just fine.  They have made a very aggressive, unrelenting album that may send the uninitiated running for the Goody�s headache powder.  But for fans of Pantera, Helmet, or Sick of It All, this is the band that has picked up the torch, whatever is left of it.  They blend elements of all of those bands inside their own unique production mixing bowl.  BYD is going to have a lot of dead to bury by the looks of those above-mentioned corpses on the Hardcore ladder, unless they�re as mean as they look.  If that�s the case, watch out for that stew.

Bury Your Dead - Cover Your Tracks
Label: Victory
Rating: