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Screw the mainstream if you really want to get your rocks off you have to go to the underground. That's just what we plan to do with this series, take some of the best emerging bands that are out blowing away hardcore fans on the underground music scene.

Anadivine - Anadivine EP
Label: Sidecho Records
Rating:

Punk rock, or post-punk if you insist, has discovered it has a heart of late, which has resulted in a wave of emo, screamo, pizza supremo bands, all dressed like your paperboy, tearing their hearts from their sleeves and pouring �em out at the top of their lungs. We've come, it can be argued, a long way from the days of the Blank Generation's dress up party of nihilism and the glorification of No Future. Anadivine, along with Autpilot Off, Cambria, Coheed and Matchbox Romance have put Kingston, NY on the map as a breeding ground for this bright, new breed of hopeful (post) punker. Formed in 2001, they named themselves, much like Lynryd Skynyrd, after a shared school teacher, although that's where any similarity to the doomed Southerners ends.

Anadivine, the band's self-titled EP plays like a tour through the most promising pastures of modern rock. �Alcohol and Oxygen', with it's sudden shifts from Prefab Sprout-ish jazziness on verses, through staggered guitar webworks all clean, spidery and threatening at the same time, to sharp shouted vocals, turning smoothly to soaring, expectant harmonies followed by violent dark guitar stabs and then back to Prefab Sprout is a lesson in song writing and arranging. The trash-garage barre chord guitar chugging that opens �Emily' morphs seamlessly into the radio friendly exuberance of hard panned and echoed vocal harmonies on the chorus.

�Cross Your Heart' is a song sung from a bitter heart (�Watching you die alone would make you the girl of my dreams'), but it's a bitterness that's lifted, like a prayer, on ascending vocals and guitar lines until what could have been another useless I-hate-my-girlfriend' song becomes something of an anthem. The vocal morphs into what sounds like Geddy Lee of Rush but I'm probably reading too much into that.

My personal favorite is 'The Refusal to Negotiate With.....' , an instrumental which starts hard with Justin Meyer's drums rolling like the old school, while the guitars of Sean Paul Pillsworth and Bill Manley blend with Mike Cashers' bass into an ambient wave of distortion, sounding like a swarm of bees lost in a cloud of razorblades.

While neither willfully obscure nor trend mongers, Anadivine strike that rare balance of earnestness and ambition. Polished but never slick, they take the dark, driving guitar rock of hardcore and leaven it with carefully considered arrangements and tons of heart. These tales of missed romantic chances in a sea of alcohol and self-absorption are tailor made for teenage misfits of all ages and Anadivine are more than ready to take their place alongside the Thursdays and Dashboard Confessionals of this cold, harsh world.

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