Review Summary: The Copenhagen scene continues to deliver awesome punk music...
The Danish punk scene has been a thriving abyss of forward thinking bands in recent years, from the breakout acts such as iceage and lower to the more obscure yet still heavily commended and superlative bands such as Sexdrome and now as of last year, Dogmatist. At first glance Dogmatist seem on par with their peers in terms of sonic aesthetic. They bring a heavy and pummelling sonic assault that is not short of passion and raw energy, however when diving further into The band’s First full length project worn out welcome I came to find some serious attention to detail and persistence within their thematic approach to song writing. Every song seems to have the perfect amount of variation from the tempo to the pitch to the drumming, dogmatist display a huge amount of talent for writing both expansive and brief Hardcore tracks.
The album opens with the track Orifice, one of the simpler songs on the album and kicks it off perfectly. the band changes between riffs and tempo with such fluidity on this track that it is hard to tell how the song has progressed in its 1:37 run time, in this brief time though the band has managed to incorporate 2 fantastically performed and passionately played guitar solos as well as some very impressive lyrics. The aforementioned guitar solos pop up every now and again on this album and provide some well needed melody amongst all the chaos. The tracks on the longer side of the record come off just as masterfully put together, such as the track masquerade which features head bobbing grooves and some truly bad-ass guitar riffs that show a twisted light heartedness that some of the more dissonant and speedy tracks on worn out welcome do not always show. It’s on this track too that the vocalist is really in the spotlight, his throat shredding screams on most of the tracks show competence but at times unoriginality. This occasionally makes some of the songs suffer. Such as the shortest song here secret fermentation. But for the majority of this album his vocals add just the right amount of abrasion to the tracks to make them better off because of it.
With this record, Dogmatist come through with a fantastic full length that proves to me that Copenhagen is still very much on top of the game when it comes to modern punk and hardcore. They show all of the American groups exactly how this sacred style of rock music should be played, I can only hope that they, as well as other Copenhagen bands, continue to do so into the future.
