No Album of the Year aggregate for this first record by Portland scene veterans (ex-Headcase, Absolute Suffering, Hard Ca$h), out on Unbeaten Records — but the two reviews found say the same thing in two vocabularies. TwentyCoreSeven lands a 9/10 and hears a record that will « fill you with a yearning for a nostalgia you once had », that of early-2010s tumblr-core melodic hardcore; ThePunkSite, unscored, rules: « melodic hardcore in spades, but what it also is is as dark and angry as you could ever get ».
What everyone agrees on: sincerity spilling over. Seven tracks about loss, addiction and rebuilding — « Rinse », drawn from the vocalist’s recovery, is described as « an absolute scream in the dark »; « Nuit », the record’s acoustic centrepiece, « puts you in your feels »; and « New England Numb », featuring Citizen’s Mat Kerekes per TwentyCoreSeven, stands as the singalong of the batch before the farewell of « Irish Goodbye ».
What divides: length, the only real reservation — ThePunkSite finds that « seven songs was just a little short for an album », while conceding it is exactly what it needed to be. Full disclosure: one numerical score on the board, so a 8.5/10 to take for what it is — the unanimous crush of two webzines, not a mass consensus. Until an aggregate exists, New England has its bruised love letter.