Hardcore Certainly Does Live
There are some bands where, you'll see they have a release coming up and you know instantly what it will entail. That is not of course always a bad thing, and with Madball it certainly isn't as they have yet again stuck stringently to their roots with Hardcore Lives and delivered a breathless, foot stomping, fist pumping pure hardcore album. Well it is all in the name right?
After the heavy bursts of riffs in the intro, the album opens with the title track and straight away, like so many Madball releases in the past, you're struck with this sense of no frills involved pure heaviness. Front man Freddy Cricien is on blazing form, spitting his way through one violent riff after another. There are some great references to their history, with track titles like Doc Marten Stomp as the whole album feels like a great throwback to a time when hardcore punk and thrash bashed heads together into a seamless flow of aggression. Many have criticised Madball for never really changing it up, but when you buy one of their records you know what you want, and you know what to expect and it is no different here.
But as well as continuing the vibe they've perfected as shown in some of the real monstrous tracks on the record like The Here And Now and Beacon Of Light, they're able to prove that they are still one of the masters in a scene which is on a real high at the moment. There is room to interpret that as an album title, Hardcore Lives is perhaps a proud statement around the growth and stabilisation of something they helped conceive so many years ago. With this being the case it allows the album to not sound dated as some may expect, instead being yet another solid release from one of the most reliable bands in heavy music.