My main beef with hardcore has always been the vocals. When people say about metal that it's just a guy screaming at a microphone, what they actually mean is hardcore. My problem is that the vocals often come across as forced, and many bands - both metal and hardcore - have proved that it's not impossible to make that type of vocals sound good. Most hardcore bands just can't. Then there's the infernal mix of screaming and clean vocals. No Peace of Mind has both.
On Purify the Hope, No Peace of Mind explore the shallow depths of melodic hardcore with a few different tools. At their disposal they have drums, bass, guitar and vocals, and with these tools they create music that has a profound hardcore disposition while still maintaining a rather melodic aspect with post-rock infused riffs and pseudo-melancholic interludes.
As with most hardcore, I felt like the rhythm section was the main strongpoint. Moshing was once (maybe it still is in some scenes) a huge part of hardcore, and this has led to much hardcore having a solid, groovy rhythm section which everything else builds up around and as such forms the groundstructure of the music. No Peace of Mind mostly follows the same principle, and in a song like Fortune they prove that their bassist, drummer and guitarist have a good thing going on between them. For the most part of the EP "Purify the Hope" the instrumentation is sound - It's not so much that they're exploring new land, but together they form a solid mix of melodic post-rock riffs and more traditional chugging passages. In the opening track, Again, the band further emboss their hardcore heritage by incorporating a fair amount of gang shouts. They took some getting used to because I normally wouldn't say they fit into a melodic outfit such as No Peace of Mind, but they actually make it work.
I don't often say this about a band, but I feel as though No Peace of Mind would be better off as an instrumental group. Hardcore never really was my genre, but I can appreciate the band's instrumentation, and I detest the vocals so much that I found it hard to ignore them. Purify the Hope had its moments especially with the opening and closing tracks, Again and The Town. But ultimately these two tracks, which only take up half of the entire EP, aren't enough to keep me interested for prolonged periods of time, and as such I can't award the EP by No Peace of Mind any more than 5/10 guitars.
Tracklist:
1. Again
2. Fortune
3. Spaces
4. The Town
The EP can be streamed here
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