San Diego skate punks Career Soldiers make their full-length debut with
Loss of Words, a solid piece of old-school hardcore with political overtones. It's one of those albums that does absolutely nothing to advance the stylistic or thematic boundaries of hardcore punk: song titles like "Long Live the Underground" and "Fuck the World, Skating's Better" get the lyrical point across, and the dozen songs follow the usual three-chord, two-minute, one mosh break formula. That said, the quartet play with energy and punk aggro to spare, ripping into songs like "This Generation" and "We'll All Be Cured" with the single-minded fury of punk righteousness. Nobody who has already grown out of their hardcore punk stage will be brought back into the fray by
Loss of Words, but given a choice between this and the latest pop-punk act piped into the sound system at Hot Topic, any self-respecting punk kid would have no trouble choosing. ~ Stewart Mason