Ends

This is good stuff, play it in your living room and you'll be bouncing over the couch and on to the coffee table. Play it in the bedroom when you do not intend to sleep. Play it in the loo or kitchen at your peril. You will be impelled to dance! DORA have a sound all of their own but the discerning listener will pick out echoes of Helmet, Fugazi, and the Pixies playing over bedrock laid by Nirvana. They are discordant, they are heavy, they are angular, they are melodic and rhythmic, they are a sign of contradiction! This is most evident in audience response who either love them or hate them. See them live if you can, exult in the energy they produce and enjoy a tight band who know how to rock!

Flame Out, ex-liar and Kalashnikov run into each other, just as the boys play the songs on their set, 15 minutes of intense rock that demands your attention, yet 3 very different and individual songs. "Don't hold your breath" and "two minutes past nine" move into a different tempo and are more commercially orientated, though not excessively! The sleeve notes for tracks 7 and 8 should be swapped as they are listed in the wrong order. Sleep well Diego Garcia was leaked to US servicemen on that island about 2 years ago via Internet contacts and it had the whole base up and dancing. Liquidation is an early song from 5 years ago but still packs a punch. Thousand Hills (a rock pibroch lamenting all that happened in Rwanda) will become a rock standard at some point in the future. Plastic fruit is like a rock form of method acting and from it develops the kernel of some of the songs in the second album, Thaumaturgy, that I have been privileged to hear in rough cut. Buy this product, Ends, listen to it - the tunes will take over your head and before you know it you will start dancing! Honest! Dead or American are pure dead brilliant as they say in Central Scotland.

British hardcore, eh? When was the last time you heard anything from that scene worth listening to? Well, this lot might just change your mind.

For sure, they've got the usual Fugazi, Pixies, Melvins, Helmet influences seeping through their pores, but at least they've made the effort to conjure something new out of it, rather than sitting back and simply recreating. And when they hit a particularly strident note, then they are a force to be reckoned with.

For a first bite at the cherry, this will do, and even if they do sometimes stumble into the much less endearing world of post-hardcore, they manage to hide their At The Drive-In riffs under a weltering maelstrom of noise and power which belies their new noise status. They've got plenty of hot licks and fiery passion, with tunes like 'Ex-Liar' and 'Kalashnikov' raging hard.

They only slow the pace down once, but it's to mighty fine effect as 'Thousand Hills' sees them giving some hometown Scots lament to the humanitarian crisis in Rwanda - hey, it's hardcore, so there's plenty of politics to keep you going on what is an excellent debut.