Crime and Punishment

Album review

Regional Justice Center is a Seattle hardcore band made up of multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Ian Shelton and his brother Max, who's been incarcerated since the project's inception. Since their 2017 demo, the band have quickly become highly respected and widely praised among fans who love powerviolence and fastcore: micro-styles of hardcore that are often heavily debated and rigidly enforced, much in the way that self-appointed connoisseurs police the arbitrary borders of shoegaze. However, Regional Justice Center have always made it abundantly clear that they care more about transcending genre tags than obeying their confines, and their sophomore album Crime and Punishment is both their heaviest and most musically

The record was produced by Taylor Young—formerly of Nails, currently in Twitching Tongues, and a revered hardcore and metal producer with an instantly recognizable fingerprint. His signature move has chunky drums and buzz-saw guitars working together in the mix rather than battling one another, and that kind of studio treatment makes a world of difference for a band like Regional Justice Center. Crime and Punishment might as well have been recorded at Abbey Road compared to their well-regarded yet punishingly lo-fi 2018 debut, World of Inconvenience, which suffered from poor recording quality that muddled the otherwise powerful songwriting. On this album, the jagged crispness of the guitar tones and the deep, punchy drums give RJC's delivery a newfound impact, and it sounds like Ian may have even written these songs with recording quality in mind.

Compared to the non-stop gallop of their debut, these tracks are stacked with beefy metal parts that add a welcome dynamic to their toolkit. There are moments where the guitars chug and the rhythm swings in a way that's more conducive to spin-kicks than neck-snapping headbangs, bringing to mind contemporaries like Gulch and Candy who surround their grindy blasts with more muscular metallic hardcore elements. That balance is a fitting complement to Ian's extremely personal lyrics, in which he approaches topics like incarceration, poverty, and family trauma with a blunt yet poetic candor. Hardcore is a genre where debuts and early EPs are often treated like an artist's most essential work, but this is Regional Justice Center's best music yet. © Eli Enis/Qobuz