American Standards – Dopamine Dealer

by Oliver
on February 27, 2023
in EP

Chaos driven noise punk from Phoenix, Arizona: American Standards (plural, please!) offer themselves as Dopamine Dealer of chaotic math and hardcore and do their job all around well!

So quick American Standards with their releases up to their first – and still only – studio album Anti-Melody have been so little hasty since 2017.
Just three subsequent singles are now followed by the Dopamine Dealer However, the EP is, so to speak, the start of a new chapter in the band’s history: Now at Manic Kat Records under contract, the three tracks not only set an exclamation mark quantitatively, the accumulated 9 minutes also generally seem like the next level in terms of consistency and range, without laying on the spectrum regarding existential materialism less pissed off or aggressively.

On the contrary: the only few original accents in their eclectic amalgamation are more bold and definite than before American Standards Virtues especially in the final The Tourist more completely and more powerfully balanced than before. The melodies and emo-trained parts are woven in more subversively, but the tendency towards hip hop that has always appeared is distilled by rapper Cody Milford from The God Samaritan blends in conspicuously but homogeneously as a prominent guest in the sound: brutal, almost bull-necked Metalcore enriched with gang shouts, between Every Time I Die, Glazed and Misery Signals including a rumbling bass, drums soaked in kerosene and fiery riffs characterize the picture.

The energy levels are high, the songwriting solid, everything seems like an effective maelstrom of scene-known set pieces, albeit less memorable than the archetypes and ultimately not quite second-rate.
But how The Dealer martially driving regarding The Chariot to a downbeat brawl or the more rocking one the Vagrant in a staccato self-overtaking mania The Bled rages, then it’s just a bit more sluggish and less excitingly spectacular than the A squad, just skipping the final burst of endorphin. But still placed on a professional basis in order not to cave in behind it. In this respect Dopamine Dealer the right touches to put studio album number 2 on a bigger radar.

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