As I’m writing the first draft of this review, I am sitting on the patio of a fancy East Vancouver pub. I am on my lunch break from a dead end job and the beer I am rapidly consuming (my second) is more than I can afford. To my direct right, a pair of well-to-do women are swapping stories about their teenage offspring, while directly behind them, three middle-aged business men discuss wireless surveillance and what an acceptable number of lay-offs might be for the coming financial quarter. They are drinking the expensive beer too, but their table has many more empty pints than mine. Meanwhile, across the globe, people drag out their lives in complete misery. Tanks roll over innocents, crushing them into nothing, and bullets explode skulls. Women are stoned to death, homosexuals executed. People slip deeper and deeper into apathy, escapism and debt. Across the board, things are bad. Of course you’ve heard it all before, but that doesn’t make things any less horrible.

I think about all this and I start to get a bit of old Sartre’s Nausea. My stomach turns as the myriad, horrific thoughts of daily life roll around in my head and I wonder what to do. Conventional rock music, in its bloated corpulence, fails in every aspect to convey these feelings of ultimate confusion and frustration. It is for these reasons and more that hardcore exists and what’s more why it is good.

Sick Charade’s demo is the sound of the thought processes which have just been described for you. It is the sound of young minds overloading and exploding as they drown in the horrors of life. Sick Charade play pure, unadulterated hardcore punk. Everything is fast, like it’s all just barely held together—teetering on the edge of collapse. Everything is loud and raw. Simple and upset in the best ways possible. Simply upset. Those who are familiar with guitar player and singer Sean Lovblom’s previous band the Reprobates’ Stress EP, in which he handled vocal duties with absolutely no restraint, bands like Government Warning or Born Bad, will understand this demo perfectly. If not, I recommend acquainting yourself with Sick Charade lest you never find an outlet for your pathetic daily frustrations.