Disclose - Tragedy LP

How good is Discharge! How good is D-Beat! How good is Japanese hardcore! While I acknowledge that not everyone is likely to be as enthusiastic about the above as I am, it’s hard to deny that the combination of the three is an enticing one.

DISCLOSE are, in my opinion, the best to ever do it. Once you push past all the memes and mystique surrounding the band and their deceased guitarist and singer, Kawakami, you find a band that has taken DISCHARGE worship to a disciplined extreme. They’re faster, the guitars strike the right balance between tone and outright noise, and the riffs are infectious in their repetition. It’s this disciplined approach that sets DISCLOSE apart. They take all the elements that make DISCHARGE so gosh darn special and heighten them to an extreme that can only be described as ‘more DISCHARGE than DISCHARGE’. As you might imagine, there’s little variation between releases for a sound this focused, but DISCLOSE’s 1994 album TRAGEDY is my personal favourite (reissued here by La Vida Es Un Mus). –Oli