I finally updated my website, and in the process, improved the look and feel of the site. One of the big things is that wanted to do is to fix the main page. You see, this site is primarily a technical site. But, I like to post about other things too (like music). In the old site, all post got equal weighting, as it just mimicked the full blog feed. But, with the new site, the tech posts are placed front and center, with my music posts relegated to the sidebar as just links to the post. This way I have the freedom to explore other topics, but I still get the Google juice to my other posts. If you want to explore the other stuff, that is great, but if you are only here for the tech stuff, well, the non tech stuff is a little less conspicuous, but still visible on the home page. Now I can feel less self conscious about posting too many music blog entries.
Agents of Man is a very hard band to categorize into a musical genre. Most of the band comes from the New Jersey and New York Hardcore scene (the members are mostly from Bulldoze, One 4 One and Train of Thought), but the band is anything but hardcore. I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews, mostly because they reviewers are trying to put them in the metalcore genre, and that surely isn’t the case either. The guys are mostly a couple years younger than me, and musically grew up with my younger brother Jay (J-Crime from NJ Bloodline and Fat Nuts) in the local NJ Hardcore scene. But the NJ scene was more than just hardcore, as most of the bands really got into the 80’s thrash stuff (Antrhax, early Metallica, etc.), along with the European melodic metal scene. So Agents of Man is really a mix of hardcore, metalcore, classic thrash & European metal. Their sound has the aggressiveness so prevalent in metalcore, along with some hardcore breakdowns, and sometimes throwing in the proverbial kitchen sink. You have the occasional scream vocals transitioning to all out melodic choruses, backed by a hard driving rhythm section.
The first 5 songs, Death of Me, No Tomorrow, Blood Money, Repercussion, Without a Trace, are killer metal songs. From there the quality varies from a guitar and vocal ballad (Be My Savior) to more metalcore sounding (Headless), to pure melodic metal (Can’t Run), typical of late 80’s NJ bands like Prophet.
If you are into the newer bands like Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet For My Valentine, or Eighteen Visions, you might want to check these guys out. If you are an old school metal guy and loved the hardcore/skater bands like Suicidal Tendencies (like me), well Agents of Man is a band that will give you hope that the music you loved back in the day is still influencing bands, and is making a come back (at least here in NJ).
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