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A fist to the face is a surprisingly fertile analogy for explaining good hardcore. Black Recluse make good hardcore, so:

A fist to the face should happen fast. If you go slow enough, too slow, it’s not really a punch anymore, is it? Black Recluse’s Walk it Off tape is hardly five minutes long, and that’s counting a few samples (shout out to the Doug Stanhope one) and an extra song at the top. The digital version hardly cracks three and a half. For that reason it’s easy to blink and realize you’ve missed whole vital sections of the tape, so you may as well play it again. If you’re me this will happen over the course of an entire afternoon.

And further, these are tempos that induce headrush. It’s a physical response. When “How Soon is Never” kicks in to double time, there is nothing to do but thrash.

A fist to the face is never the first of its kind. We’ve all seen action movies enough to know we’re not the first one to connect knuckle to chin or to nose. That doesn’t make it hurt any less. The same can be said for hardcore, and Black Recluse in particular. Yes, of course, some people will be heard to say “it’s all been done before” and “what are Black Recluse doing to push the hardcore genre forward in 2014,” but those people are boring and missing the point.

There’s a reason I’m calling the music on Walk it Off hardcore and not post-hardcore (beyond the obvious sonic ones, of course): it doesn’t allow for a teleology, a before and after. It hits too hard, too fast. It just is. When you’re getting clocked with an uppercut you don’t think about what this particular uppercut owes to other uppercuts before it, or what it might teach the uppercuts that follow in its wake, do you?

A fist to the face doesn’t require any sort of technical mastery, but it certainly can’t hurt. If you know just where to hit, and just how to straighten your arm or angle your fist, the punch can pop off even harder. Black Recluse are not about the proggy fireworks. They are, however, possessed with the capacity to lock a feel down breathlessly tight. On the grinding intro of “Stay Cold,” individual parts are nearly unresolvable; it feels instead like the whole band lunges as one.

A fist to the face shares certain structural elements with all other fists to the face throughout time. All of us have our humerus, radius, ulna, carpal, and metacarpal bones. These matter only insofar as they work exactly like they should, however. The simple pickup snare rat the top of “Walls to the Sky” works just as it should, collapsing the song onto the downbeat, amping up the lightning-speed violence of the rest of the track.

The structural elements of a fist to the face ultimately matter less than the force behind it. How fast can your hand cut the air? This is where it gets purely subjective, but, look: there is something that comes together in the way Black Recluse sounds. 

It is a concoction of songwriting, production, and performance that in other hands could come across like a merely passable genre exercise but that, here, doesn’t. There’s palpable conviction, and a thoroughly conveyed fury that makes me wish I spent less time at work or on my couch, and much much more time getting shoved around by burly dudes at shows. And so finally: a fist to the face doesn’t usually feel good. It can, however, feel necessary.

Purchase Walk it Off on Bandcamp