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Charlotte, North Carolina- also known as The Queen City- may not be one
of the first places you'd think of when it come to the hardcore music
scene. For the most part, Charlotte is a clean city where the people are
warm and friendly and it always makes the "best-places-to-live" lists of
major periodicals. But as squeaky clean as it may all seem there is a
generation of kids just itching to break from their conformity along
with a massive desire to dirty the neatness that confines them.
Rising within the city's underground are kids with a taste for the pit
and a craving for hardcore brutality. The scene is just beginning to
blossom and until recently there weren't many hardcore bands coming
through town but, with demand comes supply and the scene is beginning to
open up. "There used to not many touring bands that come through the
Carolina's at all," says Joshua Brigham, guitarist of his homegrown
hardcore outfit named Hopesfall. "It's different down here. I don't
really know how to explain it. It's good, but it's not like the rest of
the country. The scene is really young down here. But, now the shows are
starting to get a lot better here."
Recently bands such as Cursive, Stretch Armstrong, Coheed & Cambria and
The Used have all come through town and kicked it at The Tremont Music
Hall in downtown Charlotte. "That like never happens here," Brigham
says. "We hardly ever get that many good shows right in a row like that.
The scene here is definitely starting to get a lot better, but, like I
said, the scene is still really young."
Brigham was one of many kids who found solace by venting his angst
through hardcore music. The guitarist, a big fan of The Smashing
Pumpkins, got turned on to the hardcore scene after he discovered
Upstate NY's Snapcase. "I never really listened to any punk music," he
says, "I just went straight from The Pumpkins right into Snapcase.Yeah,
Snapcase was pretty much the first hardcore band I ever heard and got me
into it."
Inspired by Snapcase's hard edged sound, Brigham soon helped form a band
of his own appropriately named Hopesfall along with mates Adam Morgan,
Chad Waldrup, Jay Forrest and Michael Tyson. The five-piece hardcore
outfit found an outlet to their conformed surroundings by wailing on
their instruments and venting it all out through savage screams and
sweat on stages deep within The Queen City's bowels where they earned
their bones. "The number one most important thing for us was just to get
out there on stage and give all we got," says Brigham. "You know,
rocking out, making sure everyone has a real good time and just playing
real good music."
"We're all about the music and creativity and just trying to write good
songs," continues the guitarist. "We don't have any political message or
anything like that, we have no message at all." The message-less band
would earn a loyal following that led them to various record deals with
indy labels. They dropped their first album in 1999 THE FRAILTY OF WORDS
on DTS Records and the EP- NO WINGS TO SPEAK OF on Take Hold records in
2001.
Hopesfall's latest album on Trustkill Records, THE SATELLITE YEARS, is a
mix of melodic brilliance and brutal hardcore aggression that is intense
and pushes their creative boundaries further than ever before. "It's
kind of a spacey, heavy record," Brigham describes. "It's heavy and
melodic at the same time.I don't know, I guess that's the best
description I can give. [Laughs]"
THE SATELLITE YEARS is filled with differing tempos, complex interludes,
with a steady blend of singing and screaming. Brigham's guitar work is
solid and crucial to the bands overall complex sound. Forrest's vicious
vocals tie it all together into a harsh assault that helped make this
record quite successful. "We did not expect our record to get as big as
it has and get as many good tour offers as we've had," chirps Brigham.
"The opportunities recently have really been coming to us and it's very
nice because we've been busting our asses for years and now that it's
finally happening.I'm really excited and really happy." Currently
Hopesfall is sharing the stage with The Dillinger Escape Plan and Norma
Jean and their schedule is jammed packed all throughout the year.
Hopesfall has come a long way since their days in The Queen City underbelly
and when Brigham and the boys make the rounds back to Charlotte they
always make sure to rock-out hard. "When we come back home at The
Tremont we try and have as many of our friends bands on the show and
make it a real Carolina thing," he says, "and make it count." www.hopesfall.com
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