Zoo
The Bay Area quintet's first record for Matador feels a long way from its powerviolence beginnings, with a cleaned-up sound and a focus on garage-rock hooks.
It might be a little misleading to say Ceremony is getting soft in its old age. For one thing, the Bay Area band is hardly old. More importantly, its fourth full-length, Zoo, still positions the band as louder and nastier than most of its compatriots in the punk underground. When placed up against the act’s previous…
California’s Ceremony are the first out-and-out hardcore band since Fucked Up to ink a contract with Matador, and on the evidence of ‘Zoo’, they might be about to squeeze up alongside Damian Abraham for a particularly snug place in your heart.
'Zoo' is a change in style. Unfortunately, it feels as though such a change was made simply for the sake of it.
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Hysteria, the lead single from Ceremony's Matador debut, hints towards an experience far removed from the grinding power-violence of the Californian quintet's early work: the rhythm section rests a couple of notches above mid-tempo, and, most notably, vocalist Ross Farrar's pissed-off snarl is replaced with a semi-melodic auto-drawl, which – intentionally or not – cries out for comparisons to OFF!/Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris.
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[xrr rating=3.75/5]It’s been six years since Ceremony made their raucous debut with Violence, Violence, a 13-track, 13-minute record that hit as sonically hard as its title would suggest.
It’s a natural progression we’ve seen countless times before: young, aggressive punk band expands their musical vocabulary and makes a record that reaches beyond the strict hard-fast-loud-short confines of punk rock. Some great records have been the product of this progression, from Wire’s Chairs Missing to The Replacements’ Hootenanny and so on. LA’s Ceremony is