In the twenty-first century, the rock revolution that we'd all been hoping for hasn't happened. When the grunge fad spluttered and died, most of us felt that it'd only be a matter of time before someone came up with another brilliant idea, and everyone started to follow it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have happened. A couple of minor fads like emo and post-rock have come along, but there hasn't been anything so radical that it's swept away everything before it. For the most part, it's just been business as usual for the past ten years.

Enter Endicott. While it's easy to classify their sound; they sound like a mixture of Thrice and Helmet, with a bit more hardcore aggression thrown in for good measure, it's what they do with the conventional hardcore bag of tricks that's amazing. In a move not normally seen in this genre, "The Words In Ink Don't Lie" is actually a concept album, telling the story of a kidnapping from three different perspectives. It's a stroke of brilliant originality, not to mention an intriguing idea, and the band should be congratulated for coming up with it.

Unfortunately, while the underlying idea is sound, the execution leaves a fair bit to be desired. It's sometimes hard to follow the narrative that underlies everything when vocalist Charles Cure's delivery is so rushed and hurried that it's impossible to follow things. You can tell from the tone he's using that whatever he's saying, it's weighty and important, but actually making out the words is pretty difficult. It's not normally a problem in this genre, and if this album was just another dumb cookie-cutter hardcore record, I could probably let it past, but it seems such a shame that the band went to all the effort of setting everything up, only to have it butchered at the last minute. The instrumentation isn't quite as bad as this, but they haven't matched the brilliant idea with brilliant playing, there's just the usual hardcore riffs and tricks that have been heard many times before.

Another big problem is the poor production on this album. It's strange, because everyone involved looks reputable enough, but everything is buried under a veneer of underproduction, which makes it sound more like a self-recorded demo in some places than a professionally produced album. The vocals are excessively high in the mixture, and the actual instrumentation is compressed as hell, making it sound like the whole album was recorded inside a giant tin can.

You've got to hand it to Endicott for coming up with an interesting idea. Unfortunately, a combination of unintelligible vocals, uninspired songwriting, and dreadful production stop the idea from being as good as it's going to be. If you're a big fan of hardcore music, and you can look past the awful production, this record may interest you. For the rest of us though, well, it isn't going to revolutionize the music world.