COUNTDOWN TO OBLIVION

It is perhaps strange to try to wrap a context around a band that I never saw, a band that I didn't actually hear until years after they released this demo. But Ottawa's COUNTDOWN TO OBLIVION were all of the great things about crushing late '90s hardcore crammed into one insanely good band that left us with a criminally small recorded output, so I will do my best. Ripping metallic shred (as in "Poster Children For Family Values"), screaming dual vocal proto-fastcore ("No Brainer") and amalgamations of that decade's crushing hardcore/crust-by-way-of-DIY-basement-hardcore (most of the rest of the tape) sound brilliant to my new millennium ears. This is for the tools who still waste breath stammering about how '90s hardcore was shit...COUNTDOWN TO OBLIVION might have dropped this near the end of the decade, but the years are seeping out of their very pores.

DEATH RATTLE