Ah, California! The State of Sun! Sand! Very angry hardcore kids! Yes, because apparently, the Hoods (Who are moshing it up from Sacramento, CA) are immensely pissed off about something. The raging oldschool-with-modern-influences the band played on their first two releases has almost completely gone and has made way for slowly paced, tough-guy moshcore that sounds too much like Hatebreed or Crawlspace. The guitars do a lot of chugga-chugga, the vocalist does a lot of ‘wraah wraah wraaah’, you have the occasional bit of double bass drumming, but the Hoods completely fail to convince me with their second full-length on Victory Records. “Another Suicide”, the last track on the album, sounds like a second-hand Born From Pain song, “Bastard” sounds like Bulldoze but without the cool tempo-changes and the ‘eerie’ clean guitar intro on “I Own You” takes the icing on the cheesecake for me.

It’s not completely lost, the fast parts of the songs still sound furious and energetic, and when the band chooses to go for a more oldschool, punky approach to the songs like they do in “E Pugno Limpio”, “I Hate You” and “5455”, I’m a happy little man. Over the whole, this album is too much bark and too little bite for me and I must say that I’m sadly disappointed by “Pray For Death”. The lyrics to the title track (and the sample it starts with) make it look like the band is declaring war on Islam, which seems kind of ridiculous to me.