FOMENTO

They're Italian, they're metal, and they've got a few choice words for anyone who spends more time on their eyeliner and girl jeans than on their riffs. FOMENTO are a band on a mission, but these Roman ass-kickers thankfully spend as much time writing killer tunes and cranking out righteous, hardcore-steeped metal as they do mean-mugging poseurs and dreaming of bygone empires. "Either Caesars or Nothing" is a rager!

What FOMENTO lack in distinctiveness, they make up for in sheer enthusiasm and energy. Their sound isn't far removed from that of HATEBREED — that no-frills metallic hardcore stomp, lean and mean with no superfluous bits to get in the way of kicking the listener's ass. Riffs are meaty and bludgeoning, vocals are angry roars, and the rhythms cascade down like a galloping avalanche of fists. Subtle it ain't, and there's not much that'd give a song away as a FOMENTO tune if you were blindfolded and quizzed on it. But it's hard to be mad at a band this skillful and focused — put on "Cotard's Syndrome" or "Burial at Sea" and the thrashing energy will bowl you over like a tank, delivering punishing speed mixed with tense, teeth-grinding midtempo parts.

FOMENTO will probably need to grow beyond this sound on subsequent records, and develop more of their own unique personality, to rise out of the teeming MySpace metal hordes. But "Either Caesars or Nothing" is as powerful and confident a debut as anyone could hope for, and it puts these Italian bruisers firmly on the map as contenders. It's one of those records where analysis quickly fails, words become irrelevant, and the only solution is to crank it up to a socially-unacceptable level and start throwing punches. A band to watch.