Sometimes when you think of a town you think of a certain sound. Philadelphia is not one of those cities for me, as the bands I know from the area vary a lot in style. Yes, there is the Dan Yemin tree (Lifetime / Kid Dynamite / Paint It Black) but there are also poppy bands and emo bands and everything in between and outside of those boxes too. Bitter Branches happens to include Yemin (on bass/vocals), plus Tim Singer (Deadguy, Kiss It Goodbye) on vocals, Jeff Tirabassi (Walleye) on drums, and Matt Ryan (Cavalry) and Kevin Sommerville (Lighten Up!) on guitar.
Since it's nigh-impossible to avoid namedropping when the musicians have been in this many bands, I'd argue that Bitter Branches sounds the most like Deadguy, though it has its pockets of pretty much every band mentioned already. I might distill it down even further to say it's like a manic depressive the Jesus Lizard, with winding guitar, pulsing rhythms, bellowed and brutal vocals, and a balance between cynicism and feral anger. I have to thrown in a Chat Pile comparison as well. The recurring element of all of these ingredients is harsh, blunt and heavy music that I guess is post-hardcore with a blast of noise-rock.
There's a lot of deep, headbanging riffage, a lot of screaming, but also some wallow-in-the-moment pain and suffering too. I swear that songs like "Everything Must Go" and "Here Comes The Chisel" feel like epic, 8-minute build-ups in intensity, but the songs are only 4 minutes and 5 and-a-half, respectively. The rhythm section deserves a serious shoutout for this whole record, and I'm exhausted even thinking about what playing this live must feel like. While each song stands alone quite well, the record plays as a whole with the drawn out agony and anger bleeding seamlessly from one track into the next.
Personally, "Basic Karate" always grabs my attention at the midway point with some stop-and-go dynamics and spit-shout lyrics, The brutal "Everything Must Go," and then the big finale of "Here Comes The Chisel" pummel in wholly new ways that prove heavy music doesn't have to be fast to be effective.
