"Staring Back" and finding what you missed…

For whatever reason, I was never a Turmoil fan. I guess I could probably chalk it up to my finicky ears often having a tendency to (at times unfairly) hold less-than-stellar recordings against solid songs, I don't know. There was a time when I owned their debut full-length, "From Bleeding Hands" (in fact, I've owned it twice), but I sold it for the second and final time many years ago and never looked back. But when this double-CD discography (plus three brand new tracks) from Abacus Recordings showed up a month or so back, something funny happened: Turmoil finally hit me.

These Philadelphia bruisers started out more than 10 years ago, and this retrospective actually marks my first exposure to 1999's "The Process Of…" (their final full-length release at the time), which is chock full of fucking awesome tracks and a slick set of production values that smokes their earlier work by a landslide. Though, admittedly, there are some killer tunes throughout the band's back catalog (in all these years I've never forgotten how raging a moment it is once the vocals kick in during the intro to "New Media"). This heavy and discordant form of metalcore with smatterings of post-hardcore melody and minimal flirtations with the more angular and chaotic side of the genre is honestly very Deadguy-ish to my ears, so I can't exactly call it the most original thing in the world, but I have to confess feeling like an idiot for having overlooked the quality of this material in the past. These dudes have demonstrated some great songwriting that manages to pull plenty of feeling and atmosphere into the mix, and that's where most bands of this nature tend to fail: