Hounds & Harlots – The Good Fight

Hounds and Harlots debut full-length The Good Fight opens with a turn from the angry. A cheery pop lick stops abruptly to make way for gritty vocals that, throughout the album, have a penchant for reminiscence. The Good Fight is a San Francisco love letter to foggy city streets on the east coast, and a noisy, drunken hail to the Boston and New York punk scenes that, in Hounds and Harlots’ view, should not go quietly into that good night.

Despite the fun pop structure of each track on The Good Fight, the subject matter is irretrievably disconsolate, starting at a closed punk club in “Bloodline’s” opening lament, reaching as far back as the Paris Commune of 1848 midway through on “Coming For You,” and then back to today just in time for a final fuck-you to the big bands of today on “You’re Out.” “Stand Up,” the acoustic-dominated protest anthem at the apex of the album’s political full-throttling, is a touch too shallow for the rest of the album – “Stand up!” punctuates too many “me/me” rhymes– and while the band functions as a pitch-perfect pop outfit, it is at its Dropkick Murphian best on the harder tracks like “Bloodline” and “Coming For You.”

All of Hounds and Harlots agitating is done in the city’s dockside alehouses, and every track conjures foggy city streets and clanking glasses in a way rarely achieved by groups that inject so much pop composition into their punk. The combination makes for some remarkably crisp tracks – in some places, almost a half-dozen tonal shifts are crammed into a three-minute span.

Whether this sound is cultural runoff from Hounds and Harlots’ coastal milieu or a genuine attempt to style themselves as pop-hardcore is too early to tell. The final track, “Lot to Learn,” embodies this question with a razor-sharp bass lick that swings away to give hardcore the floor, and is the album’s most interesting track.

Inevitably the album is simultaneously light and dark in ways that prevent it from being a total triumph in either direction and the rhetoric just barely survives initial listening, coming into its own after multiple run-throughs. Merely okay lyricism is a dangerous conceit even on a well-crafted album like this one, when it’s meant to conjure the kind of barroom shows that demand more of a spectacle. Nonetheless this young band is growing up spectacularly and with the backing of the right label could foment a new scene on the West coast.