by Stewart Mason

Explode, the fourth album by Boston's Unseen, is slightly more mature than their earlier releases. It's still pure street punk: 12 songs in barely 21 minutes, each one of them more strident, pissed-off, and aggressive than the one before; but this album hangs together much better than earlier efforts like Lower Class Crucifixion. The songs are uniformly ultra-tight, which ratchets up the tension far more effectively on one-minute bursts of aggro like "Fed Up" and "Useless Regrets." As always on this kind of hardcore album, the songs end up blurring into one another, which only adds to the album's total impact. Strictly for hardcore purists, of course, but Explode is an aptly-titled missile of an album.