Shivering

Promising a "death to false emo,” Oakland’s the Shivering offer fans a blast from the past in compiling songs from four of their EPs onto a single release. This collection captures all of the intensity of the early to mid-’90s hardcore scene, which itself owed much to the emergence of such "emo” bands as Embrace and Rites of Spring in the mid-’80s. Trouble is, all of the Shivering’s EPs were recorded and released between 2001 and 2003, well after the music was generally thought to have lost its subversive edge and was usurped by mall punks and A&R slime. This doesn’t necessarily negate what the Shivering were and are up to, however, because — free of context — the band’s music seems impassioned and has much in common with their punk forbearers. The Of the Liars and To the Ground EPs are two examples of the vintage post-hardcore that emerged out of DC in the ’80s, and would have been must-have records among hipster hardcore fans back in the day. Mastering a historically important and once-vibrant musical style found the shivering resembling a meatier version of Rites of Spring at the beginning of the millennium. It will be interesting to see where their upcoming release takes them.