Snitches Get Stitches

Snitches Get Stitches are definitely rotten, blistering, hardcore punks, and they prove it with their schoolyard-bully name, the appropriately sinister title of their album, song titles like "Skullsplitter," and decibel-shattering tributes to "sexy sellouts" on thrashers like "Koala Stars." But they're also funny -- a punk band doing the howl 'n' spit to lyrics like "I've got a thing for violets," for example, is pretty freaking funny. "Wolf Eggs Appear" opens with the line "We wanna cleanse you in our flames" set to a cross between emo and something like the Magnetic Fields' dry smugness, but then the song ups the pace to a searing frenzy that demonstrates just how wussy those styles are. The Snitches are eclectic, too: On "Bring Me the Head of Pablo Neruda" (another brilliant title) they have a make-out session with indie rock, and all 32 seconds of "Sweaty Legs Can't Dance" is devoted to weird samples that sound like dolphin songs on the Discovery Channel. If you're the kind of hardcore fan I am (i.e., the stuff makes you feel nerdy and old at age 26), Snitches Get Stitches are your kind of hardcore band.