Advent: officially the first band featured on this blog.

This is the first of many entries in the blog known as The Loose Ends. The sole purpose of everything posted here will to be to document the exploits of people who have given up every day normalcy to get in a van and travel the country and play the unpopular music they love, and most of the time these bands will have something to do with the hardcore punk community. I'm thrilled that the first band featured here is a band that truly deserves any recognition they get. A band called Advent.

Advent is one of the few bands today that is considered a Christian hardcore band and doesn't have the word "suck" synonymous with their name. Amongst the sea of uninspired, breakdown soaked, mind numbing music being packaged as hardcore by certain Christian labels, they stand alone as a band with purpose, meaning, and most importantly, roots. Pulling heavily from the heyday of 90's metallic hardcore, Advent makes some of the most aggressive music you will ever hear. It's true metal influenced hardcore the way it was meant to be played. Heavy, looming and pissed. Their new album Naked and Cold sounds like Turmoil and Figure Four had a baby together, and then said baby was kidnapped by Cursed and trained it in the ways of gritty gut wrenching guitar tones. It may be the heaviest record you will hear this year.

I first heard about Advent three years ago when I was on tour with a band called The Red Baron. This was one of the many times throughout their time as a band that they decided to break up midway through a tour, and their guitar player Mike already had a new band he wanted to join after the tour was over. All I knew about them was that they were from North Carolina, they featured ex-members of the band Beloved and they were heavy as hell.

After that tour I didn't see Mike for a while. I knew he moved to North Carolina and joined Advent, but that was about it. Two years later Mike's new band finally played with my band and that night they absolutely blew me away. They played with true intensity and conviction. And they seemed pissed, which is always a plus. A year later we were lucky enough to do two tours in a row with them, and not only did they kill it every night, but they turned out to be pretty awesome dudes. Talk to these guys for ten minutes and you'll find they're freaking legit. They've been around long enough to know what good hardcore is and what makes a band real hardcore band. Most importantly, they evoke the same kind of passion for their beliefs off stage as they do on stage. They're as real as they come. Oh and also they know a lot about good barbeque, which probably has a lot to do with their southern upbringing.

The following video is all compiled from footage taken during a two week tour with them. I sat them down on the last night of tour to ask them a few questions about the band (which is kind of a weird thing to do to a bunch of your friends) and this is the that video resulted.

The Loose Ends presents: Advent from harbor partin on Vimeo.

Keep checking back here to see how this site evolves. I promise it'll at least be interesting.