���Haven't paid much attention to the stuff in recent years, but back in the 90s I was a pretty fervent fan of New York hardcore. Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Leeway, Sheer Terror, all were favorites, and I still pull out a lot of those older records on a regular basis, especially the more metallic, apocalyptic-sounding stuff. There were lots of lesser known bands that I really dug as well, one of them being Darkside NYC, a band formed by Sheer Terror guitarist Alan Blake in the early 90s. Carrying over the utterly massive, guttural guitar tone and overt Celtic Frost worship that he brought to Sheer Terror's debut Just Can't Hate Enough, Blake's new band took the New York hardcore sound into darker and more malevolent depths, with heavy doses of prehistoric death metal thrashing within their discharges of rampaging hardcore. Aside from how evil and crushing they sounded, Darkside shared the bleak, hateful attitude of Sheer Terror and Long Island nihilists Neglect, dismissing much of the unity/brotherhood vibe trumpeted by many of their peers, which made 'em all the more appealing for me.

��� Darkside ended up disbanding in the late 90s, but would reappear more recently minus Blake, with a new lineup featuring longtime members Rich O'Brien and drummer Joe Branciforte (who has also played in The Communion, All Out War, Disassociate, The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black and others) alongside fresher blood. Wasn't until now that the band finally delivered a new album though, their first new release since 1998's Ambitions Make Way For Dread, returning with one of the most confrontational hardcore albums I've heard out of NY in ages. Optimism Is Self-Deception still has that signature fusion of pessimistic, streetwise hardcore punk and Morbid Tales-era Celtic Frost, but the punk side of their sound is even more prominent now, and they're also incorporating lots of harsh electronic noise into their music, which really threw me for a loop when I first heard this. It's definitely a lot more experimental than previous Darkside releases, mashing up their ravening, violent punk outbursts and brawny Frostian sludge with tracks of electronic noise and ambient soundscapery using power tools, trumpet, samplers, synths, tape manipulation, and even a "modified autoharp". It's some of the wildest stuff I've heard out of NYC since Disassociate split up.

��� Kicking off with one of those blasts of crushing electronic noise, the band lashes out with the ferocious speedy hardcore punk of "Kill All The New Jacks", melding vicious old-school New York style hardcore with a chaos of blackened grind, splattered with nerve-shredding guitar solos and noise. Fucking savage. From there, we get another twenty two songs combining rough n' tumble hardcore with a heavy thrash metal vibe and Rich O'Brien's awesome rabid vocals, the songs strewn with that pulverizing, Frostian sludge and lots of black/death influenced tremolo riffing and blastbeat-driven frenzy, dropping into brooding doom-laden passages laced with Latin percussion, weird moments of hip-hop flow delivered over churning metallic crunch a la Sick Of It All, violently catchy street-punk hooks that abruptly give way to outbursts of crazed grindcore, bizarre industrial metal experiments that are blown out to maximum in-the-red speaker-filth. Genres are blurred and abused, songs shifting from skull-stomping crossover attacks doused with brutal Merzbowian noise, blasts of ultra-distorted Vomir-style HNW, eruptions of screeching power electronics, and there are other experimental flourishes like the punishing To Mega Therion-esque sludge splattered with crazed piano noise and howling electronics that comprises "Bury Me In A Cinch-Sak". When they end the album, it's with a fifteen minute noise track called "Driufracrullium" that sprawls out into a crackling, searing wall of garbled static. Like the aforementioned Disassociate, Darkside NYC employ an eclectic arsenal of sonic weapons on Optimism, making this one of the more interesting blasts of NY hardcore savagery we've gotten in at C-Blast.