While Damian Abraham and Ben Cook might earn the majority of Fucked Up’s headlines, guitarist Mike Haliechuk might hold the key to their legacy, and Vancouver-based hardcore quintet NEEDS understands this. Indeed, Haliechuk’s aesthetic fingerprints can be found all over The Accursed Share’s ringing guitar chords, relentless toms, shimmering guitar leads and minimalist solos. It feels, largely, like a collection of Fucked Up LP openers, and that’s hardly a bad thing — Hidden World and David Comes to Life’s best tracks were “Crusades” and “Queen of Hearts,” and NEEDS works hard, and succeeds, at replicating their charm. Of course, The Accursed Share provides several additional contempo-hardcore touch points — occasionally, The Shape of Punk to Come’s angular riffage and the sassiness of mid-’00s Level Plane enter the fray — but they, at best, feel like frivolous throw-ins. That’s not to say that The Accursed Share is a terrible release, but it, like so many modern hardcore bands, doesn’t build upon its influences. That doesn’t make it bad, but it doesn’t make it memorable, either.
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