Pick Your Side "Let me show you how democracy works" LP

This is Pick Your Side's first full length. Even though this recording features a full band, the sound is very similar to the "Survival Prayer" ep. Raw hardcore with this heavy low end crushing feel that compliments the anger spewed forth in the lyrics. This is a band that picked up where Haymaker left off. This recording was done in a real studio out of Chatham which is a studio space made from a converted church. In an interview with the band I learned the follwoing about their songs:

 1. Dark Future is a song about environmental cons and the lies behind it. The line "your dark future is a lie" is how they line up on environmentalism.


2. Plug-in Generation is a song about this generation's reliance on technology from smart phones to social networks and Jeff has a doomsday senario for them which involves an electro magnetic pulse that would render this all obsolete.

3. More Cops, More Crime is the observation that we have seen an escalation in police hirings at a period when crime goes down. They have to justify their existence and as a result everday people get hassled and incarcerated. That's how the cycle works.


4. Meltdown is a song about nuclear disaster experienced in recent times in places like Fukushima with a line like "you can't pretend - leaking into the ocean, you can't escape the pain".


5. How to Cope is Jeff's personal coping strategy. The anxiety that comes with a bleak future requires a day-to-day perspective in order to sleep at night. He calls it his own PMA, which he has tattooed on his hand.

6. Looking Back is a song about regret within the hardcore scene. There were many divisions over debates on ideology and this is Jeff's song about how he wish he could take it back because losing friends over this was not worth it.

7. Paranoid or prepared? Despite the cautions of conspiracy there are some very real ones eroding civil liberties. This song is a warning about the new slave nation of microchipped humans.


8. This too shall pass is an optimistic song about history demonstrating that we survive the bad times.

9. My Troubles is an autobiographical insight into problems weighing a person down. In some ways it is a first hand account at how depressing reality can be.

10. Ham Sandwich is slow and plodding like Infest's "Fetch the Pliers". The song attacks religion singling out some of the more fundamentalist sects of the Muslim faith.

11. Doomsday Demise is a song that takes on these apolcalyptic religions that use faith to scare people into belief.

12. It could be better is a song about police oppression which dare I say sounds informed by real life events. The song talks of the falsehoods of freedom with Freedom of speech being held up as the golden goose. How free are we in a police state? Just because it doesn;t happen to you doesn't mean the crackdown doesn't happen.

13. Matter of time predicts the collapse of our capitalist system which is unsustainable built around lies and falsehoods.

14. New War talks about Class War being the new enslavement principle.

15. All your fault is a song about spin doctoring lead by lawyers to let corporations off the hook blaming everyday citiznery solely for the mess we're in.

16. No good will come from this is another civil libertarian warning about the erosion of our rights.

17. 2 Headed Snake is directed at an unamed culprit who lies from both sides of their face like a two headed snake.

18. Right Turn is a callous call for survival in what has become a system that has focused us on the me. It reads like a paradise lost realization and ultimately expresses disdain for our system.

This full length came out on a389 Records.