Cross Class / Rad

***“The punk attention span is shorter than ever in 2020 and there’s barely time to keep your eyes on the road, much less look backwards, but recordings from two of Sacramento’s unheralded twenty-teen giants will stop you dead in your tracks. CROSS CLASS drop ten tracks in nine minutes—frustration on the lyric sheet manifests as erratic start/stop riffs, exploding into primal DBeats that last just long enough to set you up so they can break you back down with devastating abandon(ment). If Cross Class are the destruction, on the flip RAD celebrate all that remains. If you were lucky enough to see them live, then you know that Rad play for Rad (listen to LORY scream 'I’m not here to make friends!')—and they are playing whether you like it (or them) or not. Still one of the greatest and most inspiring live bands I have ever seen, cramming more honest intensity and mosh parts into criminally short light speed fastcore. Both bands are finished—Cross Class went to school and moved away, while Rad morphed into SICK BURN—but the records remain, and a healthy hail to Sacramento (the city and the label) for making sure that these sounds made it to the rest of us.”—Robert Collins