Stake: Pray for Death

It's been a while since we've posted a Hot Track Alert... my apologies! I can't think of a better track to get back into the game with than this barn-burner from Richmond, Virginia's Stake. On the one hand, this track pulls together a lot of different little threads of music that I like: the jittery, drum-machine-driven sound of Race Car and SBF, the big choruses of the Marked Men and Radioactivity, and the dark atmosphere of the best recent goth-tinged punk. But on the other hand it sounds like absolutely nothing else... this could have come from Calgary or Stockholm or Houston just as easily as Richmond. It seems to exist outside of our space-time continuum, evidence that there's a better world out there where all the songs rule and the punks like to dance.