California based punk band F-Minus have been busy the past years touring Europe and the U.s. with such bands as H2O and AFI, but they found the time to record their second album on Hellcat Records, “Suburban Blight”, which means the ruin or decay of suburbia, and, as the first track explains, “they take the money, you take the lies”, that leaves not a lot of doubts about the fact that F-Minus is a very political band, with angry music and angry lyrics too.

The album is a powerful collection of 20 tracks, for a total length of 20 minutes and 6 seconds, so, it’s not hard to understand how the songs are: fast guitar riffs, fast drummings and a lot of screams, with lyrics that can be both very short ( just a couple of phrases) but also a bit longer, as the one of “Cosmetic”. The music could be probably labelled as “hardcore”, but there are also some influences of old school punk, in a mix of music that if I describe its as “furious”, that wouldn’t be enough. Songs like “Capital Murder”, “White Collar Crime”, “Pain Messiah” , “Food Not God” and make it easier to realize that the other face of punk is not a smiling one. If on television we are shown happy pop punk bands that sing about teenagers, the underground movement of bands is much bigger and these have a lot of anger inside their minds, and groups like F-Minus are here to remind us this.

Also, the artwork of the CD explains pretty well what F-Minus is about: a black cover with a lot of provoking pictures, like a Molotov Coctail or a Homemade Granade…so, having fun but also making people think is the aim of F-Minus on this record, but also in general I’d say.

One last thing, the band is made up of 2 guys and 2 girls and the songs are sung both by a male vocal and also a female vocals, and from all the four members of F-minus, and this is a very good thing, because although the music may sound boring to a new-listener, the alternation of voices help understanding what we are hearing and I must say the voice Erica angry and cool.