Review: Grade 8

Grade 8
“Self-Titled”
(Lava / Atlantic)

Each and every year the market gets more and more saturated with copycat bands. As each trend comes to a head there are fifty bands that jump on the band wagon a little bit too late. Enter Grade 8. This is a band that should have been around about eight years ago. Sounding like a combination of about 30 different bands we’ve all heard before these guys are definitely not trying to corner the market by being original. Imagine J-Mann from Mushroomhead on vocals with the stop on dime precession of a band like Biohazard and sprinkle on some Primer 55 for good measure.

Actually as much as anyone can bag on Grade 8 for not being the most original sounding thing we’ve heard this year they do have a lot of great hooks and decent songs. Songs like ‘Brick By Brick’ or ‘Headcase’ are definitely infectious songs that fans will grab on to. I quickly found myself singing along the songs and was pretty impressed by the bands ability to incorporate some kind of hook into each song to keep me coming back. All in all Grade 8 may sound like something we’ve heard before but in a time when most of the originators are sounding played out leave it to someone like Grade 8 try and do something like this. Too bad for Grade 8 they weren’t around eight years ago when this would have been cutting edge stuff.