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Alllllllright. So if you’re straight edge, you’ve probably had a Turning Point phase at some point, and you probably know this 7″ (the one linked here is 1st press w/ both inserts). All these people love the Turning Point lp, it’s this big time straight edge hardcore centerpiece. Not me. That thing SUCKS. The vocals are wimpy and whiny. The music is over produced. There’s weird proto-90’s-emo parts.  Clean guitars (a travesty on a sxe hc record), slap bass (I want to know WHO OK’d this), and worst of all, vague “poetic” lyrics, all permeate the half an hour of garbage known as “It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn” (this is one of the stupidest album titles ever).  Everything about this record is the ruin of a straight edge hardcore band. As I’ve said before, all you need is:

• a good singer with a raw voice
• good mosh parts (+a good intro)
• at least one good tshirt design (or generally cool graphics — see record cover)

7″ era Turning Point has all of this ON LOCK. Unlike their stupid lp (to say nothing of that godawful split 7″), Skip’s voice is a throaty growl, like a deeper SSD or something. I guess it’s pretty similar to Confront or Brotherhood, very burly.  Everything is delivered with maximum intensity, authority, and plenty of youthful anger. There’s no warbling, no whining, nothing attempting to be “sensitive”. The music takes a similar approach. Right from the get-go, To Lose breaks out with a nice slow intro that commands people open up the dance floor. There’s no choice. A quick bass break leads to the main section of the song with lots of harsh barking, thick backups, and catchy riffs. To Lose is the archetypal straight edge song where-in the singer is lamenting the loss of a friend to drug abuse. “It hurts/to see you hurt yourself/but you’ve stopped listening and I can’t help”. What more can you ask for?

I gotta point out how GOOD I think this record sounds in the recording. The snare sound is exemplary. Very snappy, but very deep. It reminds me a lot of the snare on Danzig 1 which is the ultimate muscular drum sound. The bass drum also doesn’t suffer from the typical “overly clicky” problems you’d expect from a cheap recording by a young band, but instead it’s got a nice, full boomy sound. Seriously, at a time when Don Fury was botching every drum recording in the tri-state area, Turning Point struck gold. Those bass to snare drum hits that kick off some of the songs on here, like for instance, The Few and The Proud, are part of what make this record so heavy and memorable. It’s like someone chopping down a tree — a satisfying ‘CRACK’. The guitar sound is similarly thick as opposed to many other bands of the day who were stuck with thin bumble-bee sounds that engineers would try and cover up with chorus or echo. I haven’t got any idea what gear was used but it sounds as good as a Marshall amp. Another important thing about the guitar: frequent use of divebombs. There’s nothing cooler than a divebomb going into a crucial mosh part. There just isn’t, it’s not up for debate. The bass guitar is, I guess, unremarkable but that also means there’s nothing wrong with it, which is definitely good.

Yes this is the best Turning Point release, and it’s definitely my favorite of the late 80’s second tier sxe bands, along with Confront. If you’re playing straight edge hardcore, please, do what works, and stay true to the style. Sound like this record. There’s nothing innovative about adding crappy Fugazi parts to your music like Turning Point did later on. No musical ability or artistic vision please! Only hard riffs and good yelling.