Album Of The Week: Ceremony Tell Me Your Dream

When you see Ceremony live, they take you on a ride. At this point, Ceremony are a punk institution, but the word "institution" implies a certain level of stasis. Ceremony keep changing. When the band started in 2004, all of its members were teenagers. Most of them were in high school when they wrote and recorded "Kersed," a perfectly concise 72-minute anthem of disgust that became a canonical hardcore work. Live, Ceremony still play "Kersed" and the other fast, hard, chaotic head-choppers that they recorded in their early days, when they might've been second only to Trash Talk in their ability to turn a crowded room into a seething whirlwind of flying limbs. But they also play their more recent material — itchy-throbby post-punk atmospheric enough to remind you that they named themselves after a New Order song in the first place.Powerviolence bands generally don't make new wave, and new wave bands generally don't make powerviolence. Ceremony are both, and they're neither. It's not that strange to see former hardcore kids branching out and trying out different modes and genres, but those people generally don't keep doing that within the context of the band that they started when th...