waking up to an empty life

If I had money(which I dont) I would start a vinyl only record label specializing in Australian and maybe international releases that never got a vinyl release my first release would be this..... Im talking about life.love.regret-sick of goodbyes released on resist records in 2001. about 2 or so years ago me and Mr Chris "give blood" James started a myspace tribute to this band unfortunately over time we both lost the login details :( and there is no way of getting back in... anyway an amazing band this written by Chris says it all

“ Jacob: The loneliness… sometimes it weighs on me like a blanket made out of tar, or rubber or something. I don't know how to push it off. When I'm working it's not so bad, especially when there's a crisis. Then I get off work and everybody else has some place to go, it makes me angry… it makes me really pissed. I dunno what I'm sayin' all this for.
France: I feel like that sometimes, everybody does.
Man: Go on Jacob… what do you do when you get angry?
Jacob: I walk it, or I drive it… sometimes I walk it, sometimes I drive it.
France : Walk it?
Jacob: I don't have anybody to talk to, I ain't got family.
France : We're family for you.
Jacob: This group?
Man: Yeah
France : We're here for you.
Jacob: Yeah? When? 2 O'clock in the morning when I'm ridin' the streets, you here then? I haven't seen you. Ya know what I do sometimes, I walk through the supermarket at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning just to see somebody's face.

I haven't seen you there France Wallis…”


The above conversation (sampled as an outro track on their 2001 album, ‘Sick of Goodbye's' ) conveys the mood of Life.Love.Regret perfectly: lonely, bleak and painful. This was a band for the hard times; a band for those days when staying in bed feels like a better idea then facing the world outside. If misery were a movie, Life.Love.Regret would be it's soundtrack.

Life.Love.Regret married the metallic hardcore sound of Hatebreed with the dark, melodic side of bands like Integrity to create a style of gloomy, brooding hardcore that reflected the bleakness inside the heads of four distressed men. They came across as a depressing combination of the urgent, in your face sound of traditional hardcore with the heavier but melodic sound of metal.

Life.Love.Regret frontman, Luke Dolan, was the shadow of a once stable man. One their one album ‘Sick of Goodbye's', he painfully screams his way through nine miserable hymns reflecting on thoughts of heartache, suicide and loss.

The songs ebb and flow through waves of depression on their trip from the first riff of Let's Start With My Nervous Breakdown to the last one that concludes, Waking Up to an Empty Life . From the calm seas that make up the slow, dirgy sound of Help Me Not Die or The Living Dead to the painful crashes of Spitting Teeth or In Memory Of… , ‘Sick of Goodbye's' is an amazing part of the Australian and Newcastle hardcore legacies.

Always passionate and never contrived, Life.Love.Regret showed a country of kids the way metallic but emotional hardcore should be played and the way it'll probably never be played again. R.I.P.