Bands more famous and musically distinct than Cancerous Growth emerged from Boston’s 1980s hardcore scene. The booklet essay accompanying Cancer Causing Agents makes that case. But a sense of feisty fun and intermittent willingness to experiment with studio technology inhabits the set’s 46 tracks released from ’84 to ’87. Lyrics of youthful disaffection and empowerment, rudimentary political and ecological concerns and girlfriend troubles may be largely standard issue for their time and style, but they’re delivered with humor and gusto fronting a band flitting between looseness and tightness. The results make for the kind of magic that caused hardcore to resonate with a generation for which it became their folk culture, as well as justifying the deluxe clamshell packaging of the band’s complete recorded work on one CD and a DVD of concert appearances.
