Warning: This will be one of those “I’m not sure where he’s going with this point” reviews, so bear with me. I promise I’ll get around to discussing the new Daniel Striped Tiger album, which is well worth checking out.

One of the competency exams for my Master’s Degree in English involved reading passages from various works of literature and then naming what movement it came from, assigning a date range to it, and citing stylistic motifs to support your choices. If you knew the author and title of the work, fantastic, but the big picture was more important. For someone whose studies focused on the 20th century, differentiating between a modernist and postmodernist work was second-nature, but the fear of having to recognize a Restoration comedy kept me glued to my Norton Anthologies for a few weeks. Fortunately a Wallace Stevens poem made an appearance and allowed me to exhale.

I bring up this anecdote not to alienate the majority of my readership (although I know there are a few past or present literary scholars in my midst), but because Daniel Striped Tiger’s No Difference caused me to think of a related, if entirely hypothetical exam. Does No Difference qualify as hardcore, post-hardcore, both, or something else entirely? Tricky DC post-punk? Late ’90s screamo? I envisioned an exam in which I heard 30 seconds of one of these songs and had to place the sub-genre, choose the year range, and cite the dominant facets of the sound. I shuddered at this thought. Not only are these distinctions much more precise than the literary periods I was required to know (measured in decades rather than centuries), but their boundaries are blurred, if not outright broken.

Daniel Striped Tiger make that hypothetical test nearly impossible. Depending on which 30 second sample you got, you could present a convincing argument for any of those sub-genres/eras. Maybe you get the first 30 seconds of “Goldwood” or “Ancient Future” and chalk up its careening-off-the-rails energy and throat-shredding vocals to a well-done contemporary hardcore album. Maybe you get the loping, bass-heavy groove of “No Reverse” and place it in the mid-fi, turn-of-the millennium indie rock boat alongside North of America. Maybe you get the stop/starts of “Wait Outside” (MP3) and wonder if they’re from DC. Maybe you get one of the album’s stockpiles of gut-punching half-time riffs, let’s say the last half of “Off White,” and choose post-hardcore as your final answer. Maybe the instructor’s a total jerk and gives you the drifting feedback of “Traceroute,” lining you up for certain failure.

No Difference touches on all of these sub-genres, but Daniel Striped Tiger is too smart to stick with one for too long. The album is all about building energy, hitting that point when the train leans off the rails, then finding interesting ways to dissipate that energy. Every half-time breakdown, start/stop section, and quiet passage of instrumental interplay has two purposes: blow off the head of steam and throw more coal in the engine. They never stop moving long enough to lose the energy of hardcore or fully embrace the tightness of post-hardcore. If there’s a line between the two, Daniel Striped Tiger is sitting on it.

What makes the distinction between hardcore and post-hardcore even harder to nail down is that No Difference doesn’t follow the usual evolutionary arc from the former to the latter. Daniel Striped Tiger demonstrated both styles on 2005’s Condition and 2007’s Capital Cities. They’re simply better at it now. The riffs are bigger, the momentum’s greater, and the sense of impending collapse is higher. The lone caveat: with only eleven songs (three of which are essentially filler) spanning 26 minutes, No Difference skews much closer to a hardcore ten-inch than a double LP rock opera. I may be breathless after No Difference, but I wouldn’t mind an encore.