Spooky Fingers: Reflect the Filth
July 5 2009 at 08:50:34 PM
The final nail in the coffin. Battletorn calls it quits with Reflect the Filth, the duo’s third and ultimate full-length. Approach deviates little from the Trashmegeddon war-machine Omid and William unleashed in earnest after departure of vocalist Beverly. Impossibly taut and rubber-legged loose, of course, but with a more “refined” vocal delivery. I’ve always thought of Battletorn as an adolescent Hardcore band that had never heard Hardcore and only had it explained to them in broken English by some Hungarian septuagenarian who also happened to helm pest control for the tenement they called home. Only kids could bring that much energy, anguish, force. Only kids who’d never heard SSD or (early) Agnostic Front could devise something that sounds so much like and unlike the two bands, improving on some idealistic version found NOWHERE but here. The LP features studio musings and live knives out attack, the intensity level waning not a fuckin’ bit on either program. “Reflect the filth! Reflect the fuh-king filth!” Vinyl 12” limited to 500 copies. Find Omid and reserve yours today!
Kindred spirits Pollution misunderstand Hardcore as a means to an end and not an end in itself thereby putting the past 15 years of garage and shithouse warriors on notice with too few tracks lasting too few minutes via their n.s. Drugs cassette, an empowered and often ecstatic follow-up to first effort, Nasty DNA. Street urchin screamfest hits the lyric sheet here and doubles up with the one greasy organic fuck of fanged noise. When all the band members anticipate each other’s move(s) so there are no moves only a street being laid (come stand in it, eh, and get your fuckin’ toes burnt off! ) we have “Reds” and “D-IX.” Ears bleeding, arms hurt, outta beer and just blew my amp, broke all my strings, my snare head, hi-hat, and crash cymbal. Hang it on the wall. Just like Johnny Stabb said: “The fun just never ends…” Cassette limited to 40 copies?! I have #3. E-mail contact: pollution.c6@gmail.com.
The debut full-length from Belgium’s Pek, Preaching Evil, is really LCD Black Metal masquerading as rudimentary, unspectacular Death Metal. The band itself claims it is playing “Dark Blasphemic Death Metal.” OK… Splitting hairs not being a favorite pastime of mine, I try to engage the music for what it ostensibly is, and not what it sounds like: Another reason why peanut-dick’d Kanwulf entitled one of his “timeless epics,” Crushing Some Belgian Scum. For fans of “watching shit blow up,” and “docking” only. Available via Nuclear War Now!
Twisted Sister, the Glam fiends that eternally closeted your curiosity about what kinda woman you’d make, have reissued their Stay Hungry record to celebrate 25 years of having – inexplicably – two (intolerable) hits, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and “I Wanna Rock.” For whatever reason, I made it onto the promo list for this thing and I gotta say it sounds like shit. Apparently there’s an “audio problem” with like 1,000+ copies of this reish and yours truly got one of the lemons. The Rhino package includes a remastered Stay Hungry, a bunch of embarrassing songs that didn’t make the original cut, demos etc. I broke out my vinyl copy for the revisit. “Burn in Hell” is some off-the-top-ropes shit and makes me happy I never trashed this platter. “Hear no evil / Don’t you see no evil / Don’t you lay no evil down on me / You’re gonna burn in hell.” Goldilocks and the four tuckdicks ride again! You can’t stop rock ‘n’ roll…
[Stewart Voegtlin]
[Photos of Battletorn stolen from Flickr.]
RSS FEEDS
TWITTER
print
email
list
big
small
