Labels: React With Protest
Review by: Graeme Cunningham
I saw this 7″ on the distro table at the Apoplexy Twist/Calling Gina Clark show in Edinburgh and just couldn’t resist picking it up. It comes in a folded brown cardboard box, with a little tracing paper window cut into the front. There’s a drawing of a bizarre scarred little girl holding her heart on the tracing paper (slightly cheesey) and there’s also a wicked booklet with some really nice illustrations in it and a badge. I can’t commend anyone enough for coming up with packagign like this. It really inspires me personally to see so much effort going into a release.
But of course you can put a Turd in a Tiffany’s box and it is still just going to be an unpleasant collection of broken down food stuffs. Without the tunes to back this up all the effort will be for nothing. Thankfully June Paik can more than live up to it. Side A kicks off with a weird electronic drone, before a mighty wall of Uranus styled hardcore brutality stabs its golf spikes in your eyes. Flitting in and out of alternate slow tense atmospheric rumbles and frantic full on break neck trashing, this is necro stuff. You can practically hear the vein’s in their heads pulsating on their temples. The second track “Refractive” is of similar power, again taking the atmospheric mid section as a counterpoint to a front and back ends like being run over by a hummer.
Both of the tracks on side A however, come off like Country Side alliance members on the wrong end of a truncheon compared to the B side “Swallow all; it runs too deep”. Again its the Brutality vs brooding formula they follow, but here they allow this monster to gestate a little while. You can soak up the long slow build, awaiting the inevitable sickening crunching snap to the neck that you know is going to follow. This follows admirably in the path of such giants as One Eyed God Prophecy, at the same time giving the sound enough of themselves to keep it fresh like their contemporaries Shikari and Takaru. My only gripe about this record is a petty one, but I would have liked some explanations to the songs.