Labels: SuperFi
Review by: Alex Deller
Of the 15 tracks here, almost half of them use a swear word or a reference to genitalia in their title. Four titles contain a pun of some sort. The best title, which features neither of these things, is named ‘Chicken And Chips Black Metal’. It’s hard to know what this last one is all about, but it’s pretty good and borderline profound in its own strange way. Mirthsome as it all may be, there’s still that worry: is this just going to be another dose of jokey, half-baked Spazz or Charles Bronson-aping slop? Thankfully not, because Beg are smarter chaps than that and also spend a chunk of their time with the likes of Art Of Burning Water and the Afternoon Gentlemen, which means they know what they’re bloody well doing when it comes to making an ornery racket. Beg sound like they’re caught somewhere between these two worlds: they’re grind as fuck and make no mistake, but amid the frantic speed and swill-gargling vocals there are also plenty of jagged jabs to the brain and canny sidesteps that make this more than just a vicious, blastbeat-laden monster. There’s the wobbly riff that closes out ‘Dustbin Hoffman’ (chortle!), for instance, or the slugabed pummel of ‘Doom Dance Dick Grope’ (snurt!) and the mid-paced groove of – hee! – ‘Livid After Midnight (Rotting Till The Dawn)’, all of which suggest that buried beneath the Brutal Truth / Discordance Axis grind heroics there’s a furrow-browed Craw fan just dying to smash his way out. My advice: keep him there for a bit longer yet, because the balance right now is just about perfect.