At this point in my punk career I’m beginning to think Siege are becoming the classic rock of hardcore. You know: every few years their seminal oeuvre is repackaged, remastered, rereleased, expanded or deluxed until whole creaking shelves are given over to what is essentially the same thing. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I certainly have a Lost & Found version of this, various comped odds n’ sods and the first reissue Deep Six put out over ten years ago, and that’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the iterations out there. This version is supposedly the ‘definitive’ one (albeit lacking the choppy ‘F-Minus’ from the CD released by Armageddon/Disk Union and the cracking battle of the bands anecdote…) which sees the tracks from their seminal demo and ‘Cleanse The Bacteria’ material welded to the extras available elsewhere (‘Two-Faced’, ‘Trained To Kill’ and ‘Questions Behind The Wall’). If you’ve not heard Siege previously then you’re in for a right bloody treat, because they played some of the most insane, violent, coruscating stuff going: a frantic blur of gargled hardcore that roughly twists your arm up behind your back laughingly forces your face towards the logchipper. Amid the smash-and-grab of it all lurks the malicious ‘Grim Reaper’, a sax-damaged eight-minuter that’s arguably the band’s crowning glory and positively crackles with meanness and tendon-straining hostility “” a weird, wonderful number that saw a band who were already setting the template for grind and power violence opening avenues to far more twisted paths as well. It is, of course, bloody fantastic, and while you might own at least one variant already it has to be said that another copy is probably going to serve you better than another dozen or so fastcore releases by bands unfit to even change the flowers at this lot’s graveside. Go on, then – get to it.
