Blank Veins - A Guest - 7

Labels: UNC
Review by: Alex Deller

This band released a split cassette with No Balls, and this fact is telling. Why? Because Blank Veins play horrible, churning, untoward noise-rock that pays grubby homage to said band and the related Brainbombs. First song is a rattling, skull-scraping thing overloaded with squalling sax. The beat to it is almost like the Gun Club or something, though the instrumentation suggests broken glass and corrugated iron rather than Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s spidery guitar fragments. Second song is a stuck lurch, the same riff cycling over and over while beleaguered vocals howl misfortune and that infernal sax parps mercilessly away. It’s brain-gnawingly awful and borderline unbearable, but at the same time strangely compulsive. How they manage such a combination is a total mystery, but do it they do. Over and over and over again.