Remember the end of Predator, where the alien has its chest caved in by Dutch’s improvised booby trap? Well, Blow Your Own Brains Out are that huge, career-ending lump of wood and you are the Predator’s solar plexus.
Their debut album takes a massive swing and connects, packing dense, compacted riffs against each other alongside murderous pacing, breathless vocal delivery and occasional guitar heroics. The band look to the metal-edged murderousness of New York for inspiration, with Cro-Mags, Killing Time, SubZero and Dynamo all serving as reasonable points of reference. Despite these comparisons and how goddamn tough it all sounds, the band’s lyrics tend towards the progressive, focusing on topics like corruption, domestic violence and wage slavery (oh, and the movie Rocky – can’t fault them there, either).
Pretty much everything’s a solid-gold hit, though ‘Reveal Your Rotten Minds’ deserves a particular mention given its move from brisk shit-kicking to odd, scuttly breakdown, as does the way ‘Black Out’ manages to cram a brilliant slowed-down lurch into its brief runtime.
As ferocious and angry as it all is, ‘The Big Escape’ is also plenty of fun: the kind of release that slaps a ridiculous shit-eating grin across your mush – at least, that is, until someone inevitably spinkicks the teeth out your big daft mouth.