With a name straight out of the CMHWAK playbook you could safely bet your Orchid/Jerome’s Dream split knowing this lot would offer up some early-00s skramz homage.
Jagged as a tin of old razors and pissing feedback the way a cheap binbag leaks juice, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead know exactly how they want to sound. Using bands like Reversal Of Man, Spirit Of Versailles and Neil Perry as their template the band charge headlong through 13 songs in a manner that’s chaotic, relentless and incapable of sitting still.
Octaves lunge and scrape, chun-chun-chong heavy parts materialise only to vanish moments later, and dissonant riffs flash momentarily into view like sudden premonitions of your own violent demise. The main singer provides a series of incredulous, surprised-sounding screeches, and in the background here and there you seem to get some muffled roars that help to ratchet up the intensity.
As an immediate adrenaline fix there’s no denying that ‘Tragedy As Catharsis’ is effective. For me, though, it does show a band confronting the same challenge that faced many of the acts who sprang up after the first flurry of Witching Hour and Level Plane releases: despite the power, the chaos and the chops, things’re currently somewhat anonymous. Still, these are early days yet – it’d be cool to see what they do next, particularly if they bring something genuinely their own to the mayhem that they clearly love so much.