Always viewed ownership of and admiration for Burned Up Bled Dry’s ‘Cloned Slaves For Slaves’ as a mark of taste and discernment: it was (and remains) a cheap score in terms of the wider Slap A Ham canon, but dripped with such a savage sense of vengefulness that I could never understand why it wasn’t more widely appreciated.
The band’s debut full-length comes after two decades of stops and starts, but it’s such a monster of a record that it sounds like the band have never been away. Powered by a production job that’s capable of punching a fist-sized hole in the side of your head, ‘Next Stop… Dead Stop…’ draws from the same bitter spring as their two 90s EPs (i.e. a mix of grind, crust, power violence and straight-up 80s hardcore) while taking things to a whole new level.
Everything – and I mean everything – here has been pushed so far into the red that you end up fearing for your personal safety. The songs are short and brutal, but also loaded with ideas and a deadly, relentless sense of intent. For a minute or two it’ll seem like the band are leaning more into the 80s hardcore side of their sound, but just as you’ve rearranged your vertebrae to cope with that set of circumstances they’ll throw in a tricksy, tangled guitar line or, as with ‘Don’t Care’, a walloping dose of mean-spirited sludge.
20+ years ago I would’ve made comparisons to bands like His Hero Is Gone, Negative Approach, Excruciating Terror and Scrotum Grinder. All of those namedrops hold true today, but this certainly isn’t some exercise in 90s nostalgia. It’s savage, vital music made by people who are aware of the mess we made of the past, and are furious that we’re still mindlessly fucking up what’s left of the future.