Thrash + Nuclear War Now = Atompünk. Well that seems like a perfect genre for this bunch outta Austin Texas. I don’t know about you but a promo picture does speak words and the amount of artists with floppy fringes standing next to a wall that goes straight in the deleted folder around here is proof of that. Not these freaks though, looking like something dropped from Nick Turner’s spaceship into the middle of a Mutoid Waste Company free festival. Seeing their get-up I simply had to hear what Swirly, Guzzler, Keymaster and General Ham sounded like on their debut album!
It didn’t disappoint either, clattering in sharply and opening out into a pulverising percussive and bass heavy welter of noise, opening track ‘Biochron Space Suit’ really does head off like a maniac. This is the sort of sound you would get at 4AM in a squat punk do off your face on all manner of good but illegal things and it’s suitably deranged and manic to have you dancing your tits off. Ok maybe all that’s missing is the saxophone but there’s enough lunacy here without it as the piggy entitled vocalist, yells death grunts and splutters away. The PR mention’s comparisons to Killing Technology era Voivod and although not immediate you will hear squalls of disconnected squalling guitar work in the midst of this heaving mass giving it all a kind of recognisable sci-fi twist.
This is fiery and volatile stuff like handling plutonium at end of world meltdown and you know straight away it is going to leave you seriously disfigured and burnt before you get to the end of this 36 minute ten track beast. The manic velocity and crazed zeal of the musicians and singer never let up and it’s impossible not feeling thoroughly invigorated by the performance. If you have been putting off those hard to do cleaning jobs just snort up a line of coffee and put this on, jobs a goodun and that annoying task will be over before you know it. There is a real crust flavour going through it too and it Discharges savage near d-beats over songs such as ‘War Terminal – The True Front Line’ spurring you into battle and making you go fight those hideous mutants outside your bunker.
Track titles like ‘Opulent Tesseract Ascension’& ‘Mechanized Deathcanal’ are proto-charged in theme as they are in music to have you thrusting away on the hyper-drive engines and flying through a black hole straight into ‘Dimension Hatröss’. Make sure you hang onto your head when you teleport though, you’ll be banging away so hard it’s likely to fall off and be displaced on another world. Yep I like this a lot, it’s a complete burst of energy from beginning to end and just what the doctor ordered. It only lets up at the end outro which serves up a neat Fabio Frizzi inspired creepy theme suggesting we have now entered the twilight zone. Buckle up, press ignition and go Expander have well and truly arrived in style.
(8/10 Pete Woods)
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