The miscreants are back! Batpiss provided one of the best records in ages in 2013 with Nuclear Winter, and are now following it up with Biomass (out through the ever-excellent Poison City Records). It is a little more brutal - not as playful as Nuclear Winter, instead delving into more punishing dirges and ditches. Opener 'The Store' is a bruising slowburner, grinding down the gears and tearing at your psyche from the get go, Thomy's howls already stripping your inner ear. Then we have 'Death Will...', a faster track that pummels you around the solar plexus, striking you paralysed as you are drowning in sweat and spit, mindlessly pondering death and fighting for breath. Its ADD speed is almost a welcome respite, and is continued with ramped punisher 'Daredevil' then 'The Idiot' takes us into pigfuck territory, like a Pissed Jeans who are addicted to Wake In Fright and meth. The feverish motor that drives forth 'Orchard' had me thinking of the chugging rhythms of Motorhead or Turbonegro, where speed is equalled by muscle and heft, while 'Spiritually Challenged' is a track that is stuck in a gear, unrelenting in its pace and paucity of morals. We spiral back into the filth with 'Heavy Smoke' a sub three minute funeral pyre of malcontent, before 'Pulling Out' arrives - a sludge drone torture device, grinding out a feral deathmarch unlike anything the band has put to tape. 'Waking Up At The Wheel' closes things out, a pub rock song with the chassis ripped to shreds and replaced with something much more top-heavy and dangerous to all in its path.
I'll level with you - Biomass is a much harder slog than Nuclear Winter. Batpiss have dived headlong into the backwaters of self-hatred, loathing and nihilism, tonally and lyrically - the garish cartoonishness that lay on the outer edges have all but been eradicated. What you get in its place is a band that have disappeared into their hellhole and come back fused together, a force of reckoning and destruction, maniacs on the curve, ready to take you (willingly) to the abyss and beyond.
Grab Biomass here.
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