Get A Nice Dose Of Deadshred

In what is unofficially becoming Tenth Court week here, here is another Tenth Court release that needs your attention. I have spoken about Deadshred in the past, having them support Roku Music when they launched Collider a couple years ago and their Thousand Yard Staring Competition EP from late 2014. Now they have another EP out called Nice Epidemic. It kicks off with a broken scrawl in '1600', complete with piercing mournful harmonica - it's like early career The Men covering latter career The Men, deliberately badly. The brokenness of this playing style is the point - giving everything a sense of drastic desperation. 'Capsicum Prey' sounds as if INXS were on Siltbreeze; 'XXXOX' is given a playful guitar roll that belies the shattered glass vocals; 'Squat On Wood' is Hank Wood lost in the outback, Rowland S Howard scratching the strings with a nail in a fence post, the bass and drums drunkenly simplistic. 'Odious Dose' does indeed harbour sinister tendencies, a narcotic-riddled stagger throughout the darkened gin and heroin den. 'Can You Taste It?' This acrid twisted metal? Of course I fucking can. Deliciously diseased - you can get Nice Epidemic here.

Woodboot's Doing The Crime Time

Seriously, can Woodboot get any more diseased? Since the Brisbane band started out some years ago as a passing concern, the core duo of Dan and Julien cranking out scuzzed out garage punk, they have grown like an Akira homunculus, sucking in Sam McKenzie (Sulphur Lights/Occults) on second axe bludgeoner duties and Donnie Miller (No Anchor/Roku Music/Forevr) eschewing guitars and smashing the kit like the reprobate Troglodyte that he is. Crime Time is the fetid result. Each song is all about brevity with a mainline blast of fuck-you punk, tearing viscera through their serrated sawing and heckling howls. Songs like ‘Trash Dump’ is the kind of punk we hear a lot of around Brisbane parts, from the 70s punch of The Leftovers to the cartoonish chaos of Undead Apes and everything in between, but then you get to the killer slack-jawed, legs-splayed power punk of ‘Prison Planet’, all jagged edges and dripping Neanderthal fangs, that the transmogrified remnants of the likes of Hank Wood, Circle Jerks and the Spits are ripping through the entrails of the four-piece, a chest-burster showing the diseased intent within. ‘Gut You’ is fucking feral, all blood-vessel searing feedback and three-chord torture, throats being shredded almost out of psychopathic glee. ‘I’m Gonna Push You In Front Of The Bus’ is, despite of its name, a more “pop-oriented” punk blast, a Ramones template lynched and dragged along the bitumen behind a busted-up V8, some semblance of attractive melody showing beneath the blood and gashes. I can even hear ‘Return Of The Rat’ in Crime Time’s insistence that there should be rhythm underneath the sledgehammer-and-kerosene debris, if somewhat used and abused.

I’m proud to know Woodboot – I'll do time for them for sure.