After a mini slew of solid records dating back to the likes of Harlots, The Concubine and Veil Of Maya, Corrosive Recordings have a bit of a miss here in the form of Arizona’s so called ‘Botch n Roll’ noise mongers, Blues and their debut album.

Frenetic and jarring with moments of Bluesy, Southern rawk, Blues are certainly noisy and caustic, and the Botch comparisons are somewhat legitimate and even a Breather Resist and Coliseum is in here somewhere, but on the whole, this is no more than another dissonant, angular hardcore band trying to be the next Every Time I Die (The Jonbenet, Cancer Bats, The Assailant, etc).

Much like a snakepit, the riffs are often a seething indefinable mass, with the occasional color (groove) or hue (riff) showing for a moment and the production is suitably heavy with a jangly open ended dissonant guitars and a low bottom end. It’s not nearly as caustic as former label mates Harlots, and not quite as Southern and rock based as say Remove the Veil or Maylene, but sort of a non committal middle ground that’s a forgetful musical limbo. Add to that, the vocals are the strained wail/shout/moan, that’s popular in the genre but the whole thing adds up to a forgetful, clichéd mess that has me reaching for the source material

A couple of moments warrant a bit of attention, but it’s mainly the slower moodier injections like scattered in “Yeti”, “What it Takes to Shrink”, “The Bloated Mind” and “Say Nothing But Good of the Dead” but other wise the record is a tumbling mass of noisy mediocrity.

[Visit the band's website]

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