Freebo today. Just got back from a week at the beach, which was fantastic and needed and restful, and welcome home to referred pain directly into my right knee from a slipped disc. Doing all the things one does to get that back in order. More thoughts on more music coming soon though.

CHROME CELL TORTURE s/t LP (Cool Death)

Grim future outlook heavy metallic punk, kinda like mid-tempo Tragedy steamrollers flattening the no-way-out downer moves of earlier Low Life. With no options left but to stare down the fear, this Australian band (ex-Oily Boys) barrels through nine songs as cleanly as a drill through pressure-treated lumber, with effective use of feedback arcs as leads (good one in the second verse of opener “Warm Donation”). I have played this one a lot in the past week while on vacation and it’s too easy to say anything big about, but it’s hitting a lot of the areas I’d look for in music like this, and maybe that’s all it needs to do – it’s heavy, relentless, impassioned, dramatic, and it fully rips.

DIÄT S.O.36 Berlin Sept. ’22 LP (Iron Lung)

Cross-continental postpunk trio DIÄT use their distance from one another as a means of not being a band (kidding – maybe, who knows – but I am nearly certain that this band documents a part of lives lived young, in a past that can’t be re-engineered to come back.) But when its members convene in their homebase of Berlin, all bets are off – take this live set, recorded a few years after their second (and to date final) album, where they take their Crisis-to-Siouxsie-to-The Jesus Lizard pipeline and re-examine it from some remove and its sternest, coldest angles. Not all that different in mood to the CCT record reviewed above, either, the same end result with a nimbler and more formulated approach (just been doing it longer, I suppose). Band has always slammed hard, and maybe even more so here, with last call approaching and newer songs (like opener “Youth of Neukölln,” really working in the ingrained fears of bands like Agent Orange and The Wipers as part of their whole thing) to work out, the live record by a band that seldom plays live yet locks in ever harder than on their studio material.