Spineshank in hard, analytical raging

From the plectrum-off the Spineshank’s ‘Self-Destructive Pattern’ goes as it is meant to, an intense, loud, powerful, truly rocking! The third long-playing disc by the Los Angeles’ quartet is really not messing about your mind, it bypasses it and goes for the soul. ‘Violent Mood Swings’ opens this list of noiseniks and you can’t help yourself but headbang, caught within its force!

Listening to ‘S-DP’ an old Public Image Ltd’s song title goes through me grey-matter, ‘Anger Is An Energy’. Replace that with ‘Rage’ and you get Spineshank’s formula, if there really were one. There is a huge musical scope here and following the two exploding openers, ‘Smothered’ takes a more disciplined approach to end sounding like a cross between a ballad and an epic singalong. Catchy enough to have become a hit.

Fury is not the only thing the Jonny Santos fronted outfit is good at although it seems to be the band’s natural language; within the ‘Pattern’ grooves are many details and there are elements aplenty, such as prog-passages on ‘CoNSumed (Obessive CoMPulsive)’ or industrially strong ‘Forgotten’, or pyramid-sized title track, or rhythmic frenzy of ‘Tear Me Down’, or dark and menacing ‘Stillborn’, and two soundtracks to destruction that end the album, ‘Falls Apart’ and ‘DeaD To Me’.

Road to this album, follow-up to ‘The Height Of Callousness’ (2000), has been full of obstacles: the computer where the albums was saved crashed and they thought three months of work was lost for good but their producer, GGGarth Richardson, managed to retrieve it; then, the process of creation wasn’t going as smoothly, and reach for “an extreme record” (Santos) was an arduous process. Spineshank have succeeded and, as they proudly stress, in spite of not following any rules.

Guitar sounds are huge, riffs are monumental, the vocal is as aggro as if someone were knocking you out repeatedly, the whole album works up your diss-ittude until you are ready to strike at the world. As you have WPD as much as Iraqis, you replay the CD, and again… It could help with the anger management, probably.

8/10