Description
One of the new faces of Sheffield and Leeds punk (though members also keep busy in The Flex, No Form, Whipping Post and Community), Beta Blockers are here with their debut 12inch. What do they sound like? They sound like Die Kreuzen fucking about with the Screamers, or maybe Black Flag smashing gurners with Neubauten, or how about Stooges getting punished by the Gallagher brothers, maybe even all of those at the same time. Seven songs in eighteen minutes, housed in a heavyweight sleeve featuring artwork from Keegan Dakkar Lomanto. Limited to 300 copies, all on white vinyl. Daniel from Sorry State offered his take on the record Remember that time when Black Flags Live 84 lineup jammed with Einstürzende Neubauten? OK, so maybe that never happened, but if you took two stereos, cued up In My Head on one and Neubautens Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. on the other, synced them up Zaireeka -style and did enough acid so that they seemed to lock together into one roaring piece of gestalt, your experience would roughly approximate what we lucky citizens of the year 2017 can hear on this debut record from Beta Blockers. I keep coming back to this idea of duality in attempting to describe Beta Blockers because their music sounds like a tenuous, explosive marriage of ego and id. Its a distant descendent of the Stooges Fun House in that Beta Blockers rhythm section lurches and crawls with the raw, primal power of an apex predator, while the upper register of sound (on Fun House , the sax, but here a buzzing, whirring synth) engages in full sonic deconstruction… or maybe combat is the more appropriate metaphor? Theres certainly no truce between Beta Blockers deep-in-the-pocket hardcore and industrial noise elements… its less like theyre collaborating and more like theyre fighting, and if one side seems to gain the upper hand temporarily it only ends up making space for the other to build momentum and hit you with even greater force. Much like the other records Ive mentioned thus far, Beta Blockers debut is neither immediate, easy, nor friendly, but if you seek out music that confounds, disorients, and overwhelms this record is just what the doctor ordered. Listen to the record https://staticshockrecords.bandcamp.com/album/stiff-prescription
