| Swampfoot green vinyl repressing! Spazz's 1997 debut Lp on Sound Pollution was one of those defining albums in the late 90s, coming at the peak of the thrashcore/powerviolence scene (at least in popularity among the hardcore crowd). Now re-issued on Lp in a silk-screened sleeve with a black and white glossy lyric insert on 625 Records (the label run by Spazz drummer Max Ward), La Revancha still sounds as brutal and freaked-out and bizarre as it did back then, taking extreme hardcore into several unpredictable directions in the space of just twenty-some minutes. La Revancha is a tightly focused blastcore assault that mashed together the bass-heavy chaos of classic Infest, Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard with an often bizarre brand of inside humor and heavy use of samples throughout their music. Spazz were always known for their often goofy song titles and lyrics, but musically they were all business, each one of these short (often minute long) songs blasted at nuclear strength, an all out assault of Max's crazed blast beats and thrashing drums, the chunky low-end punch of Chris Dodge's manic bass, the buzzsaw punk riffs and weird skronky chords that guitarist Dan spews all over these twenty-six songs, which shift between hyper-fast grinding to slower, lurching dirges and bursts of noisy hardcore. Spazz's brand of power violence was also prone to throwing out all kinds of weird curveballs in their songs, from the blaring zonked-out sax that shows up on "Dewey Decimal Stitchcore" and "Sweet Home Alabama", to the brain-damaged hip hop segueways and breakbeat intros, sudden downshifts into lumbering doom, loads of old skateboarding samples and lyrical references, tongue-in-cheek smatterings of crude death metal, the unexpected appearance of banjos, slide whistles, and harmonicas in the middle of their burly blastcore attack; the song "Don't Quit Your Day Job" has this killer part where the band builds up to this super heavy dirge, and just as they drop into it, they're joined by the metallic plunk of a banjo, and it works perfectly. I've always thought that these guys owed as much to the goofy, cut-and-paste thrash of Spazztic Blurr as they did to the early West Coast powerviolence crowd, and all these years later my opinion hasn't changed -if you're a fan of S. Blurr's Befo Da Awbum and the classic early 7"s from the likes of Capitalist Casualties, Infest and Crossed Out, then La Revancha should probably already be sitting on your shelf or turntable. |
