I Know Load Records Are The New Amrep, But This Is Taking The Piss

I hear Tar. I hear Halo Of Flies. I hear Helmet, Scratch Acid and Rapeman, I hear Swallow and Blood Circus. Fuck me, I hear Tad and Bastards. Even the late and much lamented* Green Magnet School. Bitch Magnet, Lubricated Goat and Hammerhead and Chokebore... Need I go on? The new Noxagt (self-titled, Load Records) album is great, but it's an Amphetamine Reptile/Touch'n'Go/Wiiija Tribute album that's come about thirteen years too late. It's heavy. It's angular. It's discordant. Tight as a gnat's arse. No wasted notes...

No original ones either, and that's what disappoints. In replacing their departed viola loon with a guitarist, Noxagt have thrown themselves into the arena of possibly the most exacting of all "rock" line ups, the power trio, where yr musicianship is exposed to a greater extent and any paucity of ideas is right in the listeners face. In 1993, this album would have become an instant Pigfuck classic, but today, it sounds like an unecessary exercise in nostalgia, the product of a band who've discovered a stack of old Sounds back issues and are now attempting to sound like every band ever covered in the old Sound Of Speed column**. If this record had been made by a bunch of spotty 17 year olds, I could forgive it it's shortcomings, but it's by Noxagt for fucks sake, a band whose first two albums of grinding viola-led sludge encrusted muck sounded like nothing else recorded*** and left me with a big dumbfuck grin on my face which I had to remove with a stanley knife. The new guy on guitar has no excuse either, after all he's also Ultralyds guitarist, and he seems to be perfectly capable of realising a few new perspectives on the ancient art of guitar mangling on their stuff.

Don't get me wrong, this is a fucking good record, but it should have been so much more. Shame.

*By me anyways...

**Yeah, I know this makes me sound like an old git. I don't care.

***Except for a couple of tracks on Dying Ground's one release on Avant, but that motherfucker is a whole other kettle of sick. Remind me to write about that sometime...