This Dutch anarcho-hardcore quartet take no prisoners on their debut album!
Hard times create hard music, and with the state of the world as it is right now, there is plenty of fertile breeding ground for bands who rage against the myriad injustices that surround us. Step up, then, Bombstrap, whose roots lie in Rotterdam’s anarchist Poortgebouw community, and who are currently split between Rotterdam and Manchester. They’ve barely been together a year, but have already made a name for themselves with chaotic, explosive live sets, and have now unleashed this dark-hearted beast of a debut album.
From the word go, this is a record of unashamedly bleak and nihilistic hardcore-meets-anarcho-punk, and at ten tracks in only 23 minutes, not a note is wasted. With all credit due to the band as a whole, it’s vocalist Eva who proves their secret weapon; oscillating between an ominous semi-spoken style, hardcore roars and piercing screams, often within the same song.
For the most part, they put the pedal to the metal in terms of pace, with the likes of the opening title track, the aptly-titled ‘Welcome To Violence’ and especially ‘Bakhmut’ blasting past in a mass of pounding drums, barbed-wire guitars, and those aforementioned vocals. ‘The Green Dress’ kicks off with what sounds like an air-raid siren, before the band unleash the kind of relentless aural assault that would have the classic Motörhead line-up (RIP) nodding in approval. Everything louder than everyone else? Yeah, pretty much.
They’re no less intimidating when they slow down (albeit just to a kind of brisk sprint), though. ‘Master Alchemist’ sees Eva channelling their inner end-of-days preacher, with that “and when – not if, but when – the world explodes” refrain oddly catchy (no doubt they’d hate the term) in a foreboding kind of way. ‘Shrapnel’ boasts a short but effective squalling guitar solo served up alongside plenty of lyrical venom, and the driving ‘Heilegenblut’ features the immortal lines “you will not be spoon-fed love/you will lick it off my knife”. Nope, these folks are not ones to mince words, and for that we salute them.
How could we not mention the closing ‘Poppy Seeds’? An epic (by this record’s standards) in its nearly five-minute duration, it may give both band and listener some room to breathe (so to speak), but still drips menace with every note, and features something of a bug-eyed state of the world address cutting in about halfway through. As it draws to a close, with a burst of maniacal laughter towards the end, the effect is brilliantly unsettling.
Hardcore bands, on the whole, are generally not short on fury or abrasive sounds, but relatively few of them sound like they’re on a mission to torpedo the very heart of our rotten, corrupt society. Bombstrap are undeniably among those few, and that’s precisely what makes them so compelling. ‘Big Enemy’ may not be for the faint-hearted, but it just gets better with every listen, and marks out its creators as ones to watch.
‘Big Enemy’ is released on 2nd October via Tartarus Records – check it out HERE.
- Big Enemy
- Master Alchemist
- Machiavellianism
- Shrapnel
- Bakhmut
- The Green Dress
- Welcome To Violence
- Heilegenblut
- God’s Favourite
- Poppy Seeds
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Hard times create hard music, and with the state of the world as it is right now, there is plenty of fertile breeding ground for
I spend my days teaching English to foreign students, and my evenings attending as many gigs as possible. Raised mainly on a diet of 90s third-wave punk, my tastes have grown to include just about anything from trad ska to thrash metal. The Ramones are my musical gods.
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