Album review: Burned Up Bled Dry – ‘Next Stop…Dead Stop…’

As you can probably imagine, for the most part, ‘Next Stop…Dead Stop…’ is a fast and furious affair, on which the band combine raw, 80s-style hardcore punk with a touch of power violence and a wonderfully bleak lyrical outlook. Opening track ‘Harsh Reality’ damn near had our teeth rattling with its almost grindcore-level intensity, and indeed, some of the shorter tracks (including the 6-second ‘Pig Trough’) recall the likes of Napalm Death and their aural equivalent of a flamethrower.

Songs like the title track (complete with “this planet is a fucking trainwreck’ refrain) and ‘Not This Time’ are slices of vintage hardcore, with some great guitar riffing and gravel-throated vocals, but there’s an unexpected plot twist in the form of the almost four-minute centrepiece of ‘Don’t Care’. Built mostly around slow, monolithic guitars, it progresses at an almost funereal pace, and is at times reminiscent of Deftones or even Converge at their most brooding. It’s just as compelling as anything else on this record, and shows a side of the band worth further exploration.