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When Crosscut Sores 2017 album Raunch Date came out it was the gnarliest of a long spate of gnarlyass punk blues acts, bands like: Jim Jones Review, Chickensnake, 20 Miles, Black Mekon, and scruffy upstarts like Jooks of Kent - Tim and Scarlet from Crosscut Sores' previous formation - all set the guitar volume to STUN, and bury the needle in sludge blues and pop monster rod riffage, that frankly requires an ear adjustment, like a tilt of the head, or a blast from the headers on Tim and Scarlet's homebuilt hotrod to get it thru yr skull. It's thick, and sounds like it was recorded on a killer Hi-Fi boom box in the practice space, then mixed at a million buck studio. It sounds like what music probably sounds like in a ramshackle hotrod at eighty miles an hour on a gravel straightaway.
Crosscut Sores' 2018 volume Dead Slick in the Autodrome squawks, grinds, tear-asses, halts, explodes, and swings in overblown but controlled Crampsian fury.
Like Raunchdate, their second album is taut, with a stony, headphoned undercurrent of menace, but here they've distilled it...whatever "it" is...and banged it with a ball-peen hammer, slapped it with a soft chamois, and buffed a little bit of shine to it, but it's the same Beefhearty garage demo blast of bent alt-blues and rock & Roll as ever.
The low boogie guitar and Stoogesish boat-horned saxophone keep the barn door blown open, while cheap-mic'd vocals ghost in, out, and shout! The bass drum thumps like boots on the front porch at midnight, like falling dishware the cymbals clatter, the piano crawls the parking lot looking for loose change, as buzz-saw guitar and backward-tape effects sail through the thick, grimy, south England fog, dragging its leg behind it, a finger on one hand jabbing skyward, the other hand a hard-knuckled clenched fist.
Crosscut Sores.
17 tracks made of busted leather and greasey selvedge cuffs ground down at the heel but pressed sharp as a blade up front. Get it.
