16

Zoloft Smile (At A Loss)
by Brian Varney

I don’t know jackshit about the genre known as “crust,” but it’s a word I’d use without hesitation to describe these fellas, ’cause they sure do fire up an awfully cranky racket. The depression and hatred that saturates every pore of every living being associated with this release is evident in the album title and in song titles like “Poverty,” “Born to Lose,” and “Grip of Delusion,” not to mention the depression-fuelled malaise that hangs over the proceedings like the smell of formaldehyde in a morgue.

Musically, it’s a roiling, bass-centric tub of heaviness, the rhythms surprisingly liquid and groovy, but still fiercely vitriolic as they form a solid rock/roll-based metal foundation for the ka-chunk ka-chunk guitar sound of which I will never tire, and the shouted-raw-and-medicated-with-nicotine-and-beer-and-pills vocals. Put it all together and the musical heaviness collides spectacularly with the emotional heaviness, the resulting splatter resembling some sort of multi-car pileup with roadkill strewn about, the guts and carnage and general misery splayed violently onto everything in the vicinity, including the four unlucky survivors trying desperately to free themselves from the jagged metal and death pinning their worthless limbs to the carnage-swathed asphalt. If those four survivors were to miraculously escape and conspire to form a band and record an album informed by the experience, the band would be 16 and the album would be Zoloft Smile.
(PO Box 582 Eastlake, CO 80614)