The Smackdown – Someone Has to Kill the Headwriter – Review

thesmackdown200The Smackdown

Someone Has to Kill the Headwriter (Goodfellow)
by Hansel Merchor

Formed in 2001, this Swedish quintet crafts the sort of desperate hardcore that has grannies jerking their hearing aids off and jogging all the way to the nursing home. From the start, The Smackdown get full-on hysterical with opener “Disordered Like It’s 95.” The Smackdown’s kind of hardcore settles miles apart from the NY kind of hardcore; think of Refused with the Energizer bunny up their rectums and you’d have a clearer idea of what Someone Has to Kill the Headwriter sounds like. Unlike Refused, these Swedes fail to convey little more than rhythmic rage, and where the former influential punk combo opted to broaden its musical horizons, this new class of beasts are still sucking up a few decades of extreme music. In the end, the relentless pace of the album drowns the listener with its sheer recklessness.
(www.goodfellowrecords.com)