#skumstrike

That’s a brain-bending combination, hard to pull off musically, and it may not be what Skumstrike is attempting in the first place. We should note: all its crass slavering over scenarios of violence aside, Deadly Intrusions is a musically effective example of blackened thrash. Many of its songs do their overheated, blood-curdling thing with a winning sort of abandon. The band’s sound isn’t as raw and disturbed as Siege Column (which is probably a good thing) and isn’t as slick and shred-obsessed as Steel Bearing Hand (which may be too bad…). The Montreal-based duo works the terrain between those other two bands: grimy and grotty but at the same time somehow flashy. The performance of demented fury works itself into some fuming froths, but Skumstrike may be at their best when they settle into a gnarly riff. See the middle minutes of “Lobotomize,” which strut with snarling bravado. 

So it’s a fun record, and it even cracks wise a time or two. Certainly it’s witty to end the record with “Nothing Is Final”; it’s a cover of a Poison Idea song, from that band’s past-ripened, post-Kings of Punk period. Poison Idea released the song on War All the Time, when the band’s appetite for the rock’n’roll party was beginning to outweigh the hardcore anger, and Pig Champion was using a stool. It’s also worth noting that Poison idea named that record for a relatively arch collection of Charles Bukowski poems — and underneath all the hardboiled hilarity, the dissipation of Pig and Bukowski got pretty miserable. No idea how tuned into all those culture signals Skumstrike might be, but the layers of irony are several and quite thick. Maybe the terrorizing endeavor announced in tracks like “Panic Obsession” or “Another Shot of Fear” is similarly ironical. If so, Skumstrike’s semiotics require some adjustment. If not, the band might need to rethink just how much mirth they want their music to convey.