SHORT BUT SWEET: ILL BREED — “BLACK PANE / BLISTERED”

You’re really not going to find anything better today that costs you nothing — including even the air you’re sucking in — than this two-song single released yesterday by a band from Arizona named Ill Breed. I found it sitting in my e-mail in-box after a long, frustrating day at my fucking day job, and man alive, was it refreshing.

I was in the mood for something crushingly heavy and cathartic and spine-tingling, and when I listened to these two songs, I got all that, and I got more besides.

What’s extra cool about this music is that it’s not all one thing. It’s freaked-out howling feedback and weird noise. It’s skull-clobbering hardcore. It’s tribal drumming and headbanging riff rhythms. It’s strutting, stomping, testerone-fueled chest-baring, topped by venom-spewing, bile-vomiting vocal mayhem. It’s groaning doom chords and hard-jabbing thuggery.

It’s some kind of ingenious cross-breeding of Pantera and Integrity and Destruction — or at least those are the names that popped into my head first — and the wonder is, it all fits together like the teeth in your gums.

Okay, I exaggerated when I said this was better than the air you breathe. You can live without this, but you will live better with it.

Listen to these tracks below and then, if you’re a Facebook denizen, go like their damned FB page:

https://illbreed.bandcamp.com/album/black-pane-blistered
https://www.facebook.com/illbreedaz/