(written by Islander)
Ferocious speed, riffs with mean hooks, beats with spine-shaking groove, howling mad vocals, hardcore belligerence, and enough flash and flair to keep listeners on their toes in between wanting to body-check someone in a mosh pit. In essence, that’s what the Pennsylvania thrash band Cruel Bomb bring to the table in their self-titled debut album which will see release tomorrow (August 15th).
To flesh this out, let’s take the album’s second track and lead single “Target Neutralized“, which arrived with a video that lets us see (through strange lenses) these marauders in action.
Photo by Sarah Novroski
On the album, this song is preceded by a short scene-setter that, like the album as a whole, shares the band’s name. Although the voices in that track are raucous, the music is a mid-paced menace, ominous and sinister but also bone-rattling. You get the sense that it’s leading to a breakout, and that’s where “Target Neutralized” rushes in.
With raw and raging vocals at the forefront, high-toned and full of grit, the song discharges a blend of vivid throbs, cracking beats, and riffing that swirls like an evil serpent and also furiously darts, jolts, and gallops.
It’s controlled chaos in action, threaded together with bursts of head-moving riffage and tendrils of cold, cruel, and miserable melody, which really stand out when the band downshift the speed just past the midpoint — a slower phase that the band blow away with a blistering guitar solo and a reprise of the song’s heart-hammering main motifs.
In addition to showing that Cruel Bomb pull off more than one feat in their songwriting, that song is a vivid introduction to the ferocious explosiveness of Cruel Bomb‘s larynx-straining vocals, the nimbleness of all the string-slingers, the gut-throbbing heaviness of the bass, and the exhilarating dynamism of the drumming.
The next nine songs are equally compact (only one of them reaches the four-minute mark) and equally multi-faceted. Sometimes they’re mean and marauding, sometimes they’re scary and dark, other times they’ll pump your neck like a hard-driving piston (“Atomic Demolition Munition” and “Gravemind” are personal favorites in that regard) — and all of them are bone-smashers to one degree or another.
Like that opening single they also often include the piercing flash of head-spinning, dive-bombing, and eerily swirling guitar solos, interstitial melodic riffing that enhances the atmosphere of the song, whether it be moods of heartless menace or crushing bleakness or blazing delirium, and breakdowns that are just as much a mosh-cue as the song’s turbocharged attacks.
But make no mistake, although Cruel Bomb have a talent for dynamism, both musically and in tempo, and more than a few leanings into head-butting hardcore punk, they are unmistakably a thrash band, and they’ll give died-in-the-wool heshers plenty of opportunities to thrash their reproductive organs off in full-blown slashing and fret-melting gallops (for a prime example of that, try out the utterly incendiary “Night of the Hunt” or the ripping and raging but also brutally hulking and enormously neck-wrecking “The End“).
The band’s music, as they unabashedly acknowledge, is heavily influenced by genre pioneers like Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica, and Exodus, but their influences also include the likes of Municipal Waste and Power Trip. Yet they don’t sound like some by-the-numbers copycat, and instead like a band who use those influences like high-octane gasoline for their own well-tooled marauding machine.
There really aren’t any throw-aways on the album. Every song will get your blood pumping and give your cranial neurons a swift spin, even if they’re set spinning in different directions from moment to moment. Now it’s time for you to discover that for yourselves:
CRUEL BOMB is:
Brandon Moss – Rhythm Guitar, Vocals
Kennie Barto – Lead Guitar, Back Vocals
Nick Hennebaul – Bass
Kyle McKeown – Drums
Cruel Bomb was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Eric Novroski at Novroski Studios. The eye-catching cover art is the work of Ed Repka. Check out the links below for more info about how to acquire and stream the album.
PRE-SAVE / PRE-ORDER:
https://linktr.ee/cruelbomb
https://cruelbomb570.bandcamp.com/album/cruel-bomb
FOLLOW:
https://www.facebook.com/Cruelbomb/
https://www.instagram.com/Cruelbomb