BLOOD RUN

by UNSANE

Relapse Records

reviewed by David L. Tamarin

04.08.2008

If you played UNSANE’s new album Blood Run over the speakers at a prison, you would have a full blown riot, and prisoners would be tearing each other’s hearts out and biting the throats of the guards, who would be going lunatic apeshit with rage pounding their clubs over each other’s heads. It would be a massacre, an insane asylum of gore. These are the things I think of when I listen to UNSANE. It’s hard to believe not all their concerts erupt into bloody massacres; this is the music you play in your car on the way to work the day you decide to bring an assault weapon and take out all your co-workers. Blood Run has the power to literally make blood run.

Blood Run is music as violence, a powerful assault on all fronts, and a mindfuck of ugly noise, spewing insane vocals and incomprehensible rage filled lyrics. It is the sound of angst, of terror. UNSANE doesn’t play their instruments; they bash them over your head while maniacal atavistic screams of pain and fury tear through your eardrums. While the noise is some of the angriest shit I have ever heard, it is Chris Spencer’s vocals that blow me away. How to describe such an angry sound that seems only remotely human... UNSANE offers cathartic and pain inducing vocal destruction that sounds like Chris Spencer is destroying his vocal cords with every sound he makes. His screams would scare away Satan himself.

Put another way, UNSANE’s new album fucking rocks, it’s a nihilist hatefest noise machine. As with all of UNSANE’s past albums, the cover and inner jacket photography are of a staged crime scene covered in blood, a dead and mangled body usually prominent (except for Occupational Hazard which just features blood splatter and stains on the cover). A bathtub filled with blood in a shitty grimy bathroom, a sink with blood stains, blood splattered on the tub and on the floor, a dead woman’s feet visible, covered in tattoos and blood. Is someone dragging her body, or is she still and motionless? Its an ugly cover that is an accurate representation of the big UNSANE sound, a combination of hardcore, grunge, noise and metal, fast and furious (“D train”) at times and dreary and suicide inducing at other times (“hammered out”). The highlight of the album is the sinister and menacing sounding “dead weight”, the final track that ends the musical onslaught of Blood Run. You will breathe a sigh of relief when the album comes to an end.

The kings of New York noisecore, UNSANE has delivered another shocking masterpiece, the soundtrack to a million crime scenes. Blood Run is the real fucking thing, UNSANE doesn’t bullshit, they deliver with the sound of violent anarchy, riots, and mass murder. Even after all these years the album still captures the raw and bloody sound of their debut self-titled album. This angry and depressing classic of noise-rock has to be heard to be believed. If you are already fans of this band prepare to be blown away. If you have never heard them then you’ll find out what insanity, anger and chaos are all about; totally fucking devastating, killing spree music.

Buy this album at Amazon.com: BLOOD RUN