‘Your job! Your job! To distract your potential…Your job! Your job! You should never take pride…Every boss in America is a master and slave to his own tragic rise’ (Consumer Talk)

Cleveland’s Knowso return with their third full-length and follow-up to last year’s Pulsating Gore.  The duo are in many respects the living embodiment of what we have come to expect musically from their home city – a wholehearted willingness to contort punk into challenging yet undeniably alluring new shapes.

The core of their sound lies in the tense play-off between the densely taut guitars and the nervously agitated rhythm section that can’t help but provoke barely controllable gyrations.  Amid the urgently angular propulsion, Knowso also find scope to subtly expand their sound from the broodily catchy Perfect For Bleach and Flourescent Pink Vein to the pulsing, synth fuelled choruses of Consumer Talk and Panopticon.

The sardonically acerbic vocals are delivered with a deadpan austerity, but that should not be confused with emotional detachment.  While Pulsating Gore focused on the bitter and unsuccessful battle to unionise Nathan Ward’s (vocals / guitars) workplace, Hypnotic Smack pans out for a wider view.  It conjures a typically absurdist and off-kilter contemplation of how our subservience to the demands of capital continues to distort and pollute the behaviour of both individuals and society at large.