‘Keeping falsehoods on a one-legged pedestal, Concocting lies and keeping it criminal, Spewing trash on the highest pulpit accessory, The blind eyes are lawless and divisional’ (Red State)

‘What is your line?’. This is the simple, ever more pressing question posed by Blind Eye.  As our civil liberties are eroded with increasingly brazen abandon.  As our privacy is thrown open to those least interested in safeguarding it.  As our public discourse is poisoned by opportunists and charlatans seeking to sow division and to blame those least able to defend themselves.  It is an insidious cocktail and one that threatens to slowly, but ever so surely, submerge us.  And yet, whether through fear or convenience, self-preservation or self-interest, we allow the red lines that define our decency to continue to shift beyond what we ever thought to be acceptable.

Hailing from Nottingham, Blind Eye share an impressive pedigree spanning as it does Bloody Head, Heresy, and Pitchshifter.  However, it is the intensity of their present-day convictions that vehemently define their second full-length, Mistrust Your Nation.  The band’s soul feels like one rooted in 1980s’ anarcho-punk and then refracted through a prism that calls with equal relish on a Japanese hardcore inspired snap and an uncompromising metallic heft.  Intriguingly, the latter influence evolves in unexpected shades.  There is a louche swagger to the guitar and the filthy bass lines, not to mention a jazz-tinge to the solos, that can’t help but evoke whispers of Handle With Care-era Nuclear Assault.

Similarly, the vocals call upon a fierce anarcho rat-a-tat-tat but are, perhaps, even more indebted to the NWOBHM influenced vocals of the pioneering mid-to-late 1980s’ thrash bands, before they were later subsumed by the pincer movement of hardcore snarls and death metal growls.  The verve of Anmarie Spaziano’s vocal performance is absolutely barnstorming.  Powerfully strident, defiantly melodic, but not afraid to get down and dirty with a venomously sneering tirade, she takes aim at misogynistic constraints, our drift into demagoguery, the pollution of public life by oligarchical money, and our own quiet complicity.

From the seething escalation of Blitz Can to the raucously crushing closer Who’s In Control, the ferocity is as invigorating as it is unrelenting.  It arguably reaches its zenith at the midway point as the confrontational stomp of Red State, and the bludgeoning grooves of What Is Your Line? leave nowhere to hide.  Are you ready for the fight?  Because Blind Eye most certainly are.