Cutters Psychic Injury

Released
30th May 2024
Label 
Drunken Sailor, Legless
Format

12 Inch

Black

£18.00

‘Hoard The Land, hoard the houses, collect the rent, collect the wages, passive income…If you can’t inherit someone else’s wealth, you’re going to be left living on a shelf’ (Landlord Nation)

Now, this is an absolute steamroller of an album. Melbourne’s Cutters deliver a rampaging lesson in burly, no nonsense hardcore, but its seething intensity does not dictate any lack of subtlety or invention.  Hoarsely impassioned vocals are intertwined with venomous, infectious riffage and flares of dissonant melody, while underpinned by a rhythm section of strutting, swaggering intensity.

The utterly raucous fury of Landlord Nation, the brilliantly discordant Depresso Rant No.69, and the surging First Of Many set the tone.  But the band prove equally adept in their more expansive moments, from the relentless slow burn escalation of Frail In The Mind to the groove fuelled crescendo of Glass Tomb.

As with the band’s earlier three EPs, the lyrical focus is a coruscating deconstruction of our current bleak social malaise.  The fierce opener, Airport Smoking Lounge, delivers a powerful allegory for environmental degradation (‘Draw it in around you, take in the sights and sounds’) and Doomscroller deals with the consequences of all permissive technology (‘Books don’t hit the same, songs don’t hit the same, life don’t hit the same, I can’t think’).

Meanwhile, Landlord Nation has the excesses of rentier capitalism firmly in its crosshairs and Jobs For The Boys deals with how those in power relentlessly fail upwards in our supposed meritocracy (‘Insincere, insipid, redundant, not even fit to sell real estate’).  But the album ends on an almost hopeful note with closer, Revelations Of Divine Love, defiantly seeing the chance for a better future amidst the squalling guitars (‘There’s a strength in every living creature against every fiend from hell’).

—Foundation Vinyl