RATS BLOOD – “Punks Is Mutants” 7” [EP] (2013)
Amazing 7″ full of raw punk, d-beat crust from Dublin, Ireland! RATS BLOOD will assault you with their Scandinavian style hardcore spiced up with savage appetite and pure damage!
The band features John from DROPPING BOMBS and is unfortunately breaking up this year! Their singer, Eric (also of EASPA MEASA and PUTREFACTION, who are about to put out a new 7” soon), is moving to Australia, but before he does that, RATS BLOOD will release a new LP featuring 11 new tracks with 3 re-recordings of songs from their demo tape!
Frightening depressive rawpunk from Ireland. Following on from their eight track demo, which screamed “This country’s died a thousand times/Look at the past/Look back and laugh” and proclaimed “Ireland is falling apart. Stick together. Up the Punks.” This is another potent melding of bleak futures with punk strength, riding Totalitar coarseness and Bastard blare up to the edge of the abyss.
Rats Blood’s is a world of monsters, of sadists in power, of invisible prisons, forces so malignant as to read demonic, drugs and nuclear threat and corporate neglect and the legitimised savagery of police violence as cruel looming titans, consuming the world.
No Exit is pure pain, Socio-Apathy pure rage. Heroin is as frustrated with the lack of empathy and easy moralising as it is angry with the dulling scourge of opiates: “I have friends/Who’ve fought wars alone/Who the fuck/Are you to judge?” Therein lies the resistance, cos though these soul-eating evils are big bad motherfuckers, there’s no reason to succumb to their logic, to treat them as a just leveler, like the guilty always get arrested and the innocent always go free, like the poor deserve to be poor. Rats Blood refuses to be caught in the sway of the late-capitalist sanctimony, it refuses to join the righteous who will pave the road to hell will good intentions and a daddy-knows-best stripping of agency. Because, as it may roar on No More Fukushima, we are caught in “Arrogant human ambition/Mindless march into hell” Rats Blood will survive, they will hold it down, because they’re punks. And PUNKS IS MUTANTS. GISM as tetragrammaton, their deep violent weirdness as a staging post in an expedition in the futuredark. Rats Blood live in a hateful world and are forged in that hate, ready to breathe in the toxic air and let it feed a toxic heart. “We will survive in the blistering heat/We will survive in the snow/We will survive in the blistering heat/Because we’re scum”. Do not gleam but ooze, slither between cracks, lurk like sneakthieves, a scabrous underbelly built for disdain. Punks as pestilent avengers, transforming the interior chaos of No Exit into a scabby armour, the world drowning in filth and punks as sewer creatures, swimming free, ready for the wave to come. In each uncomfortable future or fantastic dystopia, from Futurama to Demolition Man to The Wind Singer, Metropolis, there are basement dwellers, who survive, who live down there in the gloom. That’s Rats Blood place, from where they lay out six tracks of anguish and excoriation, six tracks of unflinching raw punk tearing at the shames of the world, laying them bare with apocalyptic clarity. / Some Days You Get the Thunder, Some Days the Thunder Gets You
