Raging Speedhorn - We Will Be Dead Tomorrow
2002 - ZTT Records
By Philip Whitehouse
Go to the
Raging Speedhorn web site.
Lostprophets. Vex Red. InMe. What do they all have in common? They're all being touted as the future of British metal. And, furthermore, they're all pretty crap. No, really. Get past InMe's post-grunge-isms, Lostprophets vaguely interesting jazz-metal chops and Vex Red's impassioned singing and electronic embellishments, and you'll eventually find that as bands, they are vacuous in the extreme.
Raging Speedhorn, however, have also been stuck with that particular albatross of a label, but luckily the Corby collective have come out with a sophomore album that proves the nay-sayers who saw the debut album's relative one-dimensionality as a sign of imminent one-hit wonderdom totally and utterly wrong.
Dropping their heavier-than-thou shtick and opening up to new influences, the 'Horn sound just as infuriated second time round - but the apopleptic rage in tracks such as 'The Hate Song' is more focussed, more tightly delivered, with the sludge scraped off the production and the edge finely honed on the sextet's already proven riff-writing abilities. The slower tempos and epic songs of the last album are largely a thing of the past (barring 'Heartbreaker', which sounds like the debut's 'Random Acts Of Violence being force-fed downers while being given a makeover by Neurosis, and the frankly scary 'Ride With The Devil'), making way for storming race-alongs like the head-snapping 'Scrapin' The Resin' and the Speedhorn-style party song, 'Chronic Youth', which displays a bit of the misanthropic humour that Black Flag possessed in the 'Damaged' days.
This is basically a more mature, intelligent Speedhorn - no longer content just to cave in our skulls with sheer volume (although the riffs are still heavy enough to cause fluctuations on the Richter scale), more aiming to whip the crowd into a frenzy with punkier, speedier, tighter music. More than worth your cash. Go buy.
10/10
