12

In Crust We Trust

Envisage, if you will, not washing for a month. No soap, no cleansing hot water, no deodorant, no razor, and a constant hangover that gets worse with every passing day. Step forward Kromosom, the musical equivalent of you that very next day, every day; a band who prove that no matter how unkempt, how noisy, how disgracefully repugnant you think something can be, there's always someone ready to step in and piss all over that pathetically vestal rose garden you call an imagination.

Arising from the fetid bile puddle left by Aussie crust stalwarts Pisschrist, Kromosom are here to smear all manner of nastiness in your face until you start enjoying it. If you thought Pisschrist were angry, Kromosom step it up in every department; this is faster, dirtier, nastier, and generally gives less of a fuck than ever before. The production is ridiculously tinny and lo-fi, but anybody remotely familiar with the genre will know that's no reason to start discounting anything; in fact, it suits the music perfectly. They sound like they're playing in a cave and, coincidentally, vocalist Yeap sounds like he's busy being mauled by the inhabitants of said cave.

A barrage of raw punk attitude and riff-driven 80s Scandinavian hardcore, Live Forever amalgamates everything the band have released to-date; the first four tracks are from 2011's Paranoid 7", the next three are taken from a split 7" with Japanese crust maniacs Isterismo, and the rest are from Kromosom's own 8 Tracks EP. Sadly absent are the 2010 demo tracks; although five of the seven tracks have since been re-released in different formats and are also present here, the utter rawness of the production on the demo is strangely satisfying.

Any fire fuelled by anger will have a fearsome roar. Kromosom are the kind of band that would drink a pint of meths and piss on that fire for kicks. The likes of Paranoid, Fallout and Chaos Night are sense-shattering walls of face-melting intensity and aggression. The songs taken from the 8 Tracks EP up the production quality, and the sensation is akin to playing Napalm Death's Scum and From Enslavement To Obliteration back to back; you can tell something had changed, but going from ""cave dweller"" to ""mud pit"" is not a case of better vs. worse, but rather a case of enjoying both individually for how well they convey what the band set out to achieve. Tracks like Living Dead, Hysteria and Sentenced To Life are equally as abrasive, if not more so, in their delivery and are still executed with hell-fuelled fury.

By the time you reach the end of Live Forever, you'll probably be glad you don't get to. Crustier than an incontinent octogenarian's underpants, Kromosom are a monochrome middle finger to the world and everything in it. A violently visceral collection of sand-blasted crust punk, this collection is an essential accessory for those moments when you just want to tell everyone and everything, really loudly, to just fuck right off. Just remember to do it with a smile on your face.