The opening of “Arrow of Disease” hits you immediately with a sense of other-worldliness, projecting you instantly deep into an alien soundscape. The cymbal comes in white hot – I’m not sure if the mic was too close, or if there were some phase issues with the other drum mics, but it fills the track completely in one swirling burst. The bass comes in with similarly overwhelming insectoid/cybernetic urgency, the guitar hits a few off-kilter harmonics that serve as a warning of what is to come, and in within the first 10 seconds of the song it is very clear that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Welcome to the world of Bruised, one the best bands to come out of Chicago’s burgeoning punk scene, whose home base is a circuit of DIY venues found mostly on the south side, which has become the hot bed of the most creative and interesting music in Chicago for the last few years. Bruised’s post-punk/goth-punk songs sound like the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic world, after the bombs have dropped, or the seas levels have risen, or whatever final catastrophe has occurred, where those unlucky enough to have survived to fight over the remaining scraps have returned to the old pagan gods in a desperate attempt to resurrect some semblance of order and reason in the chaos of the final days. Both songs on this 7” conjure a distinct feeling of desperation and dread, of imbalance and impending doom, through a mixture of frenetic and purposefully unbalanced instrumentation matched perfectly with shrouded, prophetic lyrics like, “through The Big Fence, on the street, they grip their arrows of disease” or “they’ll cry their tears of joy, when there’s nothing left to cherish or destroy” that read like psalms of the end times. Bruised is a band that knows what they are going for, and are able to execute it perfectly, and we over here at Randy Records are very excited to unleash their first vinyl record onto the unsuspecting public. Check it out, and keep your eyes open for a debut LP in the near future!
