StuntmanWhoa in your face cover-art on this one that’s guaranteed to make your eyes bleed and listening to the music on this will do the same to your ears too. If this were a stuntman in real life it would crash and burn in a mangled heap of wreckage that will take out all the spectators too, leaving no one to walk away from the aftermath. The band are from France and have a couple of albums and EP’s out there already and have played a lot of shows with all sorts of bands. They have apparently been tagged as being similar in mind to the likes of Botch, Keelhaul, Unsane and Knut so expect some sonically challenging big phat riffs and noisy core evisceration behind this 25 minute assault.

After ambling in and getting you to turn the volume deceptively up with sounds of what could be something burning and crackling away in some sort of industrial factory we are literally flung into the oddly titled ‘The Patriot, The Elite, The Icon’ Riffs are rugged and vocals bark out with an aggressive in your face snarl about them. It’s kind of like being flung into a bewildering vortex but luckily it is one that bulldozes away without going into technical meltdown and despite its choppy demeanour is quite an easy brand of violence to get to grips with. Thick tar like sludge laden grooves permeate and some skewed harmonics swagger about this charging roughshod a creating havoc like a proverbial big horned beast in a shop of delicate pottery. There is no pause as one song finishes and the next tough talking one grinds straight in. English lyrics may need deciphering but this one’s called ‘Bag Of Dicks’ and its angry and majorly pissed off, what more do you need to know? ‘Horn Of Misery’ clatters similarly along with a haywire manic lunacy behind it, like something completely out of control before again hitting its groove and steamrolling around flattening everything in its path. Adding a bit of a crusty feel to this hard-arse hardcore does it no ill favours either. The Botchisms on ‘Roll The Skull’ are duly noted too.

After flying through a handful of rough and ready tracks the band play their trump card which is surprisingly a long instrumental affair ‘Scarecrow Warfare.’ This has a looping and powerful slow chundering feel about it, mechanical yet organic and heavy as hell getting you solidly banging your head along with it. It keeps on slowing making you think it’s going to come to a slow extinction but it’s all a game plan and it eventually surges back into life for a final assault. Any horror film fan should know fully well that you should never turn your back on a scarecrow and this one is no exception to that rule

Stuntman proved a bit on the tough guy, chaotic side for what I would normally listen to out of choice but all in all they convinced by pure determination and no doubt are a right punishing band live to boot.  Give them a battering at the link below.

(6.5/10 Pete Woods)

http://solarflarerds.bandcamp.com/album/incorporate-the-excess