Album Review: Winnebago Deal - Career Suicide

Their last full-length came out four long years ago, but it’s only really been a couple since Winnebago Deal stopped touring and took a hiatus. Considering how fast music industry tastes have shifted in that short time, and the vast influx of bands flexing uber-aggressive punk guns to supplement their output, it’s going to be quite a struggle for the Oxford duo to make an impact with this new effort. Perhaps, a resort to type might seriously be professional hara-kiri but, judging from this Career Suicide, a fierce slab of stripped-back second wave punk is certainly what they’ve given us.

Yep, this sure is one supersonic speeding slab of pure fury, smeared with the grime of their discontent, and it slays. The two Bens, Perrier and Thomas, start out with ‘Heart Attack In My Head’, a fluxing powerhouse that employs smeared sustain over pummelled repeater snare and broken screams to really ram home their point, rip through another 12 tracks that barely scratch the two-minute mark, and finish with the demon nut-crusher, ‘Can’t See, Don’t Care, Don’t Know’, which Perrier uses as an instrument to scrape clean his vocal chords. There’s no rest for the wicked, they say and, at this rate, their arms will be bloody stumps if they tour long with this doozy in their pocket.

Amongst an album that seems conditioned to congeal itself into one heaving mass, with it’s verse-chorus-verse blueprint being strictly adhered to, picking out highlights is a tough call but I sorta dig the eerie opening build to mayhem and vampiric cajones that ‘I Want Your Blood’ sports even if it does seriously cut the cheese. On the flipside, the 1:09 of ‘Frostbiter’ is particularly obnoxious, the sound almost folding in on itself as Perrier’s guitar and vocals slew around, the dB piling up to a crushing climax, whilst ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ teeters on the edge of punk-pop mediocrity before properly dropping it’s shorts on the chorus. They won’t sell a gazillion copies, the odd brainless idiot will no doubt declare that punk is dead, but the ‘Deal will simply shrug, stick one mighty middle finger in the air, and gig with this hatstand-mad collection of bruisers in every nook and cranny they can find and we’ll all naturally flock forth and hail them kings of all they survey once more.

Also online @ TLOBF = http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/2010/11/winnebago-deal-%E2%80%93-career-suicide/