Post Present Medium
Prison Sweat falls apart for 26 minutes. Ignoring ambitions to grow as musicians Texan hardcore group Total Abuse spend their third long-player revelling in the mess they’ve thrown across the room scolding listeners with a squall of faulty wiring and feedback stripped of hardcore’s please-the-kids sentiment. Opening with a seven-minute noise litany the record comes off thrown together in one draft of inspired desperation and bitterness or else pains were taken to make the crafting process invisible. The Austin quintet rejects any display of musicianship and minutes stumble by to the mid-tempo snare drum sticking out of the fog threatening to quit the beat.
Last year’s boredom-plagued Mutt LP makes sense in retrospect ushering the group away from the catchy fun of 2008’s self-titled debut towards something to subject your co-workers and loved ones to. Prison Sweat exists in a misanthropic state of cultured putrescence pioneered when Total Abuse forsook hardcore’s purity laws and dirtied themselves with early ’90s noise rock when lo-fi meant something other than blown-out laptop recordings.
The seven tracks writhe trying to escape humanity regressing forward missing notes and substituting ugly sounds for solos. The out-of-tune guitars — or are they formless chords? — melt into an unstable throb beneath screams quivering with frustration lapsing into apathy. Any melodies are off-key and blues-less. Total Abuse made a record that should scare parents more than the singalongs chugging guitars and musclehead posturing that’s been the hardcore status quo for 30 years. The dust clears and the debris lands closer to what hardcore should be.
