Resurrected to hurl this 2022 EP in your face

Brutal electronic noise of "Charge Of The 77th Brigade" explodes into insanely raw grindcore, and then each song comes rushing at you, utterly crushing metallic grind as "Totalitarian Gulags", "You've Got A Bigger Problem Now", "Orwellian Corpus" detonate in brief blasts of maniacal violence. The entireity of Starving is a mixture of that barbaric grindcore, bulldozing D-beat, ten-second bursts of noisecore, all recorded low-fi but loud as fuck. For a bunch of old hardcore guys, they seriously bring the aggression for this twenty-four song assault. It's a bit samey comapred to other Sore Throat offerings; you won;t find the psychedelic sample/electronic-infested insanity of their classic accidental avant-blast masterwork Disgrace To The Corpse Of Sid. But this stuff is relentless, goddamn ceaseless blasting and those awesome ape-man grunts and howls from the voalist, who here goes by the name The Skullfucker. I'm down with it. This tape really takes me back to that era of extreme UK hardcore when bands were aiming to out-speed and out-noise one another, hardcore punk being pushed to the absolute limits of coherency and musicality, which is of course how these guys stumbled into what would become an iconic "noisecore" style. The noisecore tracks on Wolves are as thermo-nuking as I need, stuff like "Cry Wolf", "Raw Meat", "Drop The Bomb" shattering at the speed of madness, nine second doses of total chaos.

But it does get a bit weirder as you approach the end though, when "Grand Solar Minimum " hits. Suddenly, these guys are delivering this crushing, doom-laden dirge that is fucking majestic; not quite the same as the industrial sludge-crust of their "Saw Throat" material (which is another major favorite of mine), but this lumbering, droning sludge-metal opus turns into an epic soundscape of misery and rage, strange drones peircing thru8gh the slo-mo crush, the sounds of crying infants and screaming crowds and weird effects being layered over that terminal dirge, developing a strange and eerie atmopshere as the eight-minute song unfurls its toxic muck, ultimately dissolving into a pool of brittle electronic noise, nuclear winds and distant bomb blasts, and huge orchestral brass-like drones that back a short, furious ranting speech . Awesome.

That is followed by "Full 22 Track EP (No Edits)", which appears to be a redux of the same recording session, but without edits (obviosyly) and some noticeable changes to the mix. That regal dirge ends the set again, and still sounds powerful as hell in this rawer, less polished form. After hearing it a couple times on this collection, I gotta say that "Grand Solar Minimum" might be one of my all-time favortite Sore Throat somngs. It rules. The tape wraps up with "8 Song Instrumental Rough Mix", which presents some of the songs from the track list , and it weirdly sounds almost industrial-metal ish. Not sure what is giving it that colder, mechanical feel, but this five-minute track could be mistaken for Optimum Wound Profile if I didn't know otherwise. Pretty rad.