I hadn?t listened to Hair Police for a while before I heard this LP, which made it all the sweeter. Weary, drugged and horrified?there?s the obvious Wolf Eyes comparisons, and with Mike Connelly now playing in that very band everyone?s gonna be thinking they?re one and the same, but Hair Police take a different darkened alleyway altogether. A two-note pulse digs into your skull for the first 5 minutes before the record erupts for the first time, and the sheer depth of the sound is totally drowning. The record feels like it?s all around you?you?re in some bleak room, covered in dust and sweat, and something?s pressing down on you?Connelly?s screams are like knives in your eyes, and the sharpened synths accompany him with a vicious accent. It?s on the B-side of the LP that shit really starts to hit you though. The title track is a seething mass of empty air and crushed hope - John Olsen?s saxophone drips over the first few minutes then all explodes into fire and flame and still, this immense, huge sound.

This is not ?noise?. This is something else entirely?the air is thick with static, but the sounds creep and pulse and evolve and groan?this is why all those dudes who set out explicitly to make BRUTAL GORE DEATH NOISE get it so wrong. ?Noise? (their words, not mine) should be affecting, moving, and above all, free. The minute you start taking as your starting point some pre-defined genre like gore movies, or pointless genocide imagery, you put yourself in a hole you can?t escape from, the same way that any band who decides they?re gonna be a ?rock? band (or, if their really retarded, an ?emo? band), and defines themselves as such, are destined to be nothing more than a clich?d collection of aspirations. There?s nothing restricted about Hair Police, and indeed about the great ?noise? artists. This LP is so belligerent and ghastly is almost escapes from the turntable, let alone any genre people try and file it under. And the artwork is badass too. Get this, and get their ?Yr. Skull in the Gutter? cassette too. 7/10 -- Evan Rhodes (28 June, 2006)