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Hash Redactor announce debut album Drecksound via Upset The Rhythm + New Track Streaming

March 12, 2019
Adelle C Winn 

Hash Redactor announce debut album Drecksound

Out April 26, 2019 on Upset The Rhythm
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Good Sense

A quick glance at the résumés of Hash Redactor’s members might seed certain expectations.  The band is fronted by guitarist Alec McIntyre of Ex-Cult, with NOTS rhythm warriors Meredith Lones on bass and Charlotte Watson on drums, and rounded off by George Williford on second guitar.  But their debut full-length dives into territory that feels distinctly untethered from their lineage and era.  Drecksound is a clattering, shambolic oasis in the sleek digital desert of the late twenty-teens.  

Perhaps both because and in spite of the alienation that typifies the glut of rock music at the end of this god-damned decade, these twelve songs deliver a pointed social criticism, more cathartic than suffocating, while championing a nihilism that greets the abyss by laughing mockingly in its face. The chorus to the incendiary Step 2: Success is sneered, not sung, “It’s a long con job and you just got it wrong / banned from the world.” Or take Open Invite’s opening missive, “I won’t settle for anything less than a four-star refugee camp.” McIntyre’s lyrics present a puckish fascination with humankind’s rake-stepping self destruction.  He’s a merry prankster, but more in the mold of a jackbooted Monty Python character than a Ken Kesey acid casualty. Case in point: A-side epic In The Tank, where a vindictive custodian boils alive the wealthy patrons at the sensory-deprivation tank facility where he works.

McIntyre and Williford’s guitar interplay on Drecksound draws from some weird rundown of usual and unusual suspects in the tight corner of avant-punk guitar work, recalling some free-association that includes: Marquee Moon, John Fahey gone electric, the playing on Ornette Coleman’s mid-70s Body Meta and Dancing In Your Head, prime-era Flesheaters, and (why not) the first two Meat Puppets albums. Without anything resembling traditional leads, guitars snake in, out and around Lones’s bass lines, which alternate between slinky earworm hooks and steel cable raw power.  All of this is locked in by Watson’s characteristically visceral swing.  It doesn’t feel controversial to claim that the duo of Watson and Lones constitutes one of the best rhythm sections to be heard anywhere in contemporary punk music.

Having played out heavy in 2018 with a refined live show, a four-song demo, and several Gonerfest appearances under their belt, HR cut the record at home on a borrowed 8-track cassette machine. The deranged raw tracks were mixed into final form by Matt Qualls at Young Avenue Sound, and mastered by Jason Ward at Chicago Mastering. Hash Redactor will be touring the States in summer and with plans for Europe later in 2019. Drecksound is out April 26th on Upset the Rhythm .

Track listing:
01. Good Sense

02. Step 2: Success

03. Terri

04. SMX20

05. In The Tank

06. Open Invite (To The Caves)

07. Panic

08. Down The Tubes

09. Lotion Poet Laureate

10. Bad Advice

11. Fish

12. Floral Pattern

Album pre-order:

http://upsettherhythm.bigcartel.com/

https://www.facebook.com/hashredactor/

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