When you can immediately feel the blood rushing through your body at a white heat pace from the first frenzied chords of an album, you hope full well that the music you’re about to engage is going to be quality throughout its duration. Sometimes, rare as they are, you can get lulled into a false sense of security, but thankfully Bones from yours truly’s hometown of Chicago doesn’t relent or stagnate during its debut CD, Bones. With all of the subtlety of a basket of batting cage baseballs hitting you flush in the face at top speed, this album sets out to do one thing: Destroy and scar your psyche beyond repair. Funny enough, you’ll thank them for it after the fact.

With a virtual one-shot full-length to hit the underground hard, Bones provides a death metal/crust battering that accentuates all of the necessary elements required to make an album in this style both absorbing and enduring. The blasting “March of the Dead” opens the CD and literally screams out early 80’s thrashing, yet retains a down-tuned death metal brutality that has the perfect production; it’s not overdone to the point of contamination, yet has just enough under-production to add some sonic flavoring to the sound, a technique either disgustingly overused or slightly underdone, rendering a recoding too over the top or too low brow. In any case, Bones manages to find the most common ground available and creates a wall of sound that, if disturbed, can blow up and send fragments of mortar into your skull and chest with indelible ease. The raging flow of these tracks makes this CD what it is, and that’s a deliberate and homogenous rigor that offers nothing plastic or generic.

As an old school fan, the sparse but discernable antiquity of the sound is what garners my attention, only to have my span strangled accordingly by truly volatile music that is what this genre sorely misses and screams out for today. Vocalist/Bassist Jon has a growling scream that might not be 100% original, but in a world of rasping black metal shrieks or guttural, incomprehensible noise the medium is of perfect treading here. While keeping the singing style of a thrashy/death order Jon enunciates well so a lyric man such as me can revel in the topical relevance of the music. Songs like “Bitch,” “Lonely Death” and the incredible Devastation cover of “Apocalyptic Warrior” stick in your recesses for a while, bouncing around with wanton abandon and forcing you to hit ‘Repeat’ more than once.

The feeling I get when listening to this album is of three guys just plugging in and going for it, not caring or worrying about perfection and polish. The overcast that is part of the charm of this record looms largely and it’s really hard not to be overcome with a staunch desire to damage some inanimate object. Alas, the music is such that if you’re like me (let’s hope no one’s that volatile) you simply feel your blood racing, your chest thumping and your fingers tightening so quickly that your only desire is to rinse and repeat, because this band is going to be around for a while if they keep up this steady pace of destructive outflow.

TRACK LISTING

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*Comments:

1.  March of the Dead
2.  Bloodlust
3.  Bitch
4.  Apocalyptic Warrior
     (Devastation cover
5.  Good Die Young
6.  Slowburn
7.  Lonely Death
8.  666
9.  Delirium Tremens

Total playing time:  35:17

Release Date: 2011
Label: Planet Metal Records

Bones - Bones

Reviewer: Chris

July 5, 2011