Marvellous major label debut from your favourite new heavy band
Lord alone knows, if MVM lived in Manchester, we’d probably be pissed off too. Every time we go there we always got lost on their millions of ring roads, it usually rains, and the football team we are there to watch generally gets beaten by the locals.
Then there’s the music. The Smith’s? Purleese! The Stone Roses were always shit and don’t get us started on the Happy Mondays. Mad for it we were not.
What we can’t ever do is channel that anger into anything coherent or creative. Lucky then, that Manchester’s Broken Teeth HC are here to do that for us.
Because let’s cut right to the chase here, “At Peace Amongst Chaos” is stunning.
The ten songs that make up their debut for Nuclear Blast would probably kick you in the face just for a giggle, but they are so good that you would probably insist they did it again, and did it harder.
Walking some kind of imaginary line that sees Slayer and Hatebreed getting hyped up on E numbers before a game of Russian Roulette, “…Chaos” is as good a study in brutality as we have seen from a British band arguably since Evile’s first record came out.
The title track fires out more riffs than you can shake a Les Paul at, has a chorus to kill for and a viscous breakdown – and does all this rather merrily in four minutes. “Stomp 2 Dust” does the same, just heavier and with a bit more anger, “Witness” Of Destruction” on the other hand decides to its crushing a little more slowly.
And to think that the album had begun with some acoustic guitar! To be fair, though, this is very much the calm before the storm and soon “Take Me Away” is blowing like a hurricane, displaying as it does, what is a rare gift for melody that Broken Teeth have. Where most bands of this type get caught up in seeing how fast they can play, or trying to work in guttural vocals, here the seething rage that its present on the brilliant “Nothing Like You” is channelled into something more deliberate than the usual chaotic maelstrom.
Of course, they can shred with the best of them, “Show No Mercy” proves that, and the suspicion that Broken Teeth HC would be brilliant live is rather exemplified by the mighty “Lose My Grip” which is essentially just a beatdown set to a riff.
There’s not letting up in the either the quality or the rage. “Prove You Wrong” picks its target and clinically eliminates them, while the closing “Riot Of The Mind” begins ominously and builds from there.
It’s a sad fact that if Broken Teeth HC were American the mainstream press would be hailing them as the future of some bullshit movement they’d created – hell, we live in a world where Babymetal just played Wembley. So here’s MVM’s shout instead. Buy this. And when you have use it as the soundtrack for your own anger. Broken Teeth have just done it better than you could.
Rating 9/10
