SEND MORE PARAMEDICS – THE FINAL FEAST

(Please stand by for an emergency message from Andy Synn)

Attention! Atención! Achtung! This is not a drill.

The dead have risen and are voting Republican feeding on the flesh of the living.

The only way to stop them is to sever the head or destroy the brain.

I repeat: sever the head or destroy the brain.

Evidence shows that the virus spreads through direct contact with the afflicted, but there have also been reports of individuals becoming infected due to exposure to toxic gas, contaminated language, and the new album from Send More Paramedics.

So whatever you do, please, avoid all contact with this album.

Now, if you’re reading this that means you ignored the previous warning, so everything that happens from now on is totally on you and neither myself nor anyone else at NCS can or will be held responsible.

So it’s not our fault if you find yourself instantly and inescapably addicted to the infectious necro-thrash riffage of songs like “Mortify” and “Malfacteur”, nor can we be blamed if the hellish hooks and delicious darkness of tracks such as “Unfree” and post-Pontypool anthem “Word is the Virus”, or the shameless splatterpunk of… erm… “Splatterpunk”, trigger certain cravings in your brain that you just can’t control.

And we definitely don’t accept any liability in the event that you realise that songs like mid-album monster “Human Capital” and eerily melodic closer “Hibakusha” are subtly (or not-so-subtly, in the case of instant-classic “Totenkopf” and its climactic refrain of “Nazi zombies fuck you!”) political… although since the Zombie genre has always been inherently political/allegorical, and the band themselves weren’t exactly mincing their words on tracks like “Bra(i)nde(a)d” (“You’re all grist to the mill!”), “The Unclean” (“We are the sick ones, pushed to the edge…”) and “Driven to Destruction” (“we’re all zombies!”) this shouldn’t really be surprising.

This is the point then when you realise that even though it’s been fifteen years since we last heard anything from Send More Paramedics (a few sporadic one-off resurrections notwithstanding), The Final Feast makes it seem like it was just yesterday that the band first crawled out of the grave.

But I guess that makes sense, when you think about it. Because zombies don’t age, and zombies don’t change. Sure, they sometimes go dormant for a little while, but they always… always… come back.

Because they’re hungry. Always hungry. And, after fifteen years of hibernation, it’s no surprise that Send More Paramedics sound even hungrier than ever.