The phraseology of “diving into” a record is intended to capture the idea of an auditory experience in which your mind is quickly surrounded by the music.
Sometimes you want to get out of the stream and towel off as quickly as possible, left cold or, worse yet, finding the waters skin-temperature and drab. Or you might get pulled deep by heavy undercurrents, making it difficult to get even your head to the surface.
Or you might experience the thrill of discovering that the waters are shark-infested, and a leg that was once attached to you has just been chewed off, leaving the waters red and frothing as the horde of other predators begin joining the feast.
That’s the kind of dive you should prepare for in Submit Or Death, the EP from New Zealand’s Just One Fix that we’re premiering today in advance of its May 10 release.
This new EP marks a return by a band who first came together in 1998 and whose last album, Let Them Hate … as Long as They Fear, is now 10 years old. It also features new drummer Ross Curtain (Silent Torture, ex-Enoch).
Whatever else happened to the band in the last decade, it sure as hell didn’t dull their teeth or the voracious experience of their music, which is likely to give your adrenaline the kind of surge you might get if suddenly commingling with a horde of hungry tiger sharks (and other monsters as well).
The attack doesn’t begin right away. Your dive goes in slow motion, with an introductory track appropriately named “Submission and Transition“, in which a classically influenced acoustic guitar instrumental seductively rings, eventually joined by more shrill and swirling sounds, almost like the unfolding of a spell.
But then you hit the surface with “Gods and Devils“, and the waters begin to violently churn, suddenly boiling with the frenzy of feverish fretwork and slashing chords, plundering bass lines, and bone-snapping beats. Raging vocals, raw and jagged in tone, join the thrashing fray along with gang yells, beastly gutturals, and punishing grooves.
As red-eyed and voracious as the vocals are, you can make out the words quite easily, including the exclamations of “FUCKING DISASTER!”, which is what the music’s feeding frenzies have in mind for you, especially when the drums start riotously thundering and the fleet-fingered riffing reaches a paroxysmal zenith.
But the band also manage to twist the music in a different and more horror-infused direction, providing ghoulish lurching rhythms as the backdrop for a squirming and screaming solo that sounds like insanity transformed into sound waves.
From there, Just One Fix continue clobbering and ripping up their listeners, and bringing other metaphors to mind besides the one about shark attacks. “Warzone” does indeed sound like we’ve been dropped into an active war zone, getting caught in percussive strafing runs and napalm-spewing riffage.
But here again, the band segue into a different dimension, slowing the onslaught to create moods of oppression and agony, but without abandoning their penchant for bone-fracturing grooves and über-rabid vocals. And of course they spin up the heat and the furious mayhem in the song’s final phase.
The opening phase of “Thorns” sounds even more dismal and pestilential than the shift that occurs in “Warzone“, even with the big tumbling drums that provide the backdrop for the grisly guitars. But soon enough the guitars start generating a sequence of mad and braying pulsations and the drums leap into a gallop — both sinister and delirious in their sensations — while the macabre vocals snarl, howl, and growl for blood. You’ll also encounter a vivid (and compulsive) bass riff which leads into a weirdly wailing guitar solo.
By now it’s very clear that the brand of thrash Just One Fix favor is violent and mean, and just as geared toward busting skulls and scaring the crap out of people as it is getting their blood pounding. This is Hell’s own thrash, let loose upon the world to revel in its blasphemy and blood-letting destructiveness.
That impression is reinforced by “Your Own God“, which is both a truly hellish attack of furious demonic delirium and the most jackhammering track on the EP. But with the closing track “Hades Rising” the band circle back around to the way the EP began, with a soft, mysterious, and mesmerizing guitar instrumental as the intro. Even then, however, the rhythm section will get your head moving.
And have no fear, that’s not where Just One Fix leave things. They give the music the gasoline, jolting the spine and carving up the flesh with savage intensity, as vocalist Riccardo Ball howls at the moon like a deranged lycanthrope one more time, and growls like he’s just stuffed his throat with your guts. Thankfully, we get one more spectacular guitar solo to send us on our way too.
One more thing is evident by now (and actually quite evident long before the end) — the maniacs in Just One Fix know how to write actual songs, and they’re damned good performers too — even if they’d scare away the sharks in the waters they inhabit.
And with all that frothy verbiage out of the way, we’ll leave you to the abundance of thrills provided by the diabolically exceptional thrash of Submit Or Death:
JUST ONE FIX is:
Riccardo Ball – Vocals
Sharne Scarborough – Guitars
Ant Ward – Bass
Ross Curtain – Drums
For more info about the band, the EP, and how to get it, check the links below.
MORE INFO:
https://linktr.ee/justonefix
https://www.facebook.com/justonefixnz