Sitting comfortably alongside the Southern Lord's recent abrasive metal/hardcore offerings, 'Hell is Other People' is another high velocity concrete slab to the face. The overall tone is a severe monochrome, but the pit-stirring powerviolence on offer hints at a band well worth seeing live in some sweaty bolthole. Like soluble aspirin, the flavour is bitter, the water murky and you get through it as quickly as you can, but it rapidly jolts you out of the hangover that is life in 2011.

With a few exceptions, the songs clock in around the minute mark, and fuse rabid hardcore, chain-dragging sludge and stop-start grind. More than one track seems to utilise a rough approximation of the riff from Nailbomb's 'Wasting Away'. 'Undulations' is a shining light here, an ashtray-bottom thrashy beast that breaks its shackles and bolts into the distance. The couplet of 'Pathogen' and 'Out of Focus' are so direct and blunt that they hardwire direct to your gut and their impact is hard to deny. The one reservation I have is that the blanket attack of 'Hell is Other People', underpinned by a permanent caustic bass rumble, has little to engage anything other than these instant, physical reactions. This kind of sustained airlessness can lose its potency on repeated listening, and personally I'd have liked the guitars to just occasionally venture outside the fairly narrow parameters they inhabit here and show a little more definition.

This has all the d-beat ultraviolence and slow, doomy blood-letting of Witch Cult's recent release, but while sounding a more professional affair, it lacks some of their idiosyncratic charm and dynamism. It is, however, another effective prescription for latent rage and pent-up frustration at the messages we're getting from the culture in which we exist: Watch your health, live longer, tighten your belt and keep the noise down because it's all going to get progressively worse until you are dead. Work harder, for longer, for less, as we're all in this together. If you don't, we will be onto it before you can blink; no-one in the world agrees with you and all your so-called friends will laugh as you are publicly humiliated. And don't try living by any of your childish ideals, because the problems are all too complex for you to even begin to understand. Mate, spawn, consume and die.  

Thanks to Heartless for helping me get that rant off my chest.