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Live Reviews

Annihilation Time Live

Crash The Pose
The Macbeth, London
29.04.06

Picture the scene. Ellis, frontman for Guildford hyper-thrash punks Crash The Pose is stripped down to his boxer shorts, rampaging through a trendy East London boozer screaming and bellowing into a crackling microphone as he carves through the cheering crowd, spitting in people’s faces and spinning their baseball caps through the air.

It’s fair to say he’s had a few. And a few more. He’s fucked up. Behind him the band try to concentrate on holding it together, busting out lose and raw hardcore thrash, a high-speed blur of hardcore noise while Ellis tries to knock his own head off. They play a song that is reportedly ‘Wasted’ by Black Flag but sounds more like someone being sick at high speed. Borderline genius and a whole lot of chaotic fun!

Annihilation Time are not your usual self-righteous hardcore band. Claiming to endorse ‘weed, LSD, mushrooms, hash, beer, booze, Vans and Deep Purple’ on their record sleeves, Annihilation Time are a loud and dirty mush of Motorhead’s sheer volume, the bite and snarl of Black Flag and Poison Idea and the seventies rock grooves of Thin Lizzy and of course, Deep Purple.

These Californian street punks like their drugs and rock n’roll and play tonight with an intensity and ferocity that is positively jaw-dropping. Their combination of punk attitude and energy mixed with balls out rock n’roll threatens to destroy the whole venue as the audience bounce off the walls to the band’s machine gun fire attack in tracks like ‘Teenage Rebel’ and ‘Fast Forward To The Gore’.

They don’t, unfortunately, play their amazing version of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Bad Reputation’, but they do tear us all a new arsehole quite sufficiently with every song they play.

Annihilation Time are pure filth. If you don’t want your mind shot to bits, don’t breath in the fumes.

James Sherry