Cancer Bats: Psychic Jailbreak | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Cancer Bats. Always at the very forefront of hardcore for the masses, it kind of threw me when I saw they’d recently parted ways with their long time guitarist Scott Middleton after seventeen years of service. I wondered how they’d continue on after such a major change. The answer? Without a single issue and without being rankled in the slightest. The Great White North’s premier hellraisers could have hung up the instruments and become posties, because they’ve always delivered previously, but Psychic Jailbreak is a record of pure, unabashed fun. You can keep your crushingly heavy record and ones with so many brutal parts it scares you but when a record follows the classic K.I.S.S. strategy of keeping it simple stupid and transmits the energy of the music into you, that’s when this stuff is at its peak.

Right from the off, the intentions are made crystal clear with Radiate as it lurches in a stunted, yet explosive way. There’s a deft use of dynamics here. By offsetting the drawn out verses with their sustained guitars and being less coloured in the sound palette with the crunchy choruses, it gives this song a smooth flow despite the contradictory parts. In truth, that’s an apt overview of Psychic Jailbreak as whole. The more ruthless ragers are balanced out with more curated and cautious songs. Take the contrast between Lonely Bong and Hammering On, for example. The first is a ripping summation of their life as road dogs and done with a much more positive spin than 2012’s, er, Road Dogs. Its blazes through its run time, fist pumping and headbanging along the way, spurred on by gripping riffs. On the other side of that is Hammering On, still given the same sonic weight but, now everything is slowed down and spread out like lithium battery smoke. The female vocal that duets with Liam Cormier’s and the seismic waves the guitars make move this song more into some stoner territory. Towards the back end, it crescendos to a climax as if what had followed before it was an oppressive blanket it was trying to shed. Underneath the rising guitars and drums, these shrill but ever-so-faint piano keys are battered into an urgent yelp. The other song I want to make mention of is The Hoof: one of the most loving odes to wood, bearing, and polyurethane ever put to music. If they were aiming for something to be featured on an upcoming HOCKEY video, I think Liam Cormier bellowing “my life was saved by a skateboard” has them in good stead.

That, essentially, is how this Cancer Bats record has been compiled. They aren’t here to reinvent the wheel and especially given they are now down one co-conspirator, Psychic Jailbreak is everything you could want from a release of this nature. Chocked full of enough energetic thrashes to have you jumping into your ceiling fans as if your name was Steve-O and well paced enough that you don’t ruin your saving grace before summer rolls around. Keep on keeping on gents.

- Matt Lynch.