Cold Meat Cake & Arse Party EP
Perth’s COLD MEAT has been at it for ten years now, but truth be told, this new EP (their first release since 2020’s Hot and Flustered LP) is where everything finally clicked for me. The string of singles that they dropped in the back half of the 2010s mostly struck me as solid attempts to force pegs into recently made GOOD THROB-shaped holes; a reductionist thought if not an entirely inaccurate one. In hindsight, it’s easier to acknowledge the many similarities between the two bands as a shared collective consciousness, one informed by snarling and shambolic KBD primitivism, speedy, razor-edged hooks in the Dangerhouse tradition, the fiery anarcho-feminist rhetoric of Eve Libertine-fronted CRASS, etc., rather than any sort of intentional coattail-riding. Cake & Arse Party is a concise, immediate five-song statement of intent, taking aim at the multitudes of damaging modern world bullshit which have only proliferated in the last decade—”Machine” blazes with one of the most furious, slow-build accelerating rhythms this side of the BAGS’ “Survive,” with vocalist Ash breathlessly shrieking about hustle culture reducing human value to the output of one’s productivity, as the bratty garage bash of “Prick at the Pub” tears down male energy vampires like a switchblade-carrying Slampt Records act, and Ash’s taunting shout of “I cannot remember how it feels to be myself” over the harsh, blown-out feedback squeal in “Artificial Energy” hit a nerve deep within my antidepressant-fogged brain. A perfect encapsulation of the supremacy of the 7” as a punk art form, absolutely vicious.