Review Summary: "Nazi Dust" shows promise of a strong future for these Florida based anger mongers.
Youth Attack! Records is a label known for finding and producing records from intense bands. Their roster features bands from a range of genres (hardcore, grind, black metal, death metal), however, no matter what the band’s chosen genre is, you can be assured that it is performed with passion and aggression.
Tampa, Florida based Nazi Dust are a punk/hardcore band who have released a number of demos and splits. Most recently the band became Youth Attack! Records alumni and subsequently released their self-titled debut 7’’.
Despite the LP’s 7 tracks clocking in at just over 8 minutes long, Nazi Dust make full use of these eight minutes to vent their frustration and anger at pretty much everything. Performing a style of hardcore comparable with Aerosols and Raw Nerve,
Nazi Dust is chock full of abrasive screams and yells and break neck power chord riffs backed by a strong backbone of drums and bass groove.
The guitars feature a cutting tone, providing a high speed potpourri of power chord riffs, single note lines and even the odd, brief solo such as the one which is featured in “Fervor”. There are occasions when the guitars will slow down to a half time speed, bringing a brief reprieve. These sections are well placed and add some depth to Nazi Dust’s sound. Drum wise, Nazi Dust mostly employs a simple 4/4 backing, but the odd complex fill or bass drum pattern is featured, bringing a decent amount of variety and enjoyment for drum fans. This can also be applied to the bass, which is practically unintelligible from the guitars, apart from the odd few times when the guitars drop out and leave the drums and bass performing a groove, this doesn’t really affect the overall enjoyment of the LP and could have simply been caused by a lower mix of the bass in the final production stages. There is definitely nothing mind blowing on show in these areas of the band, but, really, if you were expecting that from this brand of raw punk/hardcore, then you deserve to be disappointed.
Ultimately, while providing a varied enough array of riffs and fills to be engaging, the instrumentation serves merely as a backing for the vocals; with the emphasis clearly put on them being the more important aspect of the band’s sound. Despite utilising the usual hardcore aesthetic of being angry at everything, the performance of the vocals helps to convey the true anger that they are born from and prevent them from feeling contrived or boring. The vitriol with which lines such as
“I don’t need to prove myself to you” from “Fervor” are performed only serve to highlight this fact even more. There are also the occasional employments of gang vocals, which bring a little extra variation to the tracks that feature them (“Bad Blood”) but are not overused to the point that they becoming annoying or clichéd.
The production of the album further highlights this fact by having the vocals mixed slightly higher than all the instruments. This again emphasises their importance in the band’s sound but they are not mixed so highly that it is detrimental to the rest of the band member’s performances.
During its short duration, Nazi Dust's self-titled debut 7” manages to tick all the boxes in terms of aggression and intensity, and will provide more than enough entertainment for fans of rapid fire bursts of angry men hitting things and shouting, while also displaying enough potential for greater things from the band on their next release.
Recommended Tracks:- Fervor
- Bad Blood
- Exhaustion
