OCTOBER FILE
Holy Armour From the Jaws of God
Candlelight
7.5 / 10 Track listing:
01. A Munitions Crusade
02. In My Magnificent Circus
03. High Octane Climate Changer
04. Another Day
05. Hallowed Be Thy Army
06. Friendly Fire
07. Blood and Sweat
08. A Sun That Never Sets
09. Religion?
10. So Poor
Hey, ya like KILLING JOKE? I mean, a whole helluva lot? So much that if their singer, Jaz Coleman, did guest vocals on some other band's record, and you didn't know where that band's singer stopped and Coleman started, you'd be happy about it? Then have I got a band for you!
It's not like OCTOBER FILE are trying to hide their influences. They named themselves after a particularly influential DIE KREUZEN album, they've got Coleman adding his endtime shaman cachet to the proceedings, and their hypnotic, tribal anthems are the very sort of songs that make writers reach for the word "post-apocalyptic" with fireproof tongs out of their thesaurus. And this is definitely the enraged, positively seething KILLING JOKE of the "Extremities" era the band is biting into here, not their more arty and danceable past — "Holy Armour From the Jaws of God" is a ratcheting tank of a record in places, bludgeoning with heavy, droning simplicity and thundering drums, with madman ranting and sputtering about the world's woes atop it all. It lacks the poetic force of their influences — a line like "take a swim in the shit-filled sea" probably didn't need repeated three times like a mantra — but it's a minor quibble with the proceedings are this intense.
There's not much else to say, really — you like this kind of sound or you don't, and if you do, OCTOBER FILE bring enough fury and intensity to the table to satiate you and silence all those "but they sound too much like so-and-so" questions. The abrasive , mechanized tribal scream of the early 1990s rules here, from the overt and blatant KILLING JOKE reference point to a bit of MINISTRY (especially in the ham-fisted lyrics) and maybe a smattering of PRONG influence. The whole thing seems ready at any moment to bubble over, a cauldron of rage and millennial angst that'll leave you grinding your teeth and drawing up sabotage plots. There's not a drop of originality to it, and for now at least, you won't care — this is a record that gets by on pure snarl and a backpack full of the right heroes.
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