Spy’s EP
Service Weapon is the first release I’ve heard from the band and it’s struck me like a knife between the ribs. It’s possible that Spy has other releases to their name that I’m not unaware of. It’s also possible that I have a blood clot somewhere in my thigh that will rocket its way into my heart valves like a corner-pocket 8-ball while I’m out on a run this week. I’m living in the moment is what I’m trying to say and writing from a space that may not know tomorrow. Like a butcher who has run his breaking knife through his own hand,
Service Weapon opens with a pained, expellant howl, and expression that inaugurates the wounded rush and dolorous purge of “Violent Majority.” While the opening track owes its radix to the crimson, crusty gaze of bands like Protocol and Hoax, the following track “Running Out of Space” plods and growls like a sadistic, crunchier version of Warthog, stumbling over its own feet before galloping into deft d-beat pummel that caries through to “Bootlicker,” a leather chewing, dog-toothed terror that makes a mince-meat namkeen of police apologists. The final ferment on the album is also the title track, a castigating interrogation of the psyche of chicken-skat brained clods, hiding behind the loose pretense of their badges while they inflict extrajudicial killings on ostensibly free people, particularly people of color. Thick-brained thugs who are all too prone to discharge their weapons in the line of disgrace, either out of fatuous fear, or what’s worse, outright malice, a methodical Peace Test-esque cutting groove doing the duty of dragging the deservedly maligned cowards out from behind the thin blue line and into the withering light of day. Let Spy’s
Service Weapon be your first, last, and best defense against a world that has yet to devices a way of completely stripping you of your life, dignity, and humanity.
Grab a copy of
Service Weapon from
To Live a Lie Records here.
