Cold Meat is the name of a band that you'd expect to appear in an '80s exploitation film about rebellious youth driven insane by boredom. One of those moralizing tales that is half-heartedly sympathetic to the lonely alienation of young people but is primarily concerned with selling a story about drugs, depravity, and violent street crime, and has rationalized an underground punk show as an appropriate backdrop for all three. This might sound like a dig on exploitation flicks but it's not. Some parts of life can only be revealed through art in its most absurdist forms. And punk certainly thrives in the embrace of absurdity, something that Cold Meat drives home with every left-ricocheting hook and every jeering lyric spat. If they had been around when principal photography was taking place for Suburbia, Cold Meat would have been an essential pick for casting, slotting naturally between the bullying TSOL and defiant adolescence of The Vandals with their hurky, jerky, style of loose and livid hardcore that is as much about exercising certain ugly emotions and as it is ruthlessly mocking the conventions and prestige of rock's presumptive premiers (ZZ Top in particular). Of course, the opening track "Piscies Crises" off of 2020's Hot and Flustered would have only made slightly less sense in 1987 than it does today in its sneering commentary on the extent to which people attempt to avoid facing hard personal truths by losing themselves in pseudosciences- at least in the specifics that is. People in the '80s still believed a bunch of garbage, although preoccupations with astrology were having a particular moment in 2020. The vindictive row of "Women's Work" definitely feels like it could have been written three decades prior, and the sentiments of the shrieking and clawing "Bad Mood" seem perennial and paralyzing. That's kind of my final impression of Cold Meat when listening to Hot and Flustered. They're a band that sounds like they exist in a perpetual state of rising antipathy with an origin point somewhere between today and some difficult-to-pin-down point in the past. A wormhole-dwelling goon, writhing and snarling across a wide temporal expanse, they are like a stalker that defies the lurch and pull of sequential time- spotting you and staring you down, switchblade in one hand, bike chain wrapped around the other knuckle, a red fury in their eyes, daring you to make a move.
