I was thinking the other day about how stone-cold spectacular it was to see Coliseum and United Nations play at the Sub T in support of the former's LP Anxiety's Kiss, declaredly their final album back in 2015. The intensity of both their performances is something of a core memory at this point, especially the manner in which Ryan Patterson would kinetically manifest the emotions and intentions behind each song in his set to narrow the circumspection of the audience while approximating the dread of being a raccoon facing off against an oncoming train- guy has a talent for making one fear for their splatability. Coliseum cracked and crumbled after that tour, and Ryan moved on to his pure post-punk project Fotocrime. It was bittersweet to bid the group farewell, but I'm not one to begrudge an artist for shifting focus, even if their choice of direction leads us down divergent paths. As for Fotocrime, it affects me about as much as the mating habits of endangered Andean condors- interesting but ultimately inconsequential to my life. Imagine my surprise when I looked up old Battledome-C on a whim, only to learn that they had constructed a new arena in which to display their prowess and spill their carnage, a retcon back to the cockcrow of their conception, indecently identified as Infinity Shit and released in 2023. I'm somewhat shocked that Ryan would claw back his declaration that Anxiety's Kiss was the group's parting buss, but seeing how he's now calling the band C.L.S.M., I guess this is more of a reincarnation than a reunion- a reversion to a simplified structure, reminiscent of a prior instantiation, in order to ignite a freshly ascendent blaze of destiny. Back in the mid-'00s, when highly commercial third-wave emo and pop-punk were at their zenith, there was more or less an undercurrent of backlash within the punk scene that manifested in a consistent outflow of d-beat, crust, and gritty hardcore that offered the nation's youth a more caustic alternative to the outwardly docile, consumer-friendly sense of alienation and punk rock they could purchase at the mall. Coliseum, in its original infleshed epitome, was a byproduct of this schism. This sinfully ugly trio of Louisville punks headbutted their way out of the Midwest with their lurching blend of sludge metal, roadhouse country-blues, and bloody-knuckled hardcore, and helped to bring the skuffed metallic punk hybrids of the early-to-mid '90s into the new millennium along with a devastated earnestness that their big-city peers would take almost a decade to catch up to. Infinity Shit is eternally bestial, far more so than the majority of the group's catalog, save their debut, with in particular Ryan sounding like a caiman crammed full of amphetamines to the point where its overheated snap-box of brain has discovered how to mimic the human tongue, or at least pull off a half-blinkered parodic impression of Jaz Coleman after drinking a grail brimming with Lemmy's blood. Tracks like "Dehydrated Flesh of the Bourgeoisie," "Trash the Human Race," and "Alchemical Terrorism" place a premium on cyclonic grooves that penetrate body cavities, vibrate, jostle, and partically liquify organs, and involuntarily convert toe-tapping into tile-splintering stomps, taking less of an indirect Buñuelian path to insulting the Burghers, resolving to simply spit at them for being ugly parasites and wishing to stack their bodies as the planks and foundation of a new world. Ominous in its intentions, the beatdown is without pause, fetting one bitter rebuke to the next in a cacophonic catena of punk-metal mendacity towards a world that more and more resembles a moral and intellectual cesspool, a condemned noetical superfund site, each day we wake into it. The effluent of iniquity flows eternally, as does the fury to combat it. Infinity Shit is C.L.S.M.'s rousing return to a campaign against the corruption that besets this world.
20/23 is not perfect vision, but it's good enough for Equal Vision.
