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Nine newly recorded tracks of devastating Japanese crust. (or anything from their 20 year plus discography). Musically they’re known to draw influence from SDS and Out From the Void era ANTISECT with a tight, fast and steady rocking formula that works great. No frills and still punk, this is one of the more impressive current Japanese bands going. Side B is an entire live set from Osaka in 2021, recorded well, and played just as tight as the studio side.
Our take: Portland’s Black Water Records released the first 7” from Japan’s Disturd back in 2011, and nearly a decade and a half later, they’re back with the band’s latest release, From the Darkside. Disturd’s well-populated Discogs page shows that, in the intervening years, they’ve been busy with a slew of releases in different formats on a ton of different international labels. While I haven’t heard all of them (or even most of them), I get the impression not much has changed over the years, with the band continuing to explore the vintage UK crust influences that have shaped their sound since the beginning. To my ears, , Disturd sounds like those bands who took Amebix’s brooding, foreboding sound and exchanged the misty atmosphere for gleaming metal precision, with tighter playing and crisper, more detailed production. The label’s blurb mentions Antisect as a point of comparison, but Axegrinder’s Rise of the Serpent Men is another good one, and they’d make an excellent pairing with their label-mates Hellshock, too. From the Darkside features one side recorded in the studio and another live side, and the similarity between the two shows how dialed-in Disturd’s sound is. While I don’t think Disturd has any novel innovations on the formula that might convince a sceptic, if you’re a fan of this sort of heavy, chugging metallic crust, they know just how to scratch that itch.