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I don’t want to blow, I want to grow! The first Dis-clone? We don’t know about that, but these are some early rumblings of Dis-mania, direct from the Merseyside in 1986. For every man, woman or child there is no escape from the dark war horse of This Attack! Disattack. 6 raw bursts of sonic bloodbath that will leave your ears bleeding in a ditch. The fear of doom dawning when the whole world will be bathed in Blood! The 4 song demo is complemented by 2 additional rehearsal songs and a 28 page booklet of archival material, hand-outs and photos. For those who worship Discharge, Anti Cimex and Sacrilege! Line-up includes a young Bill Steer pre-Carcass.
Our take: Disattack was a short-lived band from Merseyside, England, and their claims to fame are that they featured a 15-year-old Bill Steer before he was in Napalm Death or Carcass and that they ripped off Discharge earlier than most people thought of doing it. That’s the short version, but as this package from Demo Tapes Records proves, there’s so much more to the story. If you’re concerned about the music, it’s cool, but it’s not the total Discharge worship you might expect. While you can hear hints of the Scandinavian style that had emerged by the time they recorded this tape (which they were aware of… one of Disattack’s members ran the label that released Anti-Cimex’s Criminal Trap 12”), most of the songs here do a lot more than just rearrange Discharge parts into new patterns. If you’re into obscure British and European crust from the early to mid-80s, though, you’ll get plenty of spins out of this 1-sided 12”. However, what I enjoyed most about A Bomb Drops was the thick booklet, which told the band’s story through a mix of archival documents and interviews with Negative Insight fanzine from 2015. Disattack started as a joke in a fanzine—the 80s punk equivalent of a meme—then morphed into a functioning band and fell apart after a few months. However, it’s the details—including encounters with future metal superstars and international d-beat legends—that make the story interesting. I can think of very few packages that tell a band’s story more eloquently than this one. This is only for the real punk nerds, but if you’re one of those people, you’re gonna love it.