New Jersey hellraisers Razorheads sail in on a burst of feedback and get straight to work doling out some rough-as-guts corrosive hardcore that is also insanely catchy. Classic rock riffs and eighties metal swagger are not so much heard as felt through all the chaos that is Black Leather Hounds, whose title perfectly encapsulates Razorheads’ latent cock rock tendencies lurking beneath their ferocious canine snarl. Now you’re not gonna hear any wailing falsetto or hair metal hooks in this slab of noise – if anything, Razorheads’ singer has perfected the art of vocalizing destruction, spewing guttural noise at a pitch that blends almost perfectly with the wall of distortion issuing from the guitarists’ amps – but there are some definite stadium rock stylings buried under all the hardcore raging. Dive bombs abound in the muck as well as the occasional burst of ripping old school shred complete with copious abuse of the whammy bar.
Black Leather Hounds sounds like what you’d get if you took a ripping eighties metal band with a total shredder of a lead guitarist, replaced the singer with an actual rabid hound and then bathed the whole band in hydrochloric acid mid-set. Razorheads sound like a band on fire; raw, furious, violent, dangerous, determined to get their last few songs out before being completely incinerated, intent on taking as much of the audience as they can with them in as messy a way possible.
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