According to their bandcamp page https://chewpunx.bandcamp.com/music (where you can also check out their – I’m assuming to be full – back catalogue), C.H.E.W. are from Chicago, Illinois. They are a female fronted 4-piece combo. Apparently their name isn’t actually an acronym of anything, and they cite Crass records and ACAB amongst their personal interests. However, as a band they are interested in badass riffs and sick mosh parts. Sounds pretty legit to me. A casual trawl of the internet has yielded dick all information as to whether the band members have other affiliations past or present, but I would assume they probably do or did.
What we have here is 16 slices of no frills hardcore punk, bordering on powerviolence, delivered directly to your head and neck like a sound fucking kicking over the course of half an hour. Very important. This means that the songs average out at less than 2 minutes each for those of you that suck at simple mathematics even worse than I do.
The mix feels kinda weird, with the drums to the forefront. The rest seems kind of “muddy”, but I think that this is either intentional or somehow works in favour of this recording somehow. It makes this feel, I dunno, more vital? This for me seems like a particularly evil hybrid of F-Minus and Nausea, which I appreciate is a bit of a dated frame of reference. In terms of a more up to date context, if we talk along the lines of the likes of Cell, War on Women and Fucked & Bound, then we are of course in the correct approximate ball park.
This is the audio equivalent of getting ragged to pieces by a massive crocodile and having your dismembered corpse stored under a rotting tree trunk. Only you are kind of enjoying it for some weird reason you can’t quite fathom. Relentless, nasty and inspired.
Tony of Nurgle rating: 9/10
You can grab a digital download of this from the Drunken Sailor bandcamp page or hook up the LP on pink (first 100 copies) or black from the Drunken Sailor webstore
