SLUNT – Get A Load Of This

You Slunt! A short phrase so vile it must have seethed from the underside of a trash dumpster in the darkest of alleys in the worst neighborhood from the most loathsome of characters. A phrase containing a word, that if changed ever so slightly, would surely get the album kicked off of the local retail outlet shelves. A word that is the moniker for New York’s latest band du jour; it is the keystone of who Slunt are and what they are about.

Get A Load of This is Slunt’s first release with Repossession Records, and it is an eleven song outing of some of the filthiest Rock ‘N’ Roll licks to grace one’s speakers in years. Much like their name, the music is low-ball, gutter-stomp Rock. Love songs … not from the heart, but songs from the gut, and songs from the crotch. Songs sung not by Johnny-Come-Lately, but by Abby Gannet, a vivacious hard-bodied, sweat-glistening vixen who tells it like it is. The other female in the band, Ilse Baca, holds her own when grinding out the bass lines. Rounding out this quartet is gutter-riff extraordinaire, Pat Harrington on guitar (you guessed it), and Charles Ruggiero pounding on drums.

Keeping true to their not-so-subtle innuendos, the album title and cover shot, a scantily clad female upper torso with dripping ice cream, are also fitting imagery. What they are about is hard-driving songs from the old school book of three-chord Rock with a heavy dose of Punk attitude to punch you in the face. Blunt-force lyrics, wrapped tight in a thick power-chord-crunch, drive this disc from start to finish. Songs like “Ok, Ok,” “Loved By You,” and “The Best Thing” are Pop-laden melodies driven to a relentless four-four-get-on-your-feet beat. Their cover of Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never” fits this collection like a velvet glove with its lyrics, “I might like you better if we slept together.”

The only complaint about Get A Load of This is that the production is a little too tight. The sound overall is very thick and ballsy, but there is no room to breath. The guitars are never allowed to ring out and the cymbals seem to always cut short. This makes the band sound tight, but it also makes things sound stiff and incomplete. Hopefully, after this album sells a million copies (hint, hint) and the spring/summer tours with Motorhead and COC rake in all sorts of cash and notoriety, the next album will capture the rawness that is dying to be unleashed from Slunt.