Cactus's
Tropical Terror
Self Released
By Jose Fritz
I have written band bios in the past, but when asked to write bios I fabricate most of it. I make up all kinds of crap. Cactus’s band bio borders on impossible. They claim that drummer Jru Frazier is from a screamo band in Korea. He and guitarist Asher Rogers gave up trying to find a bassist and just recruited Asher’s little brother Sam and made him learn how to play. Did it truly happen that way? I really can’t say. If it’s a lie, it’s a bold lie, a bold brave lie told by Southern men with colossal balls. In a show of respect to that possibility, I shall proceed as if it were true.
Sam Rogers did to learn to play and what a strange concoction they became. They have that barreling-down-the-highway feeling that the Ramones invented and was more recently owned by Mclusky. They stop short of The Deadly in terms of raw speed, but not intensity. They crank up the pressure with hardly hardcore breakdowns and barely coherent time changes.
Cactus's proceed full well on that front, brazenly mixing hardcore with math rock and old school punk with the new school of noise-rock. The song “Perverted Shark” is a crushing mix of knuckle-dusters and jabs aimed right at your ears. It opens with some odd time guitar picking that’s vaguely cowpunk, cut’s into an Oi-Oi-Oi downbeat followed by an odd triplet feeling breakdown that is just a headfake the used before really dropping the hammer. There is no end to the number of unexpected detours the cram into each song. It’s literally exhausting to keep up. Only the song “Daddy” falls short, every other cut is a winner.
I noticed that some particularly wussy critics with delicate sensibilities took umbrage with Cactus's 4x4 approach to riffing. I am always surprised when a critic has trouble with the exchange of rawness and power for clarity and focus. Matt Schild of Aversion.com went as far as to call it “sonic mush.” Schild is not normally a pansy but hey, if the shoe fits…
Punk rock has a tradition of greatness. It includes a great number of rabidly intense bands: The Stooges, Flipper, Murder City Devils, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and even Social Distortion. The whole fucking idea of punk rock is that it’s a bastardization of rock music. The indication there is that you can trade exuberance for precision, a novice for a technician, and a hammer for a scalpel. Punk rock ain’t fucking chamber music.
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