EP Review: Wasted Death – The Prequel To Evil
Reviewed by Tim Finch
Wasted Death describe themselves as “a ridiculously balls-out punk band” who feature as their core Charlie Davis of Beggar, Wayne Adams of Big Lad and Petbrick plus Tom Brewins of USA Nails. That’s three unique beings bringing three different takes on extreme music together and melding it into the most unlikely of banging tunes.
Having previously released their debut EP ‘Ugly As Hell’ April 2021 and landing just four months later, follow-up ‘Ugly As Hell II - Uglier Than Hell’ both via APF Records, proving they were no flash-in-the-pan supergroup.
Today, with no surrounding fanfare - or prior warning that they were about to release something - they release a new EP ‘The Prequel to Evil’ delivering three new tracks of monstrous aggression unlike anything you’ve heard before.
The latest offering opens with ‘Shock Kollar’, a rolling drum beat and the scream of feedback leads the unsuspecting listener into an onslaught of Wasted Death’s pummelling violence. Naplam Death like churning riffs and Charlie Davis tortuous screams leave you quaking. Intermittently there are passages not dissimilar to black metal masterpieces, which show an undercurrent to the bands music that leads you down a different track.
‘Sceptic Tank’ is different, it starts with a guitar low in you ear, slowly building in intensity and volume, hairs stand on the back of your neck as the bass and drums kick in, providing a backbone from which the song is about to burst forth. And burst it does, at the one minute mark Charlies vocals again spew out in a torrent of vitriolic anger, changing the song from a harrowing masterpiece into an aggression fuelled beast.
The EP’s final track '0.0% Fun' provides a third take on the thinking of this trio, feedback resumes once more as the vocals sit in the background, an echo behind the onslaught before it. This hints more at their punk roots, Dead Kennedy’s meets Napalm Death in a cacophony of wonderment.
Throughout the short seven and a half minute run time of this EP the band flick from punk to grindcore to black metal to all out noise and back again. A band not afraid to stretch that envelope of what extreme music should sound like. Mixing their different influences and different backgrounds they have produced a soupçons of what they are really about and if this is your first introduction to the band, produces that need to go back and check out those previous two opus’.
