Boddicker – Crime Upheaval
It’s too bad this cassette is sold out and anyone who now wants to listen to it has to resort to, pfff, digital. Boddicker, get with the times. Listen, anything like has to be listened to on at least vinyl or cassette. It can’t be any other way, especially since they use Detroit as an image. Detroit is dying, it’s crumbling all around the people who still insist on living there as they down heavy liquor and watch the decay like fireworks. It’s kind of an unusual approach here because the city they’re referring to is one of fiction, not the one of reality, contained entirely within the world of Robocop and OCP. So convincing and confusing was their promotional sheet, or due to the fact we skimmed most of it, that we actually thought they were from Detroit and even originally had a whole write-up here that discussed the Detroit underground, but since they mean a fictional Detroit where everything isn’t falling apart, that hardline reporting had to be eliminated, and now you’re left with this. When Boddicker first contacted us we weren’t even entirely interested in doing a digital review, either, because we like to focus on all the hardcopy we get for obvious reasons, as we always say, plus they sent this to us awhile ago. But Boddicker were persistent, and their strange presentation in the promo taking direct referencing from Robocop was enough to make us do it, because just that one ED-209 scene is awesome enough. And Boddicker is awesome. In many ways it’s pretty much just like that scene, dual cannon arms a-blazing and bodies a-flying. Well, one body, but whatever.
Boddicker represents everything the underground is, the true underground, the underground we’re always drooling over and making fools out of ourselves over so we stay as far away from Noisey-level bullshit reviews as possible. As soon as the title track begins, your chips are all in and you have your Desert Eagle loaded and under the table in case you lose. Crime Upheaval exemplifies the image of Detroit because it sounds like it was dug out from under that corroded mess. It sounds like it was recorded in Detroit, probably in one of a number of collapsing buildings, each song during said session causing the final crack to form in the last remaining support beam as Boddicker got the last second of abuse on the master before they returned to Indianapolis, where they’re actually from. But it’s easy to confuse them as originating from that trash heap of a city, because they play a sickening sticky form of crust with elements of sludge, powerviolence, and general death metal, primarily of the old variety in terms of recording quality.
But it’s perfect for that. Whenever a band like this cuts some tapes, it needs to have the right amount of decay with the right amount of accessibility to really capture the crowd it needs to capture, that being the kind that don’t mind seeing a show in the basement of a squatter house with unidentified offal thrown into a corner that for some reason makes you strangely attracted to the girl over the way who hasn’t bathed in two weeks. And, in spite of the relative shortness to the tracks, there’s a surprising amount of variety to be found here, enough that each listen almost sounds like an entirely new experience. It’s full of energy, power, and that rawness that keeps us having so much fun down here in the depths, it almost makes us wish we were living in real Detroit and facing near death just going out to get a bottle of water. The imagery they use may be slightly confusing, especially the signature of Dick Jones at the end there, but there’s something about it that works. It’s probably because there’s a wealth of disgust to be found in Crime Upheaval, and just the right amount of it. Start to finish, stellar, blow your ears out with this stuff and show them who’s a real man. By the time it’s over you only wish it’s just begun.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Boddicker – Crime Upheaval
Self-Released
5 / 5
