"This is how The Stooges would sound if they were a hardcore band," says Desperado frontman Thomas Ryjord. It's certainly a weighty claim but apparently Ryjord is a man of his word. Over the course of this album's nine tracks his band proceed to wrangle the sort of bass-heavy and uncomfortably intense punk that Iggy Pop loved so much into the sort of shapes that Refused, The Blood Brothers and Every Time I Die might recognise.

It was probably silly to doubt them in the first place, as Desperado have been doing this for a while. Beauty Is The First Victim may be the first that the UK has heard of the band but they've been kicking out the jams in their home country of Norway since 2001. Now it might seem that wherever a band comes from these days they sound so SoCal, but there is thankfully a real Scandinavian flavour to much of this. It's in the cold, cool power of the riffs, it's in the accent of Ryjord's spittle-flecked scream and it's where that pesky Refused comparison comes from.

Desperado aren't nearly frenzied or finessed enough to call themselves the shape of punk to come but from the high-adrenaline high-kicks of 'All Hat, No Cattle' to the magnetic fuzz of 'Plastic Century Media' this disc is a rip-snorting rock and roll beast. The music flexes and kicks and screams like a champ, the lyrics, often reduced to a series of barks and yelps, sound fantastic because of the gut-roaring power and underplayed melody they're expelled with and any band big and ugly enough to write a smoky, almost spoken-word song called 'The Day Emo Died' deserves much extra kudos. It's all over in a bleary-eyed flash too. Fan-punking-tastic.

Rating: 4/5 by Simon T Diplock

Tracklisting

1. All Hat, No cattle
2. Velvet Suffocation
3. Persistent Descent
4. Walls Don't Have Colours
5. Beauty Is The First Victim
6. The Day Emo Died
7. Heritage From Hell
8. The Frame
9. Plastic Century Mantra

Further links

Stunted Records.co.uk

Record company and management, home to FULC, Desperado and more...

Desperado (desperado.deadletterrecords.net)

Official site for these Norwegian desperados