Exterminator! – You Need The Service? Review

Aotearoa New Zealand trio Exterminator! aren’t a punk band, per se. However, the Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) band’s tar-thick sludge was born in the squalid depths of their hometown’s DIY punk scene. In the same way that Corrupted or Grief aren’t punk bands either — except, of course, when they totally are — Exterminator!’s knuckle-dragging pursuits have crossover appeal for connoisseurs of down-tuned filth and low-gauge murk and misery. The group’s debut, You Need the Service?, is as manky as a crustie’s crotch, and the doom-drenched tracks within leech untold horrors, both audial and psychological.

Exterminator!’s ability to expertly craft disgusting yet hypnotic dirges isn’t a huge surprise, given the band’s creative connections to NZ sludge-punk three-piece Meth Drinker (RIP). Meth Drinker’s two full-length albums (and various splits and EPs) attracted a sizable audience of unwashed punks and drug-fucked metalheads at home and overseas. I’m probably not doing Exterminator! any favours — as they endeavour to carve out their identity — by leaning too hard on ties to Meth Drinker, but it’s unavoidable, really. Like Meth Drinker, Exterminator!’s gruesome sludge crawls through gutters filled with dirty needles and broken glass. And as with Meth Drinker, Exterminator!’s music evokes the decimating toll of fractured minds and shattered lives.

Self-released last December (on the 25th, no less – Merry Crimbo, motherfucker), You Need the Service? is constructed from three core elements: cement-mixer bass, downer buzz riffs, and brain-drilling percussion. It’s a simple list of ingredients, but Exterminator! work their deafening modus operandi for all its worth, tightening the noose, riff by riff, on stomach-churning tracks.

The band (featuring Monotony – “churning bile & rotting gums”, Jabbawokie – “noise of flame & plague”, and C. Morbus – “acid drums & insolence”) kick into gear on You Need the Service?‘s neck-snapping opener “Extermination”. Right from the start, screeching feedback attacks the senses. Slowly, the band lock into a sick (and cyclical) groove, incrementally applying more erosive pressure with every crushing riff and croaking vocal tic. No question, Exterminator! display a remorseless glee as they ramp up the mental and aural torture.

There’s a dank paranoiac odour clinging to You Need the Service? — a stink that says fuck your dispensary budtender, this is back alley, dumpster diving, ditch-weed shit. This a very bad trip. Shrooms gone awry. This is huffing the stench of a rotting rat in a sack. Tracks like “The Horror on the Cruise Ship” and “Bug Spray” feature a nauseating tension with Exterminator! sounding as loose as a prolapse, yet, somehow, still as tight as a surgical scar.

The bad news is that the issue that haunts Exterminator! haunts every other band mentioned in this post — i.e. lava-paced, repetitive riffage is not always greeted with open arms. Exterminator!’s music is also 100% obnoxious. It’s demanding, sonically, which is a definite plus in my book, and Exterminator! will absolutely test your patience. For all of their debut’s dankness and density, You Need the Service? is still desolate in places. Tracks are stripped to their bare (distortion-lashed) essentials, and while You Need the Service? isn’t lo-fi, as such, the album sounds markedly corrosive. Tinnitus sufferers, proceed with caution. The point is, this isn’t your bro’s beefed-up / craft-beer-podcaster sludge. This is raw sewage.

You Need the Service? also doesn’t feature any fretboard gymnastics or wildly animated moments to admire. It’s all slow-baked poison. An ulcer that just won’t heal. And you’d already have to be a diehard fan of leaden-footed metal to appreciate the droning gunge here. There are undoubtedly many more welcoming places to start if you’re sludge-curious.

I’m detailing Exterminator!’s (and You Need the Service?‘s) confrontational or challenging aspects as a warning rather than a criticism. For subterranean sludge nerds, Exterminator!’s nihilistic cacophonies will clearly resonate as the band tap into the same downtempo vibes of groups like Buzzov*en, Noothgrush, or the aforementioned Corrupted and Grief. Exterminator!’s music’s got that same deranged edge — like a guy smoking crack on the bus, it looks wrong, and it definitely feels wrong, but maybe more wrong is precisely what you need to get by in this fucked-up world.

Even better, You Need the Service? has a whole other — and arguably more experimental — layer. In much the same way that harsh noise artists reshape and repurpose disfigured sounds, Exterminator! use oceans of abrasive distortion and feedback as acid-scorched instrumentation in of itself. (See the piercing “Waiting for something to Happen” or the caustic, bass-driven churn of “Interzone”.) The same sheet-metal psychedelia arises time and again and throughout You Need the Service?, the membrane between noise and music remains unfixed and permeable.

The ten-tonne rocker “Fear of Gonkulator” features plenty of trampling momentum. But in the main, it’s slowly grinding (and epic-length) dirges like “Dipteran Turbulence” that underline Exterminator!’s key strengths. Wretched waves of primitive riffs and battering drums crash against the shores of your mind, obliterating, along the way, all your hopes and dreams.

It’s hard to recommend music that’s so inherently unpleasant. But then, that’s what makes Exterminator!’s debut so great — it’s fucking horrible, wonderfully so. You Need the Service?‘s spirit-crushing gravity is hammered home via tracks that suffocate as much as they pummel you into submission. Here lies the weight of our collapsing civilization. You Need the Service? is bleak as hell and heavy as a funeral. It’s misanthropy writ large, negative noise incarnate, and the complete negation of all. Thrice the fun for prophets of doom.

Miserable bastards, messed-up peeps, and psychotic citizens see within.

Posted by Craig Hayes

Old man from Aotearoa New Zealand. I write about dadcrust for d-beat dorks, raw punk nerds, and metal dweebs.

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