After half a decade of staining basements and maintenance rooms with their filth and infecting minds with their pungent, anti-authoritarian, aural pertussis, Oakland crust punks Isotope have collected their entire discography onto a single cassette, which they unleashed late last year on Chad Gailey’s Carbonized Records.
Isotope was forged in the fevered, collective cranial foment of drummer Clint “Clza” Baechle and guitarist Nick “Sikki Nikki” Cantu sometime after Clza’s Acts of Sedition had thrown its final sonic molotov. The insurrectionist tendencies of the two quickly congealed into a deliberate attempt to contain and reproduce the volatile chain reaction that was Japan’s Bastard.
The band have come a long way since those combustive early recordings and their new collection has the receipts to prove up their aggrieved evolution. And yes, this collection has essentially the same cover as the band’s 2019 self-titled LP. This is how you know you’re listening to the real deal! Why would they spring for a new illustration of a devil knight when you’ve got a perfectly good one leftover from the previous record? Crusts are nothing if they’re not thrifty.
Isotope’s early recordings, represented by tracks 15 through 19, culled from Final Wind of Mercy Demo, certainly accomplish their stated goal of recreating the aesthetic and audio violence of their aforementioned infamous hardcore heroes, but it isn’t until the Midnight Soldier seven-inch that we start to get a sense for what the Isotope are capable of beyond performative adoration.
Represented by track 13 and 14, “Midnight Soldier” demonstrates Isotope’s sense of hack-saw melodicism, while “Final Wind of Mercy” sees the group plunge into unwholesome and nausea-inducing obliteration of Discharge-esque noise-punk, manifesting that band’s discordant allure at their least inhibited and operating under the miscreant cover of early black metal’s antimusic sensibilities.
The black metal elements hinted at on their seven-inch are fully embraced on the Midnight cloaked Tragedy worship and nomadic-marauder melee of the Wake Up Screaming EP (tracks 9 to 12), which burns like the soul of a dying planet, smoldering and erupting in rippling convulsions of exigent rage.
All of this grimy excess brings us back to the beginning, and the Isotope’s latest release, their self-titled LP (tracks 1 through 8), where the band has seized up their d-beat derivation and improved up the deadliness of their barbarous, long-sword swing, by imbuing it with the snaking tendrils and unholy aura Sabbat, allowing every pass of the blade to unleash a typhoon of demonic energy in the form of ripping solos and a scrape of darkly, graceful grooves.
Stream Isotope’s discography collection below via Bandcamp:
Get a copy of the cassette from Carbonized Records here.
