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Disfear: Everyday Slaughter 12” (Havoc Records) Holy hot damn, Havoc Records brings a landmark Swedish d-beat record back into print. When I wrote about Havoc’s reissue of Disfear’s 1995 LP Soul Scars, I mentioned I became aware of Disfear through their more polished 2000s releases, not learning until years later about their furious early material. It’s tempting to see 1997’s Everyday Slaughter as the culmination of that early era, as the record after this one marked a change in drummer, vocalist, and style. Everyday Slaughter, though, is a total shredder. Disfear recorded the album with Thomas Skogsberg at Sunlight Studios, who also produced sonically renowned Swedish death metal classics like Entombed’s Left Hand Path and Clandestine, Dismember’s Like an Ever Flowing Stream, Carnage’s Dark Recollections, and many others. However, the bigger production on Everyday Slaughter is balanced out by a feral performance from the band, who lays into these songs like a hungry pack of wolves on a fresh kill. Disfear builds most of these songs around short, relatively simple riffs, and even though the clarity and beefiness of the tones might sound metal, the music here is pure hardcore punk. Check out the last track on the a-side, “Subsistence,” whose verse riff is literally just one chord played as hard and as fast as possible for four bars… it’s so fucking PUNK. I’d call it a highlight, but every moment of Everyday Slaughter crackles with energy and power. It’s just a great fucking record, a high-definition portrait of a band at the top of their game.