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Chthonic, catatonic, chronic...
Cro Memory Grin is a masterpiece. Thirteen turbocharged tracks indebted to the pleasures and pitfalls of their lives in the modern city of Sydney and to the the first and second waves of international extreme music freaks and loonies: pure fucking aggression. The Oily Boys have graced us with a beast of an album that swells between direct, gripping, tangible hardcore punk and near nauseating psychedelia and throb which at moments feels like either ritual trance or a nervous breakdown. Cro Memory Grin contains near equal measures of tension and release; an exercise in high catharsis.
It’s rare that a punk record can give the listener anywhere near the same intoxicating feel of an “everything louder than everything else” live show, but that’s what Oily Boys have done. That lightning in a bottle feeling of excitement, chaotic energy, delirium, presence in a moment and frenzied flight into a mind state both frightening and ecstatic.
The stone has been carved, the fire has been lit, and this is it... Cro. Memory. Grin.
Our take: Well, this is a weird one. This hardcore band out of Sydney, Australia gives us the progressive, psychedelic take on tough hardcore none of us knew we wanted. Seriously, who would have thought you could smash together the Cro-Mags and Wire so effectively? Oily Boys don’t just slap some “weird” intros and outros on standard hardcore tracks, either. While there are straightforward HC tunes (“Headstone,” for instance, sounds like Feel the Darkness-era Poison Idea covering something from Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing), Oily Boys are at their best and most memorable when they sound like someone took an artsy post-punk band and locked them in a room with nothing but steroids and weights for a year. See the knuckle-scraping “Lizard Scheme” (part “LA Blues,” part “Dub” from the Cro-Mags demo), the unexpectedly melodic “Heat Harmony,” and the closing track, “GTrance,” which answers the question, “What would ‘Malfunction’ sound like if it had appeared on 154?” Cro Memory Grin is one of those records that sound so new I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but I’ve been seduced by its originality.