HAARM are a raw punk band hailing from somewhere around the L. A. area, and this demo is their first offering, an unmistakeable presentation of what this band’s music is all about. Essentially, HAARM is sadism in musical form. Aural self-mutilation. A screwdriver rammed into your eardrums. Empty hands and shattered dreams in a world where you have lost everything. In under ten minutes, HAARM somministrate to the listener the soundtrack to their demise. Songs of disease and disgust. Riffs that sound like rats gnawing through your skull. Vocals that sound like the howls coming from a godforsaken leper colony.
HAARM play raw punk, alright, but they do it with their own twist, alienating everything in an inconsolable mid-tempo and slowing everything down in a pit of disgruntled and exasperated depressive rock. As their unclean melodies and spastic rhythms take shape, you get a full and unmistakeable picture of their musical vision: self-erosion, disgust, misanthropy, resignation, starvation, loss…. unwillingness to exist, all gobbled up and then vomited out through a completely emaciated production quality; a wilted audio quality that communicates just one thing: lack of everything, total fucking loss and disgust.
In this band’s repellent music, you can hear the Germs, GG Allin, Void, Fear, Black Flag and Crucifix all sandblasted by a downpour of misery and abjection and disfigured by a swarming and revolting haze of chaotic lo-fi frequencies, feedback, and by an embittered fog of disgusting fuzz. This is the world of HAARM, a world with no beauty or hope. A world where disgust reigns unchallenged over everyone and everything and in which all life is choked at the roots and slowly left to rot in a slow and agonizing death.
