Ten short sharp blasts of ultra-frenetic, intense and to-the-point American hardcore punk in the vein of Negative FX, Agnostic Front, The Abused and Deathwish. They sure don’t waste time with any unessentials. What they have done is take a little more time with “My God…” since the previous tapes and 7” to expand on their sound and enrich the overall listening experience. A couple of these triumphant new epics are more than one minute in length so consider this their step up to Long Play maturity. Crawl Space has emerged from the basement and stepped into the daylight ready to stomp your ears out. This MLP is downright nasty.

Our take: Seattle’s Crawl Space make the jump to their hometown institution of Iron Lung Records on their debut 12”. If you caught their recent 7”, Bullshit Unity, on Forever Never Ends Records, Crawl Space has refined their sound since that release, not changing styles but making everything sharper, clearer, and meaner. Song titles like “Lay on the Tracks” (an 11-second burst) and “No Funeral” show the negativity on display here, which adopts the desperate world view I associate with Youth Attack Records, and as with bands like Hoax and Vile Gash, there’s a seediness mixed in there, the negativity pointed inward as much as outward. Sonically, the LP is based on the stop/start dynamics of Victim in Pain-era Agnostic Front, and it keeps your blood pumping across its entire 10 minutes. Mean as fuck.