Zero Again: Revert to Nothing​.​.​. – EP review

Zero Again: Revert to Nothing​.​.​. (Kibou +3)

7″/DL

Pre-orders from 5th March

West Country thrashy folk horror Members Of… punk band Zero Again follow up their first EP with another raging slab of vinyl reflecting on our interesting times.

This second EP is in a similar vein to the debut EP with more of Zero Again’s own brand of bleak, dark thrashy folk horror. However, this set of songs takes heavy inspiration from Rudimentary Peni, from whose song they take their name. Heavy chugging guitar switches to chilling spindly melodies and a punchy twangy bass drives the songs forward along with the pounding drums. The anguished screaming vocals dominate. Really powerful, tight, stabs accentuate the beginning and ending of songs.

Last time round I mentioned Born Against, His Hero Is Gone, Killing Joke and Cross Stitched Eyes among others. Bear that in mind but take Rudimentary Peni at their most angry and imagine them funnelling you into the furnaces of hell. This was what I heard and then I looked at the cover art! Fait accompli.

Zero Again switch between horror imagery and straight-up politics. My World Now is a damnation of Trump and, recorded in October, came before it was confirmed he lost the election. Not As I Do is a clear inditement of the advisors behind the politicians pulling the strings. Dominic Cummings and all the ones whose names you do not know.

You can listen to My World Now by Zero Again here.

On Tomorrow Disappears, they again bring in a reference to caskets (this term featured in lyrics on the first EP). There is consistent imagery at work. Death walks among us…don’t it just! At times its seems there is an element of fatalism and resultant nihilism at play…death’s gonna get ya, don’t fight it. But then in a song like Angry Corpses, behind the descriptive horror, there is a moral. “Just know we died for a chance that you might live/ And now I go without/ Squandered the most selfless gift of all/ And let it turn to shit”

Final track Making Sense of Reality has a nightmare-ish aesthetic, the helter-skelter bass and guitar climbing their way through the several layers of hell, Lard-esque demonic laughter goading you from the sidelines. Appropriate for a song that looks at the way reality can become so distorted and difficult to fathom in a whirling social media frenzy.

Available from Kibou Records (UK), Little Jans Hammer Records (ESP), Sick World Records (NZ) & Cimex Records (SWE)

Zero Again are on Facebook

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Words by Nathan Brown. Check out his Louder Than War Author Archive.

Source: louderthanwar.com