With the beginning of the new NHL season, this couldn't have come at a better time!

The McSorley verdict now in and my team getting set to lay waste to all the feeble competition in their division, I'm in a prime fighting mood and if this new thing by Damaged doesn't evoke even a little of that fiery spirit inside you, break out the embalming fluid cause you've just bought it fella!

Okay, so what sets these guys apart from the usual glut of Hard-core and Death rumblings… well for one thing, there's an awful lot of brutality going on, not so much in the idea of "What you looking at punk!"

But very much in the Death Metal direction, with a firestorm of bombastic drumming and deafening screams ripping through a fast-paced guitar shred… and we're only at song two for God's sake!

"Broken" started things off and before you know it every breakable object on the shelves is in immediate danger!

"Cyberwar" is then quickly upon us and look out now but the wave of the future has swarmed remorselessly upon us ensuring the face of tomorrow's forever left in a pile of dead ash…

"Lifestyles" slows things down a might with a tersely grinding feel and the insertion of many more break blasts moving swiftly between the hammer and stirrup!

Lyrically, Damaged writes not from an angle of the supernatural as it applies to the decadence and decay that our world continues to reap but rather from within-and this is where the hard-core generalities come into play, and their passionate anger that stems from hatred and scorn…

"Hatecore" anyone?

Rather than feed off the tiresome idea of "diversity" that seems to fit every group these days, "Hatecore" seems only fitting and one they're most comfortable with-if one defines "comfort" as an unwelcome smack in the face, but numbing nonetheless.

You can call them this or that… "Grindcore," maybe in certain instances but they're really too fast for simply that…

"Death" is another characteristic and so is just about anything else you can think of that's mean, nasty and wicked!

This is the first I've heard of these guys and first of all, I'm shocked to learn they've been around as long as they have… somewhere during the '80s is when they got this idea to torture the living daylights out of the good, clean and friendly music industry… so we know there's going to be that thrash element present over and above anything else… and it is. Secondly, they're Australian and I can't explain why that impresses me the way it does but I guess I've grown so used to the likes of AC/DC or Silverchair… or even Mortification that I never quite imagined something so intensifying would rise up from down under!

They're attack is unprecedented and their skills second to none in the extreme music terrain… it won't be long before the shock wears off and we see these guys making a real dent in the armor of American Metal!

Released by Rotten Records

Review by Vinnie Apicella [va85@columbia.edu]