Sickboy: Shake Hands With A Clenched Fist
Tigerbeat6

Well, with a name like Sickboy, what should you expect? Ridiculously damaged soundclash, naturally. Detonative, shameless, and completely unrepentant, Shake Hands With A Clenched Fist is a relentless thirteen-track stomper hellbent on offending just about everybody. In fact it's the Belgium ‘boy's debut American-label release, falling on the heels of an LP version issued by Mirex. Devotees of Jason Forrest's The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash will find much to drool over here (Forrest in fact helped out on “Folk Riddim Wars”) as it mines similar stylistic territory, even if Sickboy, unlike Forrest, typically shreds the original material so completely it's rendered largely unrecognizable. At other times, source material is gleefully acknowledged, his totally insane evisceration of Queen (“Bohemian Crapsody,” the ‘boy's contribution to Death$ucker's 2003 Ballroom Blitz comp) a case in point. Strap yourself in for jungle-drenched squealing (“One O Three . Nine”), grinding splatter (“Tashtang”), pounding Scottish jig breakcore (“Folk Riddim Wars”), and ten more cranium-crippling mashups.

November 2004