Scene and Heard

Slasher Risk at Death by Audio

Photos by Nate Dorr » With Fiasco, Grasshopper, Chaos Majik, and Power Animal.

Text by Jeremy Krinsley
Posted on June 25, 2009

Last Wednesday, Slasher Risk pulled out the big guns (or at least the big amps) for one of their first "official" shows in months. Normally I wouldn't quote an excited email but this was no joke. So, Andy Borsz, one-half of Slasher Risk:

This will be the first Slasher Risk "big style" (full huge ass amps and drums) in the city since the New York Eye & Ear festival in December. We have been playing out of the city and only playing smaller gear set-ups in around town since then so we're breaking out the heavy artillery for this one and I'm pretty sure most of our people can't wait for it.

As mentioned: no effing joke. If you, like me, crave for bands to be as crazy as you read about them in the days of Iggy Pop rolling around in glass or Alen Vega threatening his audience with glass or DNA making the sound of breaking glass with guitars, then you need to stay on top of this intermittent explosion from Slasher Risk. Yeah, you can catch any Joe Hardcore band swinging mics around violently, maybe running at each other, barking, or god forid, doing the stage blood thing, but when was the last time you saw a girl stomp across the neck of her guitar in boots to make feedback, or a guy slamming one guitar against a second to make feedback, or watched, as all this feedback keeps rising through their "full huge ass amps," as Andy Borsz has some sort of spiritual constipation forcing him to writhe over the drumset, midbeat, glaring at some demon on the other side of the room who he and bandmate Sara Cavic have summoned and may or may not excorcise once they pick up the thrashing guitar and drums punk beat with which they started and closed the set? (See picture above.)

Fiasco must have tasted the air because they followed up with a racous, noisy, even abrasive version of their regular material. Grasshopper and Chaos Majik meanwhile opened with two distinct strains of noise, Todd Pendu's C.Maj going the perpetual gust of fresh, textural wind route and Grasshopper exploring the peaks and valleys of static and mutilated horn samples. Philly-based, touring Power Animal opened with nuanced and sometimes quite twee tunes that involved some eleborate percussion toys and a whole lot of minute, delicate details- all in all a carefully crafted outfit that made the later performances that much more crushing.