THE COVER of Blasterbra’s debut EP Soon says a lot about the band. It’s colourful, playful, endearing, and vibrant, yet the artwork was inspired by the Mexican El Día de los Muertos festival, a day which commemorates the dead.
The sinister lurking beneath the sweet, or sometimes perched right alongside it, comes to the fore on this six-track release from the Galway band.
Over the past two years Blasterbra, led by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Anna McCarthy, have impressed with their mix of punk, metal, alternative, and Riot Grrl!. A live favourite and stand out track on Soon is ‘My Sweetheart The Punk’. It bounds along at a tremendous pace, and builds excitingly, thanks to Evan O’Connor’s thunderously heavy guitars, yet there is enough pop here to entice the non-punk/metal crowd.
However it is not so much a song of falling in love as one of lust and obsession, as the repeated mantra of “Your eyes, your eyes, your eyes...you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine” makes clear. Yet this possessiveness is undercut by anxiety as the song ends with “Say something, say anything...”
Elements of paranoia also creep into another key track, ‘Cutting Teeth’, where the onset of adulthood and independence proves uncomfortable: “You had to find out on your own. It’s fine I’m chocking, it’s fine I’m choking”.
‘Break In The Weather’ and ‘Basement’ are mellower, but this suits their more brooding, grunge influenced, style. Here too though the sinister and the paranoid emerge. ‘Break In The Weather’ pictures people scrambling for “bare essentials” in a post-Apocalyptic landscape, while ‘Basement’ is quite an unsettling song, possibly about child abduction.
Sinisterness is not something most Galway bands deal in, making the release of Soon all the more appealing.
