- There are some bands and some records you can spend an awful lot of vocabulary on. There are some others that can be summed up, most effectively, in just a few words. Batpiss fall into the latter category: Punk, sludge, stoner, hardcore. Whoops, that’s four, I’ve said too much already.

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Behind the elegant artwork for the debut full-length from Melbourne’s roaring Batpiss, Nuclear Winter, which according to the band will cause everyone to grow extra eyes and then evaporate, leaving behind a pool of melted skulls (just going by that cover art), there is a band that are capable of producing a fairly nuanced variety of heavy sounds.
You wouldn’t necessarily get that from the first few numbers, like the speeding, angular postpunk / hardcore screaming of Seed or the crushing, repeated descent on an e-minor chromatic scale, that is the riff to Drag Your Body. Something about that, when they bolt it to the repeated shrieking on a high b about something blood-chilling and including the words dead or alive. It sounds like (someone fed a lot of steroids to) The Dead Weather’s Cut Like A Buffalo (and then set fire to it) and has ‘single’ written all over it.
After fixating on that little toe-tapper for a while, we can take in some of the other entertainments on offer. There’s the dorian groove of Burn Below which sounds a bit like a hardcore Rock Lobster, but things start to get really interesting on the second half of the record. The band hit the brakes for the slow sludge jam of Human and build it to a big, swinging finish. The rhythmic complexity of the song is something that is repeated many times in the back end of Nuclear Winter, perhaps most notably on Loose Screws. Punk smashers like Couldn’t Get Out are in much shorter supply, although there is the post-punk of Portal, the cold and repetitive drive of which is, apparently, the band’s attempt to channel Joy Division.
They don’t leave us without a big, or at least thickly textured finish, in the seven minute, sludge-stoner grind of Drone. Y’know, I could even ask for a thicker texturing, on much of this. Producer Tom Lyngcoln’s very specific genius might work well for his own, justly lauded Harmony or The Nation Blue, but Batpiss could stand something just a touch more high-fidelity to really give the band’s undeniable, sludgy warmth, something to hook into your spine with. That's something neither Tom’s production nor the equally renowned Mikey Young’s mastering has quite been able to nail.
Whatever. As a sludge-spraying debut hardcore hand-grenade, Nuclear Winter is great, everything you and your friends will need to mutate your heads and leave you in a slowly congealing puddle of skulls.

- Chris Cobcroft.