Full Blown Chaos are as fierce and uncontrollable as their name might suggest. Their album Heavy Lies The Crown comes roaring out of your speakers like a tooled-up street-gang – disciplined, tough, focused and furious. Full Blown Chaos play the true hardcore.
The music on Heavy Lies The Crown displays the band’s New York roots to the fullest – you can hear the ancestry of the uncompromising groups that ruled the Big Apple back-streets before them in the rock-solid beatdowns and ragged bellowed chants. Nowhere more so than the album’s title track, “Heavy Lies The Crown”, which closes out with classic NYHC call-response crowd-chorus shouting and howling guitar feedback.
But Full Blown Chaos have more than one trick in their play-book. That sturdy hardcore stomp is tempered and fleshed out with the rapid-fire assault of golden-era thrash, interspersing frantic snares, kick-drum barrages and super-fast muted chord-work between the slow-motion savagery.
Lyrically, Full Blown Chaos are articulating the traditional hardcore themes of personal strength and integrity in the face of a corrupt and shitty world. A fist in the face of conformity and oppression, transcendence through struggle, personal integrity in the face of insufferable odds.
Nothing new there, then, nor in song titles like “Fail Like A Champ” and “All For Nothing” … but Heavy Lies The Crown has a clearly audible level of passion and commitment to it that many bands would struggle to match. Full Blown Chaos mean every word, every note, every blow.
Proof and demonstration of that commitment can be found encapsulated in the closing song of Heavy Lies The Crown, a two-part number entitled “Mojave Red”. The first half is a thoughtful instrumental, packed with the harmonised lead guitar lines of classic thrash slow-numbers, while the second part is like a three minute chunk of all the most intense and brutal tropes from the tunes that preceded it, a condensed ball of fury … an exorcism.
When you realise it’s written about the close shave with death the band experienced on tour a few years ago, it all makes sense. That said, if I were the Grim Reaper himself, I’d think twice about trying to take Full Blown Chaos through the veil – to judge by Heavy Lies The Crown, they sound like the kind of guys who would go out fighting.
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