It's never crossed my mind before, but mixing together brutal sludgy noise rock and ferocious crusty thrash the way that Fight Amp have is a pretty cool recipe. Bringing together the jagged aggro heaviness of Am Rep rock thud from the 90's and the apocalyptic D-beat driven thrash resulted in the debut album Hungry For Nothing from the New Jersey band, and this slab immediately went onto my list of "heaviest albums in 2008" when we got it in right at the end of the year; we've been playing this disc constantly since getting it in. Before getting picked up by Translation Loss and releasing this mighty eight-song slab, the band shortened their name from Fight Amputation to the leaner Fight Amp, and honed their sound to crushing, sludgy perfection, packing a desperate, nauseous energy into the album's tightly constructed thirty-three minute length. Fight Amp combine awesome riffs, massive angular basslines, tons of midpaced thrash parts that are custom made for violent circle pits, gnarly guitar feedback and dissonant guitar textures, lumbering sludge, and raw, meaty production. A thunderous metallic juggernaut made up of equal parts Unsane and Tragedy, Discharge and Melvins and Bleach era Nirvana. The song "Lungs" starts off surging and stopping, a huge grinding riff hammered out over an angular rhythm like Jesus Lizard at their heaviest, then breaks into blazing D-beat thrash a minute in. "Bound And Hagged" merges massive Melvins like heaviness with panicked screams that sound on the verge of collapse, and a heavy drum intro starts up "Late Bloomer" as winding riffage and another crushing bassline snake through the first half of the song, exploding midway through into more awesome fast-paced crustcore. From beginning to end, this is heavy as fuck, and it's one of the only bands I've heard that fits in just as well with neo-noise rock heavies like Black Elk, Akimbo, Diesto and Tigershark as they do with the crusty metallic power of Kylesa, an awesome combo of noise rock, hardcore punk, thrash, and sludge - like I said, one of the heaviest albums that came out last year, and highly recommended!