���There's been some fantastic noise rock coming out lately, not just from relative newcomers like Drunk Dad and Wizard Rifle that I've been fawning all over lately, but some new albums from legends like Today Is The Day and Cutthroats 9 that kind of came out of nowhere and completely flattened me this fall. While not as well known as Today Is The Day, The Cutthroats 9 are still noise rock royalty, and their new album Dissent appears a whole fourteen years after their previous full-length, their self-titled 2000 debut on Man's Ruin. These legendary scuzz-thugs started out as a side-project from Unsane's Chris Spencer, formed right around the time that Unsane was disbanding and Spencer was moving out to the West Coast; Unsane's subsequent reformation and touring forced Spencer to put this band on hold for awhile, but now with his new self-owned label Lamb Unlimited and a revised lineup (which includes members of Death Angel, Hammers Of Misfortune and 16), he's resurrected this grimy gutter-sludge assault with a new seven song album that sounds as ugly and pissed as ever.

���Named after Joaquin Romero Marchent's notorious 1972 Italian splatter-western, The Cutthroats 9 belt out a bludgeoning brand of noise rock that has that classic Am Rep feel, but also heavily incorporates Spencer's deranged slide guitar playing to produce something pretty unique. As Dissent pours forth all of it's blistered, discordant disgust, Spencer and company shred their way through tracks like the lurching, angular aggression of "Trouble" and "Hit The Ground", primo noise rock assaults, echoing that classic Unsane sound but a little less metallic, loosening it up with a kind of deranged bluesiness. A lot of that comes from Spencer's wailing slide-guitar abuse, corroded metal slipping across the strings, adding an emotional punch behind all of the bellicose howling and muck-encrusted riffage. The furious, anthemic churn of "We Could", one of the album's most infectious ragers, gets hit with a big dose of roadhouse harmonica, and there's some soul-wrecked balladry that shows up with the dark-cloud moodiness of closer "Induction", the album only slowing down and easing up on the adrenaline at the very end, though even this one gets pretty goddamn heavy; and dig that title track, definitely a contender for one of the meanest-sounding noise rock songs of the year. If Unsane were the sound of New York city streets scraping against your soul, Cutthroats 9 could be the howl of a hellzoner honkey-tonk - old-school noise rock fans should definitely check this out, a killer comeback from these guys. Includes a digital download.