Sixteen minutes long and sloshing over with bile and bad attitude, Sore Throat's 1988 EP Death To Capitalist Hardcore was the first actual EP from the band, coming on the tail of some sought-after demos. This was at the dawn of real hardcore punk extremism in the UK, and these guys had attitude to spare: with two members of Doom in their ranks, they dropped this provocation on a likely bewildered audience: the cover art was a direct dig at U.S. crossover thrash legends D.R.I., the track list looked absolutely absurd with forty-five fuckin' songs, and the titles were and lyrics were absolutely scathing. The guys in Sore Throat certainly had their tongues firmly implanted in cheek when they put this insanity together, and I wonder if they had any clue as to how influential this wound end up beiing. The music on Death is abso0lutely berserk, a ruthless blast of bonegrinding stenchcore and D-beat driven brutality, four-second long eruptions of totally formless noisecore, ascerbic sound bites and cheeky samples, and some forays into what can only be described as accidently "avant-garde" hardcore. This EP was and is one of the highlights of the late 1980s UK extreme music underground, going on to establish itself along with their subsequent releases as iconic, pioneering examples of noisecore, but all of that batshit-crazy noiseblast was tempered with some seriously crushing tracks of bulldozing metalpunk like "M.F.N. (Music For Nobheads)" and "I.C.I. Fuck Off And Die". Things kick off with some 1000mph blurrcore splat and mangled crustcore that call for the castration of rapists and decries the demonic Military-Industrial Complex, respectively. But from there, the hyperspeed smears of noise and rampaging stench-core vacillarte constamntly between social outrage and environmental desperation, and straight-up "diss tracks" aimed squarely at just about everybody in the metal/punk underground of the time. Luckily for us, the lyrics are actually included in here: aside from the thrashers referenced on the cover sleeve, Sore Throat throws eggs and jabs at Earache Records (with whom they later signed, of course), Billy Milano and Stormtroopers Of Death (S.O.D.), Suicidal Tendencies (and essentially the entire crossover thrash scene), The Exploited, and probably countless more that I can't make out because most of the lyrics are written in a weird, in-joke manner with lots of acronyms and references to god knows what. The lyrics border on the poinant at times: on "Bomb The Whitehouse", the twenty-second avalanche of blastbeats, mega-distorted guitar noise and garbled bass back Rich hurling out the lines "Reagan you Nazi bastard / Reagan you fucking cunt / you've got cancer / you'll die, you motherfucker / bomb the White House.". Oh, and the final "song" appearing to be the sound of someone being murdered with a chainsaw.

The whole thing is a goddamn riot, of course, and one of the ground-zero releases for noisecore. These guys were without a doubt pushing the limits of hardcore/grindcore as far as they could, a strategy that would go on to turn even more ludicrous and absurdist with their next few records. This was also at the tip of the spear for the kind of noisecore / noisegrind that he likes of Anal Cunt would soon begin channeling in their own deranged style; I still see people online that are totally disgusted by this EP, who saw it as a kind of spoof of grindcore. Which, in some ways, it definitely was.