Picture it: Ozzy Osborne, John Bonham and Glenn Danzig lay serene with a post-coital simper at the satanic love child they have just created. It gruesomely spawns itself from the womb and slowly rises with a mien hell-bent on destruction. It violently appropriates the leatherjackets off its progenitors. It’s ready.

 
Unfortunately the actual inception of Brisbane’s DZ Deathrays isn’t that cool. But one thing is for sure; debut album Bloodstreams will induce similar fantasies.

This thing frenetically clouts you in the face with a thick wall of sound – repetitively – for 40 minutes. Don’t be mislead by ambient opener Intro, with its reverberated and sporadic guitar. If anything DZ are just setting it up perfectly. They are about to violently rip your soul out. Teenage Kickstarts gets things going with adrenaline-fuelled screams, thumping drums and punk-rock riffage that on its own is so dirty that you’d rather switch to porn when your mum walks in. Much of the album continues in such vain, with no respite. With titles like ‘Play dead until you’re dead’ and ‘Brains’, you don’t need to speculate much further what to expect. However the true genius of DZ isn’t necessarily their devil-may-care attitude or the sheer volume of their music, it’s their virtuosity in doing so. Bloodstreams is backed by some seriously knack instrumentation. The guitars are an amalgamation of innovation and sheer audacity in creating the swathe of effects throughout the album, as the drums thwack forth in an undulating, but never dominating way.

Having said this however, at times the album feels as if it strays away a bit at meanders towards the trite, incorporating dull synths such as in Trans Am and Dumb it down. However such things are a minor foible in what is a beast of an album, that will certainly – if not for my sake, but for Ozzy’s, Bonham’s and Danzig’s – provide the world with many a head-bashing songs to come.

8.5/10