Newcastle punk quartet Fast Blood’s self-titled debut EP – out soon as a cassette on Cruel Nature – is melodic, vulnerable, and anthemically powerful. It’s a punk for wounded but resourceful survivors sound, a carrying on in the aftermath sound, a getting out of bed regardless of whether you feel like it sound. It feels to me like midwestern punk, but then I’ve always thought England’s north and the US mid-west had a lot in common – deindustrialization and disrespect internalized, coping through humor, alcohol, and getting loud.
Sonically, Fast Blood’s songs consist in converging on a driving high energy punk riff, departing from it creatively, then coming back to it. It’s a classic vamp and fill approach to rock music, executed perfectly. When all the instruments are pounding away together on one of these propulsive riffs, and singer Abigail Barlow is belting out her powerful voice, Fast Blood makes you feel big, self-assured, and part of something. It makes you feel like you – we, all of us, together – are an unstoppable force that backs each other up.
It’s the sense of togetherness that is most powerful here and on ‘You’, Barlow sings directly about friends who are there for each other in this way. Her big choruses, recorded with lots of multi-tracked and reverbed vocals, add to that sense of being in a crowd. If you ever start to feel too old to go to gigs, protests, riots, put this on and it’ll sort you right out.
Then there’s the verging away, the fills between the vamps, and the occasional breakdown. Here the band is a little more musically innovative than the straight-forward punk parts, the guitars layered and more spacious, sometimes pretty (in a very rock and roll way) though still over the foundation of the band’s freight train of a rhythm section. Those parts have faltering, humanizing quality. When the band come together on the big propulsive parts they sound larger than life and deeply confident – the leader of the protest march shouting through the megaphone, the friend who is cool in a crisis.
When the band open up a little in the more melodic bits, it’s like when you see a flicker of hesitation cross the hero’s face: this isn’t any easier for them than it is for anyone else, it’s a matter of just doing what needs doing regardless of how it feels, because it’s the only option. The moments of musical vulnerability make the epically confident parts sound all the more inspiring – you too can be your best self, in the right community; it’s hard for everyone, this record says – and they add to the EP’s emotional power.
In keeping with the sound’s interplay between confidence and moments of doubt, the lyrics are often sombre and introspective, referencing “days I say I can’t do this,” talking about how “every day feels the same to me,” asking “how did it get to this?” and “is this all there is?” This emotional content to the lyrics hits a little differently across the two basic elements of the band’s sound. During the breakdowns and more opened up parts, the self-doubt, worry, and vulnerability in the lyrics comes out more. In the more energizing parts of the songs, the same lyrical content is there but now it sounds powerful, resolute, and inspiring.
There’s a particular punk sensibility on this record that is part of why I think punk genuinely matters in the world – especially nowadays – and is part of what makes this feel like a Chicago punk record to me. There’s a vibe here that goes yes, I fucked up and things are generally not great, and yes, I don’t know how to do better, and no, that doesn’t feel good, and actually I don’t even really know how to articulate all of this – let alone feeling comfortable to say it out when sober – but, fuck it, I keep going anyway because this flawed life in this flawed place is mine and is more than the sum of its parts – especially because I’ve got good music and good friends, and a few beers.
If you reflect on this as art, there’s an every-person quality to this record: everybody struggles, and that struggle has dignity, but this isn’t an arm’s length contemplative record about other people so much as it’s an in the thick of it all, life comes at you fast kind of a record. I think this sensibility can be called one of genuine existential bravery. It’s why so many people who got into punk with this vibe when they were teens feel like this music saved them.
Being a young person, especially in a place in decline with less and less of a future on offer, is really hard and it’s not always immediately clear that everything will work out. This punk sensibility helps people realize their power to live joyously during and after hard, hurtful times, even if they haven’t been able to join the dots yet as to how they’ll make it work. That’s something young people particularly benefit from learning but anyone in these interminable plague years benefits from the reminder.
Keep going even though you don’t know how to, this music says, lean on your pals, and after a while you’ll look back and realize after the fact how you pulled it off. The EP’s closer ‘Milo’ brings these tensions to the surface most explicitly, being an internal monologue about making mistakes, kicking yourself for doing so, realizing you’re doing that, kicking yourself again for having that stupid habit of kicking yourself, and then, somehow, without knowing how, still managing to rise above it all anyway.
Go buy the record. It’s the least you can do to thank them. Fast Blood have given us their bruised but powerful hearts in order to strengthen our own.
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