COCKFIGHT SHOOTOUT breed until broken

Time for me to make very own daggy music confession...

Can you keep a secret? This stays just between me and you okay? Cool. Here goes: I’m a bit of a closet headbanger. I might look like a skinny white indie kid on the outside, but on the inside I’m a black leather studded rawker! It’s sorta my guilty pleasure.

So when Cockfight Shootout’s mini album landed in my lap I tried not to look too pleased – but deep down I couldn’t wait to stick it on. The Melbourne Metalers didn’t disappoint.

‘Step In Line’ opens the six-tracker in style, crunchy rhythm guitar and chugging bass perfectly complementing Caelhain Gallogly’s hoarse vocals. Then the bruising ‘In The Comforts Of Madness’ steams in, giving axeman Mick Farley the room to let fly with some slick guitar solos. Admittedly there is a bit of a lapse after that. The mid-paced ‘Tastemaker’ lacks any real spark and ‘A Question Of Guilt’ is a bit like post-Troublegum Therapy? (all the right ingredients but kinda half-baked).

The relentless racket of ‘Eat Your Own Kind’ is better but that’s immediately eclipsed by the humdinging closer ‘Tricks of Light’. Part Motorhead/part ZZ Top it’s got tempo changes and licks in all the right places and suggests there’s a lot more to come from Cockfight Shootout.

If Breed Until Broken were a self-help book it would be: Learning To Love Your Inner Metaler.

By Andy McLean. Copyright held by author.

First published in The Brag, Sydney, 2004.

Breed Until Broken is available through Chatterbox Records.