3 out of 5

Label: The Ghost is Clear Records

Produced by: Matt Bayles (mixed by)

I think I’m getting a little jaded when shouty spazzcore music starts to sound poppy to me.

Nuclear Dudes has been, and continues to be, noisemaker Jon Weisnewski with guests. Skeletal Blasphemy brings on Murder City Devils’ / Big Business’ Coady Willis on drums, for example, with Jon handling all of the vocals and remaining instrumentation of big ol’ guitars and maybe some big ol’ distorted keys (or maybe it’s all big ol’ digital computer stuff), and regular mixer Matt Bayles is along for the ride as well.

To be fair, poppy is also near how I’d describe MCD and BB, so the matchup here fits. There’s a type of veneer to those bands – Skeletal Blasphemy included – where the loudness or meanness is like an affect; it’s a goal. And given Nuclear Dudes bro-lite name and squiggly cover art, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to assume that affectation, which adds an element of “weird” to the mix so we get some cross between the booming drums of Coady Willis and a mathcore-adjacent song structure that nibbles at the goofy mainstream hardcore of late 90s / early 00s like Mindless Self Indulgence or Powerman 5000. …Which is where my brain gets stuck a little bit, because it’s not like that stuff doesn’t rock, but I also don’t know that it had much power beyond being kinda catchy. And maybe we’ve lapsed far enough along the nostalgia train that goofy mainstream hardcore can now be indie, or maybe it doesn’t matter at all – my point is more that Skeletal Blasphemy affects heaviness and does a lot of quick time changes and guitar wankery, but it’s also very, very accessible and doesn’t really push its formula any further than it needs to to make for a fun sound.