The beauty of Cut and Run, the second album by Brooklyn trio Child Abuse, is about as eye-of-the-beholder as it gets. If you're a fan of the complex-but-blunt punk/metal hybrid known as "brutal prog"-- think Flying Luttenbachers and Orthrelm, Lightning Bolt and Ruins-- every note should be a direct hit. But If you're seeking a genre-transcender-- the kind of album that makes you think, "this sounds more like stuff I already like than I expected"-- keep searching. There's nothing unexpected about Cut and Run.
That's actually one of the best things about it. Throughout these six heavy-duty tracks, numerous pitfalls are avoided with ease. The sound is noisy yet spacious, as the group's burly elements wrestle judiciously rather than overlapping into vaguness. Singer Luke Calzonetti's grind-core growl is much sharper than the cartoonish goof that style often falls into. The math-y riffs and beats could sound clinical, but the sweat and grime it takes to execute them is wisely left intact. Most importantly, the trio rarely lets their bludgeoning repetition drift into autopilot. Instead, Cut and Run's loops numb your mind in a good way, producing more hypnosis than boredom.
But even good mind-numbing can disengage the brain, and there is a jocky quality to Cut and Run that sometimes obscures the thought behind it. The band cites composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Charles Ives as influences, and you can hear those strains if you focus deeply. But it's easier to let your pupils dilate and your brain liquefy. There are also some themes that make their scary moniker understandable-- opener "Hold This" gets its title from a traumatic incident bassist Tim Dahl experienced at age six, and drummer Oran Canfield (son of Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield) recently wrote a memoir about his troubled youth. But those kind of ideas are buried under all the bombast. Brutal-prog should crush your skull before it stimulates what's inside, and Cut and Run succeeds on that count. But at times it pursues reflexive muscle at the expense of reflective thought.
The final track on Cut and Run hints at ways the band might capture mind and body more equally. Led by Calzonetti's woozy keyboard, "Froze Toes" sounds refreshingly open-ended, blurring the line between sharp math and loose impulse. It's not a radical departure-- nothing here is-- but if Child Abuse move more toward such unpredictable edges, their already sturdy music could could become exponentially stronger.
