"The second album from UK hardcore engine The Lowest Form, Personal Space sees the band cutting through a comedown fug of feedback, sharp butterflyknife guitars flashing deadly over a wasteground rubble of noise.
Songs drawn up from discord, songs of marshalled cacophony, coils of scritching guitars break apart and reform, coalescing around insistent basslines and heavy drumbeats, before splintering again. It's hardcore constructed from textured noise as much as from breakdowns and riffs, rumbling infectious chants emerging from the wavering clamor, the vile keening of consciousness's half-known edges, noise in the grain of it all, noise as bedrock, an abrasive acid bath of fuzz, susurration and machinewhirr.
"SMASH MY FUCKIN' HEAD AGAINST THE WALL" is the line that opens it up, rising out of Interplanetary Bad Boy's hissing swell. Driven through the album are anguished explorations of interior/exterior limits, whirling around viciously in the grubby borders of your skull, spinning hopelessly in the cosmic of the aether, untethered, higher than the sky but way down in the muck. From Gak Attack's claustrophobic pogo or Last Smash's drawling thump to Star Slammers manic tumble and Dread Future's rolling barrage, The Lowest Form have brought together another LP of murdered-out panicattack punk, lithe and unleashed, born of bad vibes and background radiation, an album at once uncomfortably close and fully heavy." -Joe Briggs

Our take: Even though the Lowest Form features Paco from La Vida Es Un Mus on drums, the band makes perfect sense on Iron Lung Records... to me, Iron Lung is the label that is constantly pushing hardcore and punk in interesting and unexpected directions, and the Lowest Form are undoubtedly pushing hardcore places it hasn't gone before. The story I remember hearing on the Lowest Form way back when was that (with the obvious exception of Paco) most of the members aren't really "of" the hardcore scene per se, but were rather people who might identify socially and subculturally with a scene other than hardcore punk even if they had an interest in the genre. I may have messed up some details or invented that story out of thin air, but listening to Personal Space it sounds like it could be true. This is a record that has all of the abstract qualities of hardcore--it's heavy, loud, noisy, fast, angry, etc.--but it arrives at those adjectives via a completely different route than what bands raised and bred on little other than hardcore tend to do. There are no breakdowns, no obvious nods to other bands' riffs or songs... just a concerted and earnest attempt to embody the adjectives listed above. At times the Lowest Form--despite the fact that they sound like they rely primarily on the standard hardcore band setup of guitar, drums, bass and vocals--sound more like industrial music than hardcore... as with industrial, there's an emphasis on the texture of particular sounds and how they layer on one another, sit together, and comprise a composition. In a word, it feels like art, and while that may turn some people off it gets me really excited. Definitely one of my favorite releases of the month, if not the year.

UK

Sceptres: Childsplay 7"

Discharge: Decontrol 7"

Hygiene: S/T 7"

Cock Sparrer: Shock Troops 12"

Swell Maps: Jane from Occupied Europe 12"

Black Sabbath: Vol 4 12"

Sex Pistols: Never Mind The Bollocks 12"

Black Sabbath: Paranoid 12"

Black Sabbath: S/T 12"

A Page of Punk / Werewolves on Motorcycles: Split 7"

Varukers: Protest and Survive 7"

The Lowest Form: Personal Space 12"