The screech. The wall. The slanted-floor nausea. There’s not a word for the signature cyclical howling that Chicago’s RUNNING have harnessed and tortured into submission. They play with their food before they eat... flay into a terse punk trance, a Kraut-beat psycho riff for the ages, mesmerize or terrorize...but invariably they unleash The Sound upon us just when it seems most likely to bring back your lunch. That they’ve built such a mean, spare and evil band around such chaos is to our benefit—the circular mayhem alone would be a fascinating stand-alone curiosity—but lucky for us, they’ve captured their cacophonous, rotten heart in the black glove of blank-stare punk. Corrosive, serrated, and billous, Running have conjured a lurking creeper of a record in Vaguely Ethnic. it’s nasty, it’s antisocial, and you’re gonna like it.
