Lucern Raze – International Breakdown – album review

Lucern Raze is the project of Luke Reilly, the founder of Stockholm’s PNKSLM records, ‘Thanks to some downtime due to the current pandemic, Luke’s found some time to revive his Lucern Raze project, and over the past 6 weeks ended up making a full LP. “INTERNATIONAL BREAKDOWN” jumps between 90’s big beat, lo-fi hip hop and psychedelic punk.’ Fighting Boredom like PNKSLM records a lot and this album features a lot of the bands we enthuse about, have a read below to see what we thought.

Somewhere there’s a bar still open, far from any main street or through fare, entered via a rubbish strewn back alley with a stench of fear and dereliction. Inside it’s dim, hard to see, with layers of cigarette smoke built up over years and a feeling of the place being alive. At the end of the room there’s a small stage with ripped patched curtains behind it and on which a bunch of people appear to be fighting to get to the microphones and amplifiers to get set up. This is what the new Lucern Raze album feels like. It’s sleazy, dirty and very very cool. 

The Hip Hop beats echo hard across unpainted sweat dripping concrete walls as a crowd of  ultimately cool kids sit and watch the bands fight to get to the front. Lucern Raze has released a new record from the depths of the PNK SLM swamp and he’s dragged along a gang of like minded individuals to help him out. It’s been put together in six weeks as most of world seized to a grinding halt which provided him time to drag on board the cream of the PNK SLM acts, what started with a project with BRYSON THE ALIEN (Portland), picked up the likes of Black Mekon (Birmingham),  Chemtrails (Manchester), Cherry Pickles (Birmingham), Lou King (Manchester), ShitKid (Stockholm), Sudakistan (Stockholm) and Swampmeat (Birmingham). The result is a backbone of solid beats, languid and slow for the most part but turned up loud enough they own the room.

It’s a lazy, sweaty, record. The base of it are the hip hop beats which make every song move along even when people like Cherry Pickles are doing their best to bend it into their anarchic strange world, and they’re not the only lunatics here, every track is a treat. Across the sound there’s garage fuzz, a surf tinged wiped out mass of twang, a fantastic dirty bass line with an antagonistic teenage vocal. Smooth beats flowing into a fuzzed out groove and dense, hard hip hop jams. 

If you’ve never heard of PNKSLM records all you need to know is right here on this slice of lovely nastiness. Get with the groove dude.

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Lucern Haze are on Facebook and have a Bandcamp page.

All Words by Adrian Bloxham.