Step to Freedom S/T LP Compact Disk
OUT NOW! Following up several tape releases including Blown Out Media's 2019 The Rotten Era, Step to Freedom is back with a full-length self-titled LP. BLOWN OUT MEDIA is offering 200 CDs (BOM-2023-31) with 4-panel fold-over with band pics, art, and lyrics as well as a 4-by-3-inch vinyl sticker with the axeman artwork and a download code.
CRUST POWER MAD STORM!
1. Chasm of Souls
2. Control Therapy
3. Pseudo Reality
4. Bad Karma
5. Revengeance Altar
6. New Life Format
7. Before the Storm
8. Deadly Fortress
Gruff, tough, and rougher than a rhino’s nads, Step to Freedom weld the brute-force belligerence of Bolt Thrower’s In Battle There Is No Law! to the oppressive darkness of Antisect’s Out From The Void. The Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, band’s new self-titled album follows on from a trio of releases packed with fierce metallic crust, with 2019’s The Rotten Era being the best of that bunch. Step to Freedom’s latest album follows a similar ‘keep it dark, keep it mean‘ trajectory. The heavy gauge crust within crushes all challengers, and the album’s über-stench cover art mirrors the axe-wielding uproar perfectly.
Obviously, it’s a tense time for Russian punk bands and their fans. Dissent is fraught with risk, and things look dystopia-level bleak. However, at the very least, Step to Freedom’s latest album has allowed the band to purge some psychological pressure via a stack of raucous tracks. Ultimately, exorcising significant stresses is one of heavy music’s key directives, right? Emotional liberation via audio eruptions … something like that.
As usual, Step to Freedom inject traces of chugging old school thrash into their rage-driven stenchcore. (If you want a few ‘how stench?’ reference points, see the punishing salvos of Swordwielder, Fatum, Warkrusher, or Sanctum.) There are definite hooks here, too. But Step to Freedom drag those same melodies through the sewers, adding a welcomingly thick layer of crud.
Maximum filth and aggression spearheaded Step to Freedom’s previous releases, and their new album leads with the same intimidating intensity. Ferocious anger powers “Chasms of Soul”, “Control Therapy”, and “Pseudo Reality”, while the scorching “Bad Karma” sits alongside gloomier and doomier dirges like “Deadly Fortress” and “New Life Format”. Primal songs arise from the ashes of catastrophic ruin as guttural vocals and gravelled riffs careen into churning bass and drums. The breadth and depth of the monstrous epic “Revengeance Altar” underscores a crucial point; namely, that Step to Freedom’s creative strengths have never sounded stronger.
Step to Freedom serve up a grim feast with squalor and decay sitting at the heart of the meal. Their new album’s wretched atmosphere reflects a world where conflict endures as disparities increase, and the most vulnerable among us are invariably left to suffer. Step to Freedom speak of an ugly reality where misanthropy metastasizes in many of us. But here’s the good news; the band are here to drain the pus. We’re all infected with myriad ills and awash in psychic pain, but here’s your medicine. Take a double dose thrice daily – your torments will soon be trampled into dust.
yourlastrites.com/2023/06/16/in-crust-we-trust-vol-27/
What could be, visually and aesthetically, more stenchcore than a barbaric undead warrior armed with a rudimentary ax standing against an endless expanse of human skulls, while in the background a stone fortress that belongs to a undefined medieval and fantasy imagery? Probably nothing. Indeed, the cover artwork of this new chapter in the discography of the Russian Step to Freedom is crust in every single pencil sketch, in every detail, in every shade of black and white and in all the scenarios and atmospheres that can evoke a style so immediately inherent to the aforementioned genre. But the homo crust-inhabilis lives not only on captivating artwork and graphics and in fact the band coming from the desolate lands of the east of the Russian empire known as Nizhny Novgorod, once again, offers us a feral and savage attack of rooted crust punk deep into the primordial sounds of the British school of the 80s. Moving the steps from the influence written in their bowels that brings to mind historical and seminal names such as Deviated Instinct, Antisect and Hellbastard and having deeply absorbed the lesson of cornerstones of the genre such as Welcome to the Orgy or Heading for Internal Darkness, Step to Freedom plays the putrescent, apocalyptic and warlike crust punk material in the most brutal and furious way possible. If it is not exactly accurate to speak of a Russian way to crust, it is undeniable that the genre in the epicenter of what was the Soviet empire has taken on its own immediately recognizable sound and aesthetics; bands like Fatum and Repression Attack, in their stylistic differences, have charted the course to follow and many other new legions of crusters move across Russia, raising the rotting banners of crust punk and spreading death, destruction and desolation around them. Step to Freedom do not deny this fact, because listen after listen you feel in depth that you are in the presence of a band that plays that primordial soup known as stenchcore marking an unequivocal continuum with the Russian school of the genre represented by essential chapters such as Edge of the Wild and Altar of Destruction.
I had left Step to Freedom with the brief review of The Rotten It appeared in the article Stench from Post-Soviet Wastelands, a 2019 album that already presented the elements that we find on this new (and for myself, expected) self titled album in an even more mature and aware way of its compositional quality: a primitive crust punk, with a warlike nature and ruthless brutality, covered with a thick metal armor and which feeds itself through looting and incursions into territories of thrash metal and proto- death; a barbaric voice that calls for the destruction of this world, riffs abrasive and sharp as the blades of a double-headed ax ready to wipe out everything in front of them, a rhythmic carpet that crumbles the bones and makes the earth tremble underfoot and solos (a times with an epic flavor) sudden that pierce the warlike and apocalyptic atmosphere built by the Russian band. From the most heinous bands represented by tracks like Control Therapy or Chasms of Soul up to the most epic, apocalyptic and dark moments of Pseudo Reality or Dark Fortress, Step to Freedom's approach remains constantly wild and barbaric, moved by an uncontrollable fury like a berserker who launches himself on enemy lines without feeling fear and regardless of suffering, sowing destruction and terror with his every move. Perhaps more marked than in the past are the influences of the thrash metal of the Sacrilege school and the riffing as well as the mid-paced parts that evoke the Bolt Thrower specter of the indispensable In Battle There Is No Law, and more generally a strong metallic imprint which might suggest the thrash crossover of some Concrete Sox.
Thirty-five minutes of crust-massacre that leave no space to catch your breath and destroy even the possibility of imagining moments of stillness, in an incessant and impetuous march towards the most ruthless devastation and the brutal attack that spares nothing and nobody. From the depths of the Russian underground, brandishing the rusty ax of the most barbaric and furious stench-crust punk, Step to Freedom once again rail against this dark, rotting era, in which new wars, political repression and state oppression dominate on the rubble of the catastrophe created by the hunger for profit of the global neoliberal economy. As if to leave a clear and unequivocal message to this world and its barbarities: "We will not have destroyed everything if we do not also destroy the rubble". Don't be surprised if you find this record in some obscure year-end crust-list, just as you shouldn't be surprised if there is no trace of it in those glossy punk charts of self-styled people who can write. The crust is great and the Steps to Freedom are one of its last fierce legions!
http://disastrosonoro.altervista.org/step-to-freedom-s-t-2023/