Seattle’s Botch are rightly regarded as the founding forefathers of contemporary progressive hardcore, and this album remains their epitaph. There is not a single hardcore or punk band today specialising in awkward time signatures and stupidly long song titles that doesn’t owe this album a huge debt. Only a four piece on paper, the band nevertheless pushed themselves to the absolute outer limits of what hardcore was capable of; of what a simple drum, bass and guitar set up could muster. In hindsight, purists wanting something rich in all-too-obvious angst wrongly overlooked their work. Botch’s approach – to combine brain-numbing complexity with a lyric sheet full of red herrings and offbeat poetry – was simply too studious to warrant mass consumption.