PRIESTS Vinyl & CDs

Review: Washington DC has one of the America's richest histories of punk and post-punk, so much so that it gave its name to the hugely influential DC Hardcore scene. DC four piece Priests are a part of the city's newest wave in the genre. On their second album 'Nothing Feels Natural', Priests wear the raw and brash aggression of their punk forebears well, but with a forward-thinking and twisted approach. Opener 'Appropriate' sounds like a classic sub-pop single, 'Jj' morphs them into a hardcore/post-punk/surf-pop group, 'No Big Bang' is a raw spoken word chugger cattle-prodded by insistent and unexpected 808 handclaps. What's most surprising is the album's dividing interlude - a minute of beautiful and wrenching effect-laden strings, that acts as a short breather in a record that otherwise rips and roars with ferocious intensity. Quite simply, anybody who thinks post-punk has become trite in recent years needs to hear Priests.