For some, summer means swimming pools and drinks with tiny umbrellas. For others, summer means tallboys and sweaty bodies engaged in what can only be called a crusty display of full-contact Bacchanalia. "Dispatch" is the meanest and bloodiest VHÖL track to date, from a metal band that normally liquefies thrash into T-1000 badassery.
Charging headfirst with a grunting, galloping riff from guitarist John Cobbett and bassist Sigrid Sheie's grueling tone — and matched by Aesop Dekker's muscular drumming — this is the Bay Area's band most direct tribute to the punk backbone of its work. "It was our little nod to Pooch-era Discharge," Cobbett writes of the U.K. heavy-metal hardcore-punk band. But it wouldn't be VHÖL if it weren't a little cosmic, as vocalist Mike Scheidt claws and shrieks his way through Cobbett's alien wails. "The lyrics are loosely a sci-fi theme on killing machines sent by the powers-that-be to do their dirty work from a distance," Scheidt writes NPR. "With drones currently being used for that exact purpose, it's not quite so sci-fi, really."
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