What can you do with 17 minutes? You can take a shower. You can wait for the bus. You can stare at the internet. Or you can cue up the new 10-song album from Heavy Hand, Get Soft Get Clean, and get a serious jumpstart on your day. Yes, dear consumer, now YOU can enjoy all the life-affirming benefits of Milwaukee’s finest noise-punk outfit in just one concentrated dose. Get Soft Get Clean is fast, it’s furious, it’s kid-tested and mother-approved. It has songs called “Bitchn’ Unicorn Poster” and “Nasty Pussy So Tremendous.” (Forget what we said about it being mother-approved.) Morning’s will never be the same!
Not that previous Heavy Hand records have been self-serious epics. Beginning with 2012’s Confusion Is Body Parts and culminating in 2017’s Prerapture Era, Heavy Hand (Anthony Weber, Isa Carini, Chris Roberts) has always specialized in bracing, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them blasts of rock and roll. It’s a winning, never-tested-on-animals formula: Songs barely reach the two-minute mark. Weber howls over a pummeling din. Songs like “Inspired By Haircuts” butt up against “You Can’t Get Pregnant In A Tent” and “Milwaukee Cum Dumpster.” It rules.
And so it goes with Get Soft Get Clean. “Tonight’s The Night For Tinnitus” is both a menacing thrash and an appropriately titled threat. “Feed The Portal” pounds like a headache. “Microwave Steak” simmers before it explodes. Closer “All Dogs DTF” is down to rock. “You Talk Like A Manager,” meanwhile, is maybe the best 90 seconds in Milwaukee music this year. “When you talk you’re talking…SHIT!” screams Weber in the chorus. Good god we can’t stop listening to that one.
Listen to Get Soft Get Clean now…
…and then travel back to 2014 and enjoy a trip to the Racine Zoo in the video for “Motherfucking Bobcat.”