Turtle Rage – Critical Thinking EP (Incredible Noise Records)

Growing up in the eighties and nineties, you couldn’t miss even a single episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a TV. The series has all the elements of an era, spanning from skateboarding culture and punk rock movement to the themes we are still concerned about today, such as radiation or interdimensional traveling, but everything was folded into a cartoon which was quite entertaining. Today we are talking about some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles inspired fastcore band from Berlin, Germany. Turtle Rage was formed sometime in 2014. and judging by their album covers, it seems they are heavily into TMNT series. Critical Thinking is their brand new seven-inch record which includes ten blasting fastcore songs with a lot of humor involved, especially expressed on a lyric sheet. Sonically, Turtle Rage are covering a couple of underground genres like powerviolence, grindcore, thrashcore, hardcore, but the sound is unified under the banner of fastcore. What really makes this band great are their writing skills and an ability to compose pretty short songs with a lot of sense and balance for both fast and slow tempos, but also with a lot of transitions implemented in between. The arrangements are also neat, with all those blastbeats hammering the brain while the guitars are covering everything with hazardous amounts of mutagen. Vocals are somewhere between screaming and yelling, but there is also a mid-growl vocal which is characteristic for powerviolence bands. The band also thought about some singalong parts which are giving a lot of power to the presented material. All in all, Critical Thinking is one hell of a release thematically dedicated to the fans of TMNT and skateboarding culture and I encourage you to give it a listen. The band also thought about the graphics for Critical Thinking, so we have a Foot Ninja skateboarder vandalizing some wall with Turtle Rage logo. Of course, pizza box and trash can are laying near, so the whole scene reminds us of the TMNT universe. Critical Thinking has been published by Incredible Noise Records as a yellow variant, but it’s also available on a classic black 7” vinyl and it’s directly available at the label’s bandcamp page.