Running

Running

Wake Up Applauding

Castle Face

Running elbows in quick from the City of the Big Shoulders with Wake Up Applauding. Delivered loudly, dripping in unintelligible menace with the occasional flash of dark humor, their bathtub mixture of dope-sick guitars claws at your purse, ramming into an unhealthy sense of propulsion and repetition that seems chemical, unreal.  This is villains-plotting-evil kinda punk, mutants in the sewers emerging and wreaking havoc… Mothra shorting out high-voltage power lines and melting, screaming, onto a fleeing populace. Corrosive, driving, repetitive, pissed off, these guys deliver that evil cruisin’ vibe, tight and pushing 100 but with just a rotted off stump of a hand grossing everyone out and shifting gears.

Running

Frizzled

God?

***If you like the taste of pure, uncut gnarly, full of fire, fury and fun! then GOD? knows you’ll dig running into RUNNING. Their Asshole Savant and Vaguely Ethnic LPs are simply the BEST at music that’s unhearable once it’s been heard even for a second. And especially after it’s been heard for a half hour! The same is true of this single but even MORE SO—it cuts thickly into the ears and breaks on through to the other mind, which is instantly oxidized by the penetration of their spinning wheels, plates, cones, strings, drumsticks, uvulae, etc. Equal parts shamble-dance and noise-pop, Running drive relentlessly while shouting their HI-larious lyrics (we think) with vigor from the bottom of a well of cheap ‘verb. With serriform guitar racing with the vocs for most-fucked sounding and the bass and drums driving savagely forward—like “Totally Fired,” for example—find us a song with singing that better unites listener peril with lively dancefloor antics! These are musical high times and jinx to boot. If you haven’t yet, start RUNNING! (STREET DATE - 7/22/2014)

Running

Vaguely Ethnic

Castle Face

***The screech. The wall. The slanted-floor nausea. There’s not a word for the signature cyclical howling that Chicago’s RUNNING harnesses and tortures into submission. They play with their food before they eat; they flay into a terse punk trance, a Kraut-beat psycho riff for the ages, mesmerize or terrorize; but invariably they unleash The Sound upon us just when it seems most likely to bring back your lunch. That they’ve built such a mean, spare and evil band around such chaos is to our benefit—the circular mayhem alone would be a fascinating stand-alone curiosity—but lucky for us, they’ve captured their cacophonous, rotten heart in the black glove of blank-stare punk. Corrosive, serrated, and billous, Running have conjured a lurking creeper of a record in Vaguely Ethnic. It’s nasty, it’s antisocial, and you’re gonna like it. (STREET DATE - 8/06/2013)

Running

S/t

Permanent

***“RUNNING is one of America's best psych/punk bands. Running sounds to us like Clockcleaner, if they played twice as fast and half as long. The vocals are reverbed beyond recognition, the drums are pummeling, and the bass and guitar are abrasive feedback-laden. After pumping out a couple of incredible cassette tape only releases, Running went into the studio and recorded some of their material (semi) professionally. Those recordings have now been preserved to wax as Running's debut 12-inch EP. This eponymous EP comes housed in a jacket with really interestingly created artwork and contains exactly 13 totally brutal weird punk songs. If these guys were jockier, they'd be a hardcore band. Thankfully, they're too arty for that ish. We'd love to point you in the direction of the band's Myspace page for a preview, but they don't have one. Trust us on this one, or preview ‘#1 Dad’ on the Permanent Records Chicago Myspace page. This record fucking rips! The first pressing is limited to 525 copies!”—Permanent