Ravi Shavi

***Opening with the distorted chant “Erase America!” over angle-grinder guitar, Ravi Shavi dispense with any subtlety and deliver their most caustic and combative work yet, their fifth release on arbiter of outsider punk Almost Ready Records. Frontman and brainchild Rafay Rashid has long possessed an ability to channel the canonical saints of underground rock; if past releases found him scaling a Punk Rushmore of Ziggy, Iggy, and Lou, Erase America burns a votive candle for the profane soul of Mark E. Smith. Songs like “Intifada”, “US Rat”, and “Miracle Bombs” fuse the paranoid catharsis of post-punk and no wave with the avant-noise nihilism of the band’s Providence, R.I. home base. The resulting speedball might be the first record to fully look the fetid corpse of post-empire America eye to eye. “The motherland of killing another man” indeed.