New Zealand Music Month: Vomit Storm

**It’s New Zealand Music Month this May. **New Zealand’s **annual celebration of homegrown music. Generally, that involves a lot of mainstream media highlighting a lot of mainstream acts. So I’m here to try and redress the balance a bit.  **I’ll be posting a link to some rowdy New Zealand music for you to check out every day over the next month. Some bands will no doubt be familiar; others I hope will be fresh to your ears.

Vomit Storm

I had zero hesitation in placing Wellington trio Vomit Storm’s *Mudge or Be Mudged! *album onto my list of favourite New Zealand releases from 2014. Chiefly because the band deal in hugely enjoyable crossover thrash. Essentially, Vomit Storm play stench-ridden and ferocious punked-up metal. With the band gleefully huffing, snorting, smoking, and guzzling their way to society’s impending collapse.

When I first wrote about Vomit Storm, earlier this year,  I said that in order to understand why Mudge or Be Mudged! is something you need to hear, you have to understand the meaning of the rungas. For those living outside New Zealand, think of rungas as being a word you’d use to describe a bunch of squalid scenarios where studded-jacketed rivetheads and punx might be causing a little, well, trouble. That sums up the temper of Vomit Storm’s tunes perfectly. Because the band are rungas as rungas can be, and as I’ve said before, the music they make is essentially created by scumbags and perfectly suited for scumbags like you, and me.

So that’s Mudge or Be Mudged!––scumbag tunes, for the end of days.

Vomit Storm are highly recommended for those who like red-raw, bullshit-free, thrashin’ punk.