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If you’re not familiar with GBH, don’t feel bad; at least you’ve still got your health.  And if you are, hear them again for the first time… and the second, and so on.  No surprises, sucks ups, or signs of sell out, some twenty years after their very first “City Baby Attacked By Rats” plagued the unsuspecting public still only months recovered from the first wave of UK anarchism.  Here was a forerunner for the next wave, which would prove to be as defiant and doubtlessly more durable then the first.  

And so “Ha Ha,” sure, featuring the little laughing gremlin sporting a good one at the expense of any and all authorial dissonance, their ninth studio record amidst countless waves of comps, singles, live bits, live bait… lurches forward full throttle with a menacing scowl and sinister ambition as if to prove, something, that’s never been more evident.  

GBH is one of those few second generational Street Punk pugilists, along with fellow Brit-bashers The Business, Discharge, The Exploited, heading legions of lesser known quantities still toiling if not buried somewhere between the pavement cracks they helped create with their boundless discontent.  Unlike their many peers, GBH has managed to hold it together more often than not for the last twenty years and still retain the core of their being, still featuring 75% of their original line up intact—an unheard of Punk precedent in an age of break ups, misquotes, and Johnny come latelys.  

In spite of remaining faithful to the fans and their scene, GBH comes away with a battle hardened new record worthy of “comeback” status if we count six years between it and “Punk Junkies” and still “Punk as Fuck” nonetheless—it’s that heavy, loud, boisterous, and bastardizing down to the finest detail from when the first bombs blew in Birmingham.  “Ha Ha,” “Falling Down,” and “Crush ‘Em” are an opening nine minutes of hoots, hollers, and hair triggered intensity aimed straight at conformity, crime, and governmental responsibility…?  May as well be, they’ll get it in there somewhere when all else fails, so verbal assassination’s always a good bet!  

GBH is a glut of extremities within a classic Punk/HC framework—a sound that’s never pegged with the quick one word fix; instead, an embodiment of the classic brick breaking days of yore, faithfully (re)under produced here along with the essential working class, windy city, and bay area style brashness and unexpected L.E.S. choral call outs that go way way back to the beginning of when it all began, and who many still recall for its age old integrity.  

So GBH remains the full package of all that’s respectable in Punk circles; a continually stretching bridge that’s helped birth countless modern day menaces like Rancid, The Cuffs, Blanks, Krays, Anti-Hero types and with nary a trace element of Pop consciousness.  “Ha Ha’s” seventeen tracks of pummeling riffs, fills, pit breaks, and buried mixes that are worth the wait and the lump you’ll come away with after the first listen.  It’s still four guys who know their business and don’t fuck around when its time to produce the call to arms and almighty tradition.