cllhn (or "Callahan" without the vowels) hails from the German city of Dresden. Up to now I've only ever had knowledge of two things to do with that city: their football team being one and the fact that Dresden suffered from a massive bombing onslaught from Allied forces during the Second World War. With the release of cllhn's second EP, handily tiled II, I can now expand that list to three things.

II features eight tracks of fairly thick-sounding punk rock, that is all particularly quick paced and with quite a melodic, hardcore kind of noise to make this an abrasive yet listenable release. To be honest, all eight songs seem to flow into each other a bit too seamlessly and if you're not concentrating it would be easy to think that the 18 minutes or so have been spent listening to the same track. As such there are no real stand out tracks here to focus on, but it is actually an above average set of songs that, although lacking in diversity, does manage to retain the majority of my attention once it gets going. The problem is that I can't see this being something I actively seek out to listen to much in the future, which isn't a good result.

Saying that, there are positives and those includes the chunky guitar sound and the vocals, which are slightly held back in the mix but of decent quality, making this a not bad release, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately for me it's a case of this being filler in my music listening life more than anything else although I hope this doesn't put others off from giving it go via the band's Bandcamp page (it's free to download).

To clarify, the three stars are mainly for the fact that this is easy to listen to even if it's not overly distinctive.