Archive for August 2012

This is one of the albums that changed my life, as far as music is concerned. By far superior to anything else the Carcass discography, Symphonies of Sickness is the ultimate expression in downtuned guitars, scatterfuck dual vocals and blasting drums. The crisp and warm guitar tone can only be described as grinding. This is the definate grindcore guitar sound; fuzzy, yet grating enough to create a suitable amount of audible chaos. Symphonies can sound…

When I Initially bought this I thought it was an LP (silly me) so expectedly I was a touch disappointed on its arrival. Never mind, because that initial disappointment faded very quickly upon first spinning Black Sun’s self-destructive noise meets sludge attack. Imagine early Swans, Iron Monkey and Burning Witch having a fight in the bottom of an mine shaft and you should have a pretty good idea of how Black Sun sound. Paralyser isn’t as noise…

I don’t particularly find this record exciting in any way . As far as middle of the road, no frills thrash goes, Re-Animator have got it down to a tee. I’m sure that there is a bunch of metalheads out there who love this, without question, but the reason this is in my collection actually has nothing to do with the music on the disc. It is there because of its artwork. The artwork was…

Godflesh is one of my favourite bands. Not of all time, because I have not known them “all time”. But, when I finally got my head out my arse and searched for some music that wasn’t grindcore, German techno-porngrind or Sunn O))), I never, ever looked back. Godflesh’s effect on my outlook of music is just as important as Napalm Death’s original input into my perception of music (how ironic it is that both bands…

This is the TVG Global Thrashcore Dealer pressing of Abuse, which I picked up before it was re-released by Earache a short while later. I got this off Shane Embury’s FETO stall in Deathfest 2010 (or were Wormrot selling this next to Shane Embury’s stall? That would make much more sense, surely? I don’t know!) back when Wormrot were very much unknown in the UK. They have come a long way since, and two full UK tours later I feel they…

So I finally grew the fuck up and got this album. After years of holding out, hoping and praying for a shot at the original pressing from back in the day, I finally gave up on owning a piece of musical history. I can only justify so much for a record. It is, at the end of the day, historic or not, it’s just a piece of vinyl. I don’t like Burzum enough to justify…

Another smashing Back On Black black metal pressing (did you have to read that twice? Ha ha). This is really fancy, smooth and shiny and looking as sexy as black metal can in all its gatefold glory. I learned my lesson after purchasing Burzum’s Burzum and instead got this from HMV for the fucking criminal price of £9.99 including delivery rather than being raped by Plastic Head. Why go direct, eh? 1349 are something else….

Early Misfits seems to me to suffer to the same bane as Agathocles, all the same shit seems to be released on tons of different bloody albums. It is hard to tell what is the original recording of a track and what is different. I was going to start off by saying that Legacy of Brutality mixes alternate recordings of some tracks with other tracks that are originally off…then I drew a blank. They really…

One of my all time favourite songs! Shaming that I never got around to buying this any sooner too! And I gotta say, it sounds fucking massive on vinyl. The higher vocal frequencies end up in fizz a bit, but the bassier parts are much more prominent to what I am usually expecting. Also, the panning seems somewhat different? The joys of analogue music (assuming Aphex Twin was still using analogue equipment to make his…

One of the first black metal records I ever heard, and one of my favourites. I waited a very long time to get this on wax; eventually getting a copy on white when Back on Black were good enough to release represses. The original vinyl pressings on Nuclear Blast are worth a bit more, but that’s ok, I’m not particularly wild or fanatical enough about black metal in the grand scheme of things, so I can let the original…

Where Scum put grindcore on the map for most people, From Enslavement to Obliteration took the whole genre to new depths of mental speed and heavyness. I read once, I think in Terrorizer magazine, FETO being described as the bastard of a younger brother to Scum. Scum may have started it all, but FETO perfected the blueprint. To be honest, it just rips your fucking head off. I got this picture disc as a gift…

This has to be one of my favourite records – just look at those colours! The way this album was packaged and marketed by Relapse was brilliant; alongside this excellently nauseating vinyl package, the CD version came with extravagant packaging and a formaldehyde scented disc for ultra-mortician vibes. That’s dedication! For me, I find that I love The County Medical Examiners because they fill the void that Carcass left when they fucked off to make…

I don’t think in the history of music that an album title has so correctly summed up it’s contents like this one. By the time Anal Cunt announced that they were working on a new album that wasn’t shitty attempts at rock music, most people had either forgotten or given up completely. Now you have to take what I’m saying here with a pinch of salt because it is Anal Cunt and it is hard…

In the 80s, Swans went through various forms of horrible music; starting with the fuckfest of jazz and no wave, then somehow mutating to dirgy, percussion heavy, bass guitar driven nightmares. With the album Cop, Swans added the focus to real distorted guitar in the mix and created something more musical yet still epic and heavy, and thus instantly inventing Godflesh and a hundred other bands in the process. In the remaining gap between that…

As far as dubstep goes I’m still pretty inexperienced, but as my musical tastes somehow mutate drastically I find myself listening more and more to this genre. Scorn for me were the in-road into this electronic genre I would have maybe never touched otherwise, despite the fact a lot of types of dubstep (or gorestep) artists mimic the structure and heaviness of metal music. This double 12″ by Ohm Resistance however, does not strike any…