Archive for 2014

I’ve really been digging Esham recently. Well, I’ve always loved this guy (one of the few positive things to come out of my teenage obsession with ICP) but I discovered that a whole bunch of his albums are streaming on Spotify, which is absolutely great news because a ton of his early works contained a pile of uncleared sampling and are therefore seemingly forever confined to the “out of print” section of music industry hell….

‘Scuse the lack of posting guys and gals – it’s that time of year again where I fall off. Just had to drop in to share this post though; one of the most positive and uplifting records I’ve heard in a while. I’ve been craving fresh, new musical experiences lately in amongst flying about being mental-busy, and I’ve been journeying to musical realms that I’ve rarely touched up in the past. I heard of Emeralds…

Gangliocytoma is a drum machine grindcore project that mixes razor sharp guitar work with the muddy blurs of gorenoise and goregrind. Expect relentless drum machine barrages, endless guitar explosions and then on top of it all the signature goregrind watery bowels explusion. Despite the mile-a-second goregrind relentlessness, riffs are actually present and audible. Fancy that! It’s not a very long release, yet it’s only a demo so I wouldn’t expect hours of material. But hey,…

When I first heard of this reissue I was all like – Fuuuuuuuu-u-u-u-u-uck that shit. The price being charged for a copy of this remastered old demo was nothing short of total fucking extortion (kek). I think the fact that it took the almighty unit-shifting Cradle of Filth a month or two to sell the 666 vinyl copies of this album shows that I was not alone in this way of thinking. If a band…

What part of this release constitutes as ‘rock’ I’m not entirely sure, but Bong have got the ‘stoner’ part of the title 100% correct. Well, with a name like Bong would more would you expect? Such a simple yet fathomless name can only lend itself to a simple (in theory) yet fathomless (in practice) sound. Bong is music for those who aren’t afraid to sit tight and experience the long haul; the great build up,…

Well, this is… different. I’m aware of the influential impact that Suicide and Mr. Alan Vega have had on some of my favourite artists, so it was only fair that in time I go back even further and plumb those original depths. After a bit of research, and conversing among friends, I came to rest on Suicide’s debut album; a puzzling affair of cheap synths, almost early Lou Reed-like vocals and linear narrative and repetition…

Main is a band that was formed by two members of Loop, including Robert Hampson who was also in Godflesh for a little bit (he played on the Pure album). Main, to me, appears to be some sort of experimental industrial-tinged ambient project that places heavily effected guitar work into a world of noises and other creepy atmospheres. (2021 edit: G C Green of Godflesh also plays on this particular album) And that, essentially, is what…

Look, Sphere is one of my favourite Merzbow releases. Granted, I have in no way shape or form heard them all, but of the ones that I have heard, Sphere is high up there among the best. The three Sphere tracks are pulsing, blooping, bleeping harsh displays of spherical madness. I’m not entirely sure why the tracks were even broken up in the first place, but hey – what do I know. My favourite though…

Ah, good ol’ PLF. Is that Palestine Liberation Front? Pretty Little Flower? Princess Louise Fusiliers? Penguin Liberation Front? Parachute Landing Fall? Pulverizing Lethal Force? Phillip Lewis Fowler? Ha! According to an actual expert that I saw posting in the Youtube comments section (oh, ye exalted one!) the official story is that the band began as Pretty Little Flower, but are now known as Pulverizing Lethal Force. To be honest, they’ve always been known as PLF…

A call on a grindcore group on Facebook for female-front grindcore bands returned the usual list of suspects for someone too lazy to use a search engine, but nestled in that list were two bands I’d never heard of previously, so I guess I’m a bit of a twat for just knocking the Facebook post, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, one of those bands is Sockweb (I’ll get to the other in another…

This is the first time I’ve actually successfully sat through an entire Nadja album. They definitely made delivering kebabs and pizza an ethereal experience, I can say that much. Numbness is like many other releases in the sizeable Nadja catalogue; ridiculously fuzzy, enormously slow, miserable yet hopeful and just a little bit pretentious. Numbness offers (to me) nothing new; it is simply Nadja for Nadja’s sake. Depending on how much you like Nadja, you may…

This is probably one of the more bizarre things that I have bought recently. Cintecele Diavolui is an old alias / side project that was used by Mortiis in the mid/late 90s when he was deep into making mainly dark ambient synth and keyboard based music, or as he called it – Dark Dungeon Music. Cintecele Diavolui is a pretty cool name in my opinion. The phrase means “The Devil’s Songs” in Romanian, which is…

Lull is another Mick Harris project, one I believe that he worked on between Scorn releases back in the day. Lull takes pages from the book of Lustmord; extremely minimal yet puzzlingly fulfilling compositions of sound, often devoid of any noticeable instrumentation, pummelling you instead with lulling ambience (no pun intended) and claustrophobic barrages of atmosphere. Moments then, is the stifling ambient soundscape of choice for those with a short attention span. Instead of the…

I like Killing Joke and I like dub (be that dub reggae or the same remixing technique applied to other genres) but I’ve got to be in the mood for both, so there’s no surprise that I aurally inhaled this gargantuan release in one entire sitting. It took some doing as In Dub is 3 hours long, and contains several remixes of the same few songs. I’m not sure when I’ll actually ever come back…

The hype for hhis record has been unstoppable for the last few months, and rightly so, due to the solid consistency of quality albums that The Aphex Twin has churned out over his long and unusual career. On top of that, Syro is the first Aphex Twin release in 13 years, so to say this album had a lot to live up to would be a bit of an understatement. Luckily, Richard D. James has…

I’ve never really been into Voïvod. I even tried to witness the band play all of Dimension Hatröss at Roadburn Festival 2012, which is hosted in Tilburg’s 013, a venue with arguably the best sound in the world, and I still couldn’t get into it. I just don’t get it – is it thrash? Is it prog wankery? Is it a tired display of both? Phobos though, blew my fucking head off. It works better…

So I finally took the plunge and came around to dealing with this record. *Deep breath* After the absolute stink-fest of Savior Sorrow and the suicide-inducing snooze-fest of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, I had all but given up hope on Mushroomhead. Then I heard J Mann would be guesting on the latest record. And then I heard that the plan to collaborate had been scrapped and J Mann had returned permanently. Fuck! And then,…

It sometimes seems a bit detrimental to do reviews on albums that are really old, but as I trawl through covering a little bit about every piece of music in my collection (yes, that’s still an aim of Lines In Wax, despite the recent abolition of reviewing individual formats) it becomes an inevitability. A lot of people can take or leave Korn. In fact, I know tons of people who absolutely hate Korn. But, this…

Out of all the early Mortiis ambient keyboard pieces, The Song Of A Long Forgotten Ghost is probably the one that I am least familiar with, which is a crying shame because it’s a truly beautiful piece of music. Sometimes I wish I had the patience to put something like this together but I have to accept that I just can’t play the piano, organ, synth or what-have-you without any practice or training haha Early…

Archagathus are currently one of my favourite things at the moment, especially as I gear up for catching them on their European tour with the equally fucking amazing Six Brew Bantha. You could say that Archagathus came up on this whole mince-gore crossover trend that’s going on, but if Dehumanizer shows us anything, it’s that the band have converged these two genres from opposite ends of the spectrum (as far as grind is concerned, at…

The boys in Magrudergrind seem to always catch an awful lot of flak for “selling out”, perhaps more so than any band that’s done this Scion A/V shit. I’m not gonna go into the bands dodgy appearance on a crappy TV show, I’m focussing entirely on the Scion thing here. I don’t understand why I never hear anybody slagging off Wormrot for doing the same thing? Wormrot’s Noise EP is up on some revered grind-pedestal,…

Akercocke’s fourth album was by far their most experimental. Following up the absolutely monstrous and enormous epic that was Leviathan could have been no easy task for these distinguished English gentlemen. In my opinion, Words that go unspoken… is nowhere near as brutal as the exquisite aural punishment of Leviathan, but the band definitely followed through by evolving in incredible leaps into something far more sprawling, technical and genre-bending. Where Leviathan had that the “oomph”…

20 songs on a 5″ record? That’s exactly what I’m talking about, ladies and gentlemen! Hummingbird of Death have always been known to bring the high-powered, super-fast grindcore (or powerviolence, if you’re a hardcore kid), but this shy-of-4-minutes monster is just something else. Discounting the last track, which takes up the entirety of side B, each song is a microburst of super-thrashy speedy goodness. This isn’t as polished as more familiar material (like the classic…

Welcome to a world of fuzz. Boasting one of the greatest (yet simplest) guitar tones that I have ever heard, Dead Meadow’s turn of the century debut dreamscape of a record is a fantastic trip through a stoned, lush world of 60s and 70s influenced rock music. The opening track, “Sleepy Silver Door”, is quite simply one of the greatest things ever put to tape. It’s one of my favourite stoner-related tracks, with simple yet…

It’s not that often that I usually listen to shit like this, but I burned this album when it first came out and it’s just one of those things that’s been stuck in my car since. My stereo broke a few months ago when I tried to spin a leaked copy of Swans’ To Be Kind (that’s what I get for pirating music, folks!*) but when my car went in recently to get a new…

Okay then…how do I tackle this one (no pun intended)? This is a revered classic of sorts, but I’ve always had a hard time listening to it (I suppose that is kinda the point? I don’t suppose it was recorded with ‘easy listening’ in mind), but now I have this crazy trip on double vinyl there is no longer any excuse to keep putting off the review/post like I did with my CD copy. Again,…

Death In June is one strange-ass project. For something as simple as acoustic, folky shit, DIJ sure do have a wide, eccentric discography. Brown Book is pretty weird. Death In June’s lazy campfire strumming and monotone vocal meets 80s-to-the-max drum programming and fairly awful female vocals. It kinda sounds like a poor man’s mid-career Swans. I might be slightly biased here however, and even factually incorrect as Death In June were doing this kind of…

I recently did another Reekorrhoea review (for the band’s demo tape) but I can’t get enough of this crusty mincecore-meets-goregrind crossover sound that’s going on here. Mr. Andy is a goregrind genius, and whilst this doesn’t exactly sound a million miles away from his Hyperemesis shit, it doesn’t really fucking matter at all, because this shit fucking rules. Reekorrhoea’s part of this split also includes a Dismembered Fetus cover, but I’m not familiar with that…

Boy, am I happy this saw the light of day! Initially I mistook this release as a new Splattered Entrails album. I was thinking – “shit, they’ve gone back to the gory stuff!?”, but alas it was not to be. Instead though, Undercooked Intrauterine Delicacies turned out to be a compilation album of impossible to find splits that the band did back in the Myspace days. It includes a three-way split/comp on FDA Rekotz and…

I would like to admit that this album is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I’d probably be pushing it a bit too far. Digimortal is a strange one – a rare result of an industrial-influenced death metal band selling their asses out and cashing in on the nu-metal craze of the late 90s. Hey, I’m not saying Digimortal is particularly ground-breaking, but this came across far, far more successful than say, Cryptopsy’s absymal weakening…

Fuck! What happened here? Earth are definitely not messing about on their new record – the heaviest thing the band have done in over a decade. I can get behind this! Since their reformation / regrouping, Earth have been all about calm, serene, bright and wavering tones; colossal monuments of clean guitar work and uplifting instrumental soundscapes – almost like the shoegazing equivalent of their early drone days. But this is something else entirely. Someone…

I came across Mz. 412 on my quest for bands that mix black metal with power electronics. Although to me Mz. 412 takes elements from both genres of music (with both being quite introspectively similar in some respects and also a million miles apart in others), yet it seems to stand alone from both in a sound more rooted in industrial, or experimental ambience. This is something morosely militant about In Nomine… which lends heavily…

We are about to take you into the world of the LSD user… I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia trip recently so I’ve been spinning this record an awful lot. When I was 12, life was all about Slipknot and Mushroomhead. Mushroomhead, despite having some dud album releases in the last decade or so, remain one of my favourite bands ever. I picked up XX on the strength of the band’s image alone,…

Bobby M is upon us again with a slightly-less-gory approach to noise, which is unusual, to say the least. Perhaps surprisingly for music of this genre, Slithis’ Revenge focusses on the destruction that mankind has wreaked upon the earth as subject matter. I’d never in a million years consider there to be a market for environmentally-friendly gorenoise, but the world is full of surprises.  If you think the artwork looks horrendous, then nothing can prepare…

Facialmess is a harsh noise project from Japan. Total Liberation is an EP that was released a few years ago on J Randall’s Grindcore Karaoke, consisting of two tracks, a 7 minuter and a 13 minuter. “Suspicious Activities” starts off by oddly mashing together droning, machine-like background ambience with increasingly-erratic cuttings of harsh noise. It just jolts back and forth without any regard for your hearing, or sanity for that matter. It sounds to me like…

Blood Ceremony’s self-titled is one of my go-to feel good “doom metal” records (I use the term doom like that because I find that this isn’t miserable enough to fall under the doom tag proper, although it does incorporate a lot of elements from that genre). As mentioned elsewhere on this website recently, my distain for the explosion in female-fronted edgy rock music continues to grow, but let’s fuck all that trend-jocking shit for a…

When I first went to Roadburn festival in 2011 I was in waaaay over my head with my bands-I-know to bands-I’ve-never-heard-of ratio. I’m not saying I didn’t have a wicked time (I went again the year after) but I spent a lot of time high, watching shit I’d never even heard of. Black Pyramid was one of those bands, whom I espied briefly through the packed doors of the second stage in Tilburg’s 013 venue….

Wow, this fucking rules! Human Touch is some insane shit, playing grind-speed hardcore punk with frenetic, worryingly spastic female vocals. Imagine mixing Minor Threat with Despite You, or something. I’d absolutely love to see this band perform live, because after only 5 songs (only one which has any substantial length) I’m left a little shocked, and most definitely wanting more. The sound is spot on; definitely paying homage to true hardcore production styles of old…

Wow, just how fuckin’ nasty this sounds is really beyond any words! Fans of Libido Airbag better be scrambling to hit play on this shit – I’m not kidding. There’s legions of lo-fi electronic or techno influenced “goregrind” out there at the moment, and if you’re not deep into this shit then sifting through it all can be a bit of a slog. Thank fuck then, for Gurgle, who are just absolutely fucking amazing. Typical…

Maaan the newer Dead Infection stuff just gets randomer and randomer (I know that’s not a word, but whatever). This particular EP, as you can no-doubt see, features a cat that looks like Adolf Hitler. I’m not sure what the particular meaning is behind all of this surreal stuff, and I don’t really care as long as the tunes are good. Dead Infection have a lot to live up to with every new release, but…

Extreme Putrefaction is another project in the gazillion ranks of noisemongering goregrind king Bobby Maggard. This particular little variant mixes bassy harsh noise with unstoppable drum machine attacks and septic tank gurgles. To get artsy fartsy in the descriptive sense, imagine earlier, analogue pedal Merzbow jamming with Urine Festival. Extreme Putrefaction literally sounds like shit pellets being machine gunned into a cesspool of unspeakable filthy depths. For the uninitiated, ‘gorenoise’ can seem like quite an…

Christ, who’s idea was this? Mixing gabba-techno / industrial kingpin Alec Empire with the father of harsh noise, Akita Masami would surely result in a cacophonous cocktail that would make the world end in any other given circumstance. Somehow the earth didn’t stop turning, and instead we are treated to one of the craziest collaborations in musical history in all it’s glory. This is quite probably the most coherent thing I’ve heard Merzbow being involved…

Now here’s something I have listened the absolute fucking death out of during the last few months. I’ve always been a casual Type O Negative fan but I’ve always put off buying their albums, because I’m lazy as fuck like that. Anyways, I stumbled upon a free copy of this when I worked clearing out unwanted crap from charity shops, and for the next couple of hours in the van I became baptised in the…

The Killing Jar is quite possible one of the crappiest names for an album I’ve ever come across, but let’s not let that tarnish things here. Black Moth are a dirty rock and/or roll band with stoner and doom metal influences. They’ve been around for a few years now but I hadn’t heard of them until they were announced for Temples Festival this year. I was too smashed to watch them (story of my life)…

Whilst I surely can’t review my own material, I can tell you fuckers a little bit about it. With the death of Life Is Easy I’ve started a whole bunch of new musical ventures, including Fire Walk With Me; a project born out of my new love affairs with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and HNW music, if such a crossover isn’t too bold. What I’ve done here however is attempted somewhat at creating texture within…

You probably don’t need me to tell you that the new Pallbearer record is heavy as fuck, but FYI – it’s heavy as fuck. Doom metal is a grossly saturated scene these days, making stand-out records is becoming something of a challenge. I’ve personally given up on loads of underground doom because I literally just can’t be fucked to sift through all the shit, which is a tragedy. When I took the chance with streaming…

Vomir is currently my new favourite go-to name when I fancy a harsh noise massage for my brain and my ever-growing tinnitus. I guess focussing entirely on some endless static attack helps ease the ringing for some reason or other. Anyway, I digress. Vomir is (as far as my knowledge of this scenes goes) the absolute master of the harsh noise wall (often abbreviated to HNW). If you’re wondering what HNW is, well, imagine that…

This was a random purchase for me a couple of Christmas’ back, from some D.I.Y. / punk / hardcore record shop in Cardiff. It’s been a while, and the shop/label is long gone (at least at that location), but I (obviously) still have this record and still spin it every now and then. I picked it up because I am a massive fan of Anal Cunt and was aware that they had done a split…

Is it just me or does it look like the cover says “The fine art of Malevolent Creation”? I snoozed at a chance of seeing these cunts in Cardiff recently, which was a bit silly because how often does something like Malevolent Creation come around 25 minutes from your house? I hate to be Mr. Has-an-excuse-for-always-missing-gigs (which I’m totally not; my bank balance and tinnitus will testify) but I’d been burning the candle at both…

Japanese Torture Comedy Hour was a noise project that revolved around Scott Hull, J Randall and other related musicians, and eventually became a solo project for Randall in it’s own right. Dolphin Meat is an hour-long improvised live performance (entitled “日本の拷問コメディアワー – EP#62”) created entirely out of feedback loops and recorded to VHS tape (because, fuck it, why not?). I tried doing something similar about five or six years ago; bleeding feedback from mic to…

Donno what the fuck is going on here…wow! It’s like Aborym decided to do cybergrind and then do a collab with 7MON and Merzbow. When the longest track is 25 seconds long, and the entire EP a mere 10 songs in length, you know that what Incest has in store for you has just got to be painful. And it is. Sample-heavy drum machine grindcore mashes devastatingly with chunks of harsh noise and power electronics….

Now this is really nice – imagine combining the sounds of gabba techno drum programming (but slowed down a touch) with the random ambience of early Warp Records electronic music like The Aphex Twin. It’s kinda like a drum’n’bassy Venetian Snares making sweet, sweet love to Optimus Prime, at varying BPM. “Time Is A Disease” is a beast of an opener, with moody synths and epic piano lines, before it bursts this EP open with…

For me, Shpongle is the perfect music for the expansion of mind, body and soul; the perfect background noise for the ingestion of opiates, fungal hallucinogenics and dimethyltryptamine. However, even though I don’t sit around fires chugging bowls of ayahuasca that often, I do feel that sometimes I am halfway there, thanks to Shpongle’s ethereal “psytrance” (yes, that’s a real genre) and its ability to take me other worlds. Museum Of Consciousness is apparently the…

It’s ridiculous to expect originality in a genre as limiting as slam. The name ‘slam’ itself is daft, but it signifies a slightly more slower, groovier approach to the death metal template. I personally welcome a ‘slam’ record now and then because it really breaks it up for me as far as death metal is concerned; sometimes I can just get really tired of super-super-fast death metal, and it’s always nice to slow down and…

“Fight Music” is probably one of my favourite singles off the D12 album Devil’s Night, as it incorporates a much harder edge to it. When I was a wee lad the rockier guitar parts of this track helped me get into D12, and whilst it turned out that a majority of their songs don’t actually sound like this, it helped plant the seed, and after the strength of the “Purple Pills” (or “Hills”, as I…

Boy am I glad I bought this cheeky little 10″ when I did (edit: I’ve now traded it for a copy of Swans’ Filth). Due to Blues Pills’ ever-blossoming popularity this original 4-track EP is now worth a bloody fortune (for a 10″). The difference between Blues Pills and a gazillion other “revival”, “retro” or (dare I say it) “occult rock” acts (that phrase makes me physically sick) is that when Blues Pills first showed…

RazorRape are a Swedish groovy goregrind band that have been going since 2004. This 2013 EP is a short but sweet journey through some twisted tunes of gory love. Boasting a chunky but honest production job, SSS is a heavy-hitting record, mixing chugging slams and beatdowns with polka-style rhythms and blasting goregrind. The track “Drillbit Defloration” (what a title) is pure CBT-worship through and through, with an absolute massive riff and grooving mid-section. My only…

Reekorrhoea is a project of Hyperemesis’ Andy Ringdahl, focussing more on old-school horror movie themes as subject matter rather than all-out gore. It’s still mincecore-infused goregrind goodness, however, so I love it! Imagine LDOH meets Agathocles at a Tumour gig and you’re along the right lines here. The five tracks aren’t particularly long but they don’t need to be, this shit gets in, fucking gets on with it, and then fucks off. The guitars are…

Nice! What a fucking nihilistic recording this is! I believe Urine Cop was originally a collaboration between members of Winters In Osaka and ex-LDOH vocalist Erwin De Groot, but there’s no trademark De Groot pitchshifter howls on this nine and a half minute window into hell. All that can be heard is noise, and drums. Well, some semblance of drums. It just sounds like a flurry of cymbals, as if a drum track has been…

I would probably have never listened to Portishead if it wasn’t for the fact that their first two albums were already on my old computer when I bought it, back in 2009. They always seemed like something my mother would listen to, what with their shit band name and music video circulations on the Sky ClassicFM music channel. It wasn’t until my appreciation for electronic music developed to such a degree that I could hear…

I keep forgetting how much I love this album. Waking The Cadaver seems to be a household name in terrible music, and mentioning to almost any metalhead that you like them usually results in laughs, but for anyone who actually listened a bit further than that Shredded Wheat song (“Chased Through The Woods By A Rapist” is the correct title, which is much more grim) would have discovered an absolute gem of a metal record….

Led By Lions are a band that are fairly local to me, with members hailing from several areas of South Wales. This band was born from the ashes of long-running metal-meets-pop-punk group Man Of The Hour, who have been flogging the local circuit in various guises since 2007, so A Long Time Coming has been, well…a long time coming, really. Led By Lions is essentially the final incarnation of Man Of The Hour, with the…

The recent (edit: a year and a half ago! Fuuuuuck) Bongripper and Conan UK tour lived up to all my expectations in total sonic annihilation, and this tie-in Split 12″ is a great little reminder of the cacophony the duo made together. On the 12″ we get more of the same from Bongripper, which isn’t a bad thing I assure you. I simply cannot think of anything more to say other than it really is awesome as…

Holy shit this is some chilled out stuff. I’m not talking dubby or ambient or anything, just nice and laid back rock’n’roll with easy, soft vocals and a purring bassline. I would never have bought this myself, mainly because I have never heard of Dave Stewart before; it was a gift from my old man (as the Americans say), who sometimes randomly sends a record my way, which is awfully kind of him. Apparently on…

To me, mid-to-late 2000s Napalm Death releases seem to follow a certain pattern. Each of the records share a similar cover art style, perpetuated by a specific colourising which is different on each record. Order Of The Leech was yellow, this record was red, and Smear Campaign was blue. Leaders Not Followers 2 and Time Waits For No Slave also shared similar artwork to the three mentioned above and even had similar traits in production….

To me, We Are Him is the “heaviest” of all the Angels Of Light material, for lack of a better way of describing it. In hindsight, their final album was a precursor to the reformation of Swans in 2010. It mashes together the usual artsy, folky vibes of earlier Angels stuff with heavy bass lines and thumping percussion attacks. Listening to the first ten seconds of “Goodbye Mary Lou” is enough to cement that We…

This is a classic of the Myspace days, recently revisited by myself as it’s now been uploaded to Torn Flesh Records’ first Bandcamp page (they have four Bandcamps (is that a word? lol) loaded to the gills with all sorts of crazy shit). The world of Crowbar Abortion is a strange one: dancable beats and random electronics mash somewhat excellently with flat-out drum machine grindcore, raspy, distorted vocals and shredding guitar solos (yes!). Don’t let…

I’ve had this album for years, and I can’t remember where I got it from. Anyways, I got it and was expecting some nasty goregrind but instead was met with some metallic punk sound so I fucked it off and forgot that I had it. It wasn’t until I saw Malignant Tumour live in Obscene Extreme Festival 2013 that I remembered I had this 12″; Gumpy said something about really enjoying them and wanting to…

Ah…harsh noise; if there was ever a genre of ‘music’ where it is hard to remain original. I love watching noise artists perform live, but listening to harsh noise in the home (asides from the ‘big’ names) isn’t something that I do very often. This is primarily because 1.) if you have a torrent for every single Merzbow release, you’re pretty much set for life in the noise game and 2.) the internet has caused…

I’ve heard the name Tom Waits tossed around for absolutely yonks, but I never got around to actually hearing the guy properly until I really got into HBO’s The Wire, where his song “Way Down In The Hole” was used as the theme song for every single season. The song appeared in five different guises by five different artists, one for each season, with the Waits version itself oddly appearing second on season two. Logically,…

(2021 Edit: did anyone notice in my re-upload of this post from Blogger I’ve now used the South Korea digipak cover where the title is spelt wrong? LOL) I love absolutely any band that can keep death metal especially fresh and vibrant, without becoming too gimmicky. Nile have a hit and miss discography, in my opinion, but 2005’s Annihilation of the Wicked on Relapse Records is a monolithically heavy recording of blasting ancient Egyptian brutality….

Wow! Now isn’t the name of this band a mouthful? It’s almost as thick and penetrating (that’s what she said!) as their ultra-chunky death metal / goregrind crossover sound. Austria’s VxPxOxAxAxWxAxMxC pack one hell of a groovy punch, something that is completely evident on this sick little split CD. Boasting one of the nastiest programmed snare sounds ever, the band chug and groove through 4 apotemnophiliac hymns of gargling gore destruction, my favourites being “Baptized…

This is a sticky-labelled 12″ that I bought 2nd hand when I was experimenting with scratching back in the day (lol). I’d gotten a Ministry of Sound deck for Christmas and I needed some 90s-to-the-max shit to scratch and test pitch correction / matching on. As expected, I failed triumphantly at this shit and gave it up pretty quickly, although I did find it fun to scratch random records now and then, something which I…

Whilst this is entirely on the other end of the industrial metal spectrum that I prefer not to get too close to, The Grudge was one of favourite records as a teenager. Over the last few years I have learned that there is a lot more to industrial than crappy guitars layered with crappy dance music and ripping off old Nine Inch Nails tracks, but that’s another story. Mortiis’ first Era 3 release was a…

This is one of the more ‘brutal’ Misfits releases. If anything, it is the fastest, grimiest (studio) recording the band have done. Even the cover art alone is something more crust/grind-looking, although it was released a while before those genres really came into their own. This spins at 33rpm, which is surprising considering how short it is, I was expecting it to be a 45. Still though, Earth A.D. / Wolfs Blood is a short…

I already did a review of this record over on Gonzo Karaoke (something I need to do again, that shit is awesome), a wicked website ‘portal’ to a world full of freely downloadable audible awesomeness, but seeing as I also now have the physical edition here in my hands, I guess I have to do another, proper review. It would be a bit cheapskate to just copy the review over, so I’m gonna do a second one, albiet it’ll…

Unfortunately, Can’t Find My Way Home is one of the weaker tracks off the somewhat-hated The Burning World album (and a cover song to boot), so this single doesn’t really do anything for me in that respect. It is merely a completists item for me, as I go on to collect at least one version of every release Swans have put out. I have the 7″ version here, although there is a 12″ version of…

I’ve never encountered No Thought before, but I really enjoyed their mix of styles. Many bands do the whole doom-into-grind thing, but No Thought seem to pull it off rather seamlessly here, which is fuckin’ great. The production is thick and crunchy (mmmmm yummy) and based more in the low-end of the spectrum, and reminds me rather poetically of Rotten Sound mixed with early Brutal Truth. Well worth a listen, I’d wager, if you’re into…

I always welcome more Intestinal Disgorge. I should make a crappy Sean Bean meme with the text “One does not simply have enough Intestinal Disgorge”. So, when I got the sexcellent Hyperemesis / Pulsating Cerebral Slime 7″ lathe from Goatgrind Records I had to pick up their release of Dripping… at the same time; it would have been criminal not to! I have three Intestinal Disgorge records now (at the time of writing), so I…

I’ve recently been playing catch up with Anathema. They are a band I have now known about for years, but I only own a very small amount of their albums. Thank Zombie Jesus then, for the Amazon marketplace with it’s sometimes insanely cheap prices. A used copy of A Natural Disaster ended up costing me almost next to nothing. And to be honest, I’m really glad. The first thing that surprised me about this record…

Dead Infection were one of the first goregrind bands I ever heard alongside Last Days of Humanity. Together they made up the dankest sound I had ever heard at 16 years of age, previously having only experienced grind with Napalm Death’s Scum and a cross section of Anal Cunt stuff. When I downloaded Brain Corrosion shortly after, I was blown away by the crisp, heavy sound and high quality production that was the total opposite…

It might have cybergoth written all over it, but this album is the fucking shit. Imagine if Dimmu Borgir decided to start making music like KMFDM or something. Animatronic is a bright, sparkly journey through what should by rights be a dark and mysterious world. The songs are keyboard or female-vocal led, beefed out with chuggy riffage and a combination of programmed beats and heavy drumming. Eagled-eared listeners (is that a thing? It is now!)…

SKI BA BOP BA DOP DA FUCKIN’ BOP NIKKA A bit of a jokey post for you, considering it’s April Fools and all. Despite the ridiculousness of the content, this is a genuinely canon Lines In Wax post and has been added to the Collection page and everything. Ho ho! I got this alllll the way back on January the 2nd when I was helping my buddy Phil out at his job recycling textiles, and…

I was expecting more from Maximum Thrash, I will be honest. I’ve seen the name around a lot over the last few years so I was rather excited about finally hearing them. I was a bit disappointed then, when I dropped the needle onto this wax and got some shitty live recording as my first impression of them. Don’t get me wrong, the band sound like they’d be great, but there’s nothing worse than shelling…

Man, now this is a blast from my past! I’d pretty much forgotten CKY existed for the last half a decade or so, until I saw this CD for sale for next to nothing in a charity shop. I forgot just how much I loved this band’s first two records – I can’t really speak much for the rest of the discography (An Answer Can Be Found was OK I guess, but Carver City does…

I had a little bit of a catch-up with Korn’s mid-to-late 2000s releases on Amazon recently. For some reason, the young-me never picked up 2003’s follow-up to Untouchables; Take A Look In The Mirror, which was unusual, especially considering that this was the last record the band did with the full original line-up. I really think Silveria’s drumming, whilst not incredibly technical, is extremely unique, and is noticeably missing from the later Korn stuff (as…

I gotta come clean here…I know that Impetigo are regarded as legends in the grindcore/noisecore scenes, but I just cannot get into them! I’ve had this CD for yonks but I rarely, if ever, listen to it. Perhaps I need to investigate more of their material, but with the crazy scope of music out there, I always find myself forgetting to do so. Giallo / Antefatto is a collection of the bands first two demos…

Fury 161 are a noise / death industrial based project with members hailing from Wales, Ireland and originally, South Africa. They came together in 2013 to produce misanthropic, hateful atmospheres about futility and anger towards all of mankind. Opener ‘Thanatos’ builds a dark, clanking atmosphere without getting too harsh. It is the audible equivalent of an incomprehensible mechanical world gearing up. ‘Spirits’ follows, which almost sounds like the distorted offspring of a Public Castration-era Swans…

Ho ho! Now this is something that I have watched grow from a silly one-minute-something demo into a full-blown project of epic proportions. Introducing my good ol’ pal Gareth B, whom is a fellow band-mate with me in Merthyr Tydfilian based rap metal (yes!) group Start! Start!. Mr. B is always grooving our tunes up with his mad bass skills, but he doesn’t get much chance to shine on the mic. That’s where Small Fortunes…

Before I start, let me just say that this band has one of the most awesome names in the history of all that is grindcore and death metal. Fuck! It’s such a brutal name, and one that still gets thinking “dayuuuum, that’s nasty” even after years of immersion in this type of shit. But, as usual, I digress. On with the music! Deeds of Derangement opens with a million-mile-a-minute blast-a-thon, throwing you right into PD’s…

Well, this is one short-ass tape. I should have seen it coming really, going on the Witch Cult live sets that I’ve experienced. This tape is Witch Cult to the core; starting off with some building harsh noise before ramming head-on into a grinding fury of total chaos and speed. Drainland have only two songs here, but they are really good; I just wish it lasted a bit longer (then maybe this review could be…

As far as Björk albums go this has to be the most boring one I have heard so far, if you can even call it an album at only seven tracks in length. Selmasongs is the “OST” to the film Dancer In The Dark, which also stars Björk in the main role. I’ve never seen the film and don’t particularly plan on watching it, but I expected from Björk and all her super-creative weirdness a very challenging…

I think this is probably the hardest thing in the ANb discography to get a hold of. Sure, the Insect Warfare split and the Converge split can fetch rather hefty prices, and Tentacles of Destruction is fairly limited, but for sheer difficulty in regards to unoptainability (is that even a word? *edit – no, it’s not), the split EP with Halo currently holds the crown (seeing as I don’t have all the ANb shit yet,…

Ok…so Jesus Cröst do groovy gore grind now? Dunno when the change over happened exactly, but it happened. Don’t get me wrong, the cover art is pretty hilarious considering the usual subject matter of Jesus Cröst’s material…but other than that…shit….I really don’t want to say it, because I hate dissing bands….but this shit sucks ass. Compared to the insane precision and ruthless insanity of material like Töt, this 7″ comes across as a bit boring…

Holy Mother, now this is some abrasive shit! Sete Star Sept are currently my go-to band for extra-nasty noisecore skullduggery, and they do not disappoint with this particular slice of shitgrind vulgarity. Violent Gorge takes things a little bit further. Things start off in the noisecore ballpark, and then subtly migrate into harsh noise territory, as it appears the original “band” recordings are cut, spliced, diced and manipulated to create all manner of auditory discomfort….

Wowzers, what a noise! Ha ha! I got this split because I am slowly making my way through collecting the Total Fucking Destruction stuff. I’m not’ve really been that familiar with Skat Injector, up until now that is. Neil from Legs Akimbo was a legend in finding an unsold copy of this split for me, as this shit is pretty limited now. The TFD stuff here is just some live versions of well known tracks…

Ever since I decided to include CDs on Lines In Wax about a year and a half ago I have looked forward to reviewing this album. It’s purely one of the most unique things I have ever heard, and every time I scanned my shelf for something to listen to whilst at work, Snuffholic would catch my eye, but every single time I’d think to myself “hmmm, maybe next time”. Well, finally that “next time”…

Yes yes, I know you’re all probably thinking the same; “not another bleedin’ Anathema post!”, but tough shite! I’ve done a lot of listening to Anathema recently, and that’s how Lines In Wax works; I don’t randomly just pull reviews out of my arse, I generally try to write about what is fresh in my head to give a more accurate, in depth review. That’s why there isn’t any tangible order to the stuff I…

Before The Berzerker became a fully-fledged band with Dissimulate and the tour that came before it, the project was – if footage from the Principles and Practices.. DVD is anything to go by – basically one very angry Australian man shouting at his friends until they made a death metal record with hardcore gabba drumming. I don’t really know how or why Dig from Earache signed Luke Kenny on two mediocre, dancy Morbid Angel remixes,…

Joe Pesci play really blurry sounding fastcore, somewhere along the grind highway between sounding like Anal Cunt and (really) early Magrudergrind. At Our Expense! sounds like more of a demo than anything, but it is a great, yet sadly quite short, trip through a grinding world of total speed. Bones Brigade released this CD back in 2009 after some self-released splits/demos and a 12″ four-way which the band appeared on around 2007. After the release of this…