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. I’m not sure if there is even a guitar in use here, or just some clever sampling. Such a short release is gonna spawn a short review, so I’ll just shut up an let Incest do the rest. Released through Vile Noise, a DIY Scottish label.
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 a flurry of garbled electronica and blasting 909 beats. “At Least We Have McDonalds” is a scatterfuck of a track, incorporating elements of dubstep into an already chaotic sound. “The Ghost Of My Girlfriend’s House” is as close to straight-up Snares worship Data Shit can get, before closer “Hypertrophy” is a simmering mirage of operatic samples and grindcore-grade drum programming. What more do you need? I’ve tried looking up more about Data Shit but have so far been unsuccessful. You can stream and download the entire EP over on Torn Flesh Records.
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 final Shpongle album. If you are familiar with the group’s earlier works, then what you can expect here is more of the same – in the greatest way possible. We’re talking 9, 10, 11 minute trips into twisting, turning, lush musical worlds that are dripping in gorgeous instrumentation and driven by stoned yet purposeful beat programming. We’re talking flutes, lutes, harps, synths, sitars. We’re talking blips, blops, bleeps; whirls and whizzes. We are talking total clarity and immersion into the Museum Of Consciousness. The highlights for me are the two longest tracks; “How The Jellyfish Jumped Up The Mountain” and “The Aquatic Garden Of Celestial Delights”. The former is a pacy, fluid journey through an audible hallucination, whereas the latter is a lurching, plodding epic of cataclysmal chill out proportion. Things get even weirder by “The Epiphany Of Mrs. Kugla”, where the Shpongolians tread into territory that can only be described as a bombastic film score. I can conjure up swooping montages of a villain’s lair; a damsel in distress, or a world gone to shit. And who is here to save us? Simon Posford and Raja Ram, most definitely. This thing is longer than 4 DMT trips.
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 chug out a fucking spectacular riff every now and then (for further reading on the power of riffs, see: doom metal). I first heard Epicardiectomy in an underground bar in Prague, in the Czech Republic. The guy working there was either in the band or his friends were, I can’t remember, I was properly shitfaced even though it was like 4pm. Hearing it blasting through speakers and deafening the ten or so patrons of that particular hole in the floor in Eastern Europe will stick with me forever. In my house however, Abhorrent Stench of Posthumous Gastrorectal Desecration doesn’t sound quite so epic, but it is still fucking heavy as hell. It kinda reminds me of Cephalotripsy, everything is fairly similar, although the vocals differ a bit. It is all a bit one dimensional (it is a slam record, after all) but if brutal music to bang you head to is what you want (and/or need) then I’d recommend Epicardiectomy any day of the week. Also, I bet they are fucking shit hot live!
“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 first heard it) single as well, really cemented my D12 fandom. I don’t wanna perpetuate a 12-year-old-white-girl stereotype, but Eminem’s part of this track smokes all of the rest of the band’s rhymes, hands down, although Bizarre’s lines are pretty funny, and twisted, as per usual. The song also boasted a shit hot production style, the beats being similar to that of Eminem’s own Marshall Mathers LP, which came out not long before this. You can pick this up for virtually next to nothing off websites such as Discogs, if you are somewhat into collecting this shit. You can also get the D12 album which this is off for pennies on the Amazon Marketplace.
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 up on my radar they were the only ones who seemed even remotely genuine and weren’t just jocking a trend of female-fronted slightly-heavy rock bands that had songs about the devil. Because y’know, that’s edgy as fuck, amirite? I don’t want to sound like a hipster but the more popular Blues Pills get the less I like them – just check out the super polished sheen on their new record. Bliss though, is a rougher, more intimate recording of true rock music bursting with passion, soul and well, songs about the devil. Bliss balances the right amounts of psychedelic without becoming self-indulgent, and balances the right amount of pop digestibility, without having the songs become too predictable or boring. As much as I like to laugh at people with flowers in their hair who think we’re still in the sixties, this record is fucking fantastic. It makes me wanna smoke a bunch of weed and drive a convertible through the fucking desert. Play it!
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 gripe with this EP is how short it is; it’s literally over in a matter of minutes, which sucks, but what can you do? With tracks as amazing as “Severed Cock Lollipop”, “Ballsack Blastfuck” and the previously mentioned ditty about the drillbit, who can argue? Groovy goregrind at it’s best! This is the 3rd RazorRape release out on the excellent Rotten Roll Rex.
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 nasty as fuck but my favourites have gotta be the vocals and the drum programming. The snare is perfect, and those vocals are just top notch, like, innit. You can stream the entire thing from the Reekorrhoea Bandcamp page (I’ve linked the demo below) but there’s also 75 copies available on tape, for the true crusty goregrinders. Word.
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 recorded and then fed through a whole bunch of filters and pedals. It’s muddy, all over the place, probably improvised and most definitely horrible. Aching over the top of all this mess is a bunch of high-frequency whines and fizzles, almost sounding like alien microphone feedback. It does mix up a bit as the track unfolds but for the most part things remain entirely focussed on being a colossal, possibly stoned mess. It’s glorious.
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 Portishead in a different way, and then, one day, with the iPod on random, I fell in love. This is so laid back and chilled, yet so epic at the same time it really is a bit of an enigma. How is that even possible? Well, Portishead managed it. Ticking, soft trip-hop beats and sparse instrumentation is pretty much all that’s going on here, complimented by one of the best female voices I’ve heard a long time. As a blue print for an entire record, this approach is extremely basic, but this self-titled record fails to bore me at any given moment. It is simply a magical record. The final track includes some fleeting male vocal contributions, but that’s about as far as breaking the template goes! I got this on vinyl for £12, from the Head chain in Bristol. Turn ting up!
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. Perverse Recollections… is jammed awkwardly between the worlds of deathcore, slam and even goregrind (think piccolo snares and watery vocals), and what a glorious fucking mess it is. This shit is literally all over the place. The drums, in the fast bits at least, are nothing short of spastic. The guitars are razor-wire sharp, twisting and chugging through the tracks like barbed wire twisted around a fence. The vocals are a hydra-headed beast of different styles of grotesquery; drowning in bong water one minute, disemboweling a pig the next, and then barking at you like the frontman of a straight-edge hardcore band, before some amphibian-like creature emerges from Cthulhu’s depths to spit a couple of lines too.
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 added inclusion of a new full-time frontman, Scott Randall. Former vocalist/guitarist Richard Meyrick now focuses entirely on his guitar role, and the main back up vocals are provided instead by second guitarist James Heard (and the rest of the band in a live setting, no doubt). The first notable thing about Led By Lions other than the new vocals is the chunky, impressively professional production standard and heavy sound. Without being over-triggered, the drums are solid and dense in the mix, as is, rather nicely, the bass (provided by Small Fortunes / Start! Start! lunatic Gareth Burrough). I’m not sure what tuning this is all recorded in, but it adds a welcome grating metal edge to what would essentially be a very melodic and poppy performance. This was self-financed and self-released by the band themselves, and you can hear the EP in it’s entirety if you are using Spotify (clicky clicky). Physical copies will be available later in the year, and you can also check out the promo video for the song “Fall Of A Giant” below.
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 hell, if only a little short for my liking, even when spinning at 33rpm. Bongripper are slowly growing to become one of my favourite doom metal bands of all time, and they are showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Conan on the other hand throw a little variation into their usual sound here. It is still down-tuned and massive; horrendous room shaking bass tones are laced with echoic yelps like every other Conan release, but there seems to be a grandiose, building feeling beneath the usual textures, as if Conan have all of a sudden become epic as fuck. It is like giant-monolithic-power-doom-drone-metal. Yes, that’ll do. Ha ha. Out on Holy Roar Records.
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 a recent holiday my parents took, my father was mistaken for a retired Dave Stewart by the hotel staff. When I was told this story it became apparent that I had never heard of Dave Stewart, and a few weeks later this 12″ landed in my possession. Ha! As I opened up with saying, track 1 is chilled as feck, but track 2 “King Of The Hypocrites” brings all of the funk in the universe, chicken-grease guitars and all. The song that follows it, “Diamond Avenue” has a whole fast-paced abstract lyrical approach that reminds me of something that Bryan Ferry might have done at some point (think “Street Life” or “A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall” (that title might not be strictly 100% correct!)). The remains of the A side are fairly lackluster compared to these first three songs. Side B opens up all guns blazing, with all sorts of shit going on; trumpets popping up left right and centre for the lively yet very rubbish “Party Town”. In fact, “Party Town” is so goddamn awful that I call the listening a day right here. I’ve gotten an over-all feel for what’s going on here! Ha ha! No doubt I’ll spin this again soon but for the purposes of this review I have heard more than enough Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys. Mega recommends if you’re into classic rock and/or roll, otherwise I wouldn’t bother clicking.
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. Out of them all though, The Code Is Red… has to be my favourite. After obsessing over Scum, FETO and the other early, genre-defying classics that Napalm Death released, I found it a bit difficult to stomach the slower, more groove-orientated stuff of the 90s. With the records listed above, Napalm Death fell into their own unique pattern of mixing blasting grindcore with groove, and vicious death metal. Opening track “Silence Is Deafening” was a single for the band, and even features a really heavy breakdown part at the end, but after that, a whole bunch of blasting grindcore follows, with the right amount of punch and speed. There’s a couple of oddball moments to the regular formula in here to keep it interesting though; “The Great And The Good” features guest vocals from Jello Biafra, and the penultimate track, “Morale”, has a much more different, slow and crushing, early-Swans vibe which you don’t see very often from a band as fast as Napalm Death. All in all, The Code Is Red… is a very focused record but also varied enough to remain interesting.
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 Are Him is still steeped in the roots from which the Angels Of Light spawned, but there is a palpable menace brooding over this record. Let’s face it, “Black River Song” and “My Brother’s Man” could easily have been on the Swans reformation album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. Both are mind numbingly repetitive, driven by bass and heavy percussion, and narrated by twisted, slightly disturbing vocal lines. But, this is still an Angels Of Light record, and moments of clarity and beauty are in abundance. I never thought I’d ever be into something that resembles country and western, but Michael Gira will take you strange places if you are willing to follow. “Sunflower’s Here To Stay” and “The Visitor” are simply stunning, intricately composed and immensely delicate tracks of American goodness. If you liked the softer side to Swans and haven’t heard Angels Of Light yet, there’s no better place to start than here. Self-released by Gira on Young God Records.
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 the shitty cover artwork put you off, this is one hell of a record. It kinda reminds me of The Kovenant, if you crossed them with Enemy Soil and, I dunno…Invasion-era Gigantic Brain? It’s all a bit mental and can be a lot to take in on the first listen. I don’t really know how well this has aged seeing as I loved it when I was a young ‘un and I might be a little bit biased, but if you like your music sporadic, challenging and quite simply dripping with insanity, then I’d look no further for the time being. Press play, I dare you.
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 get some albums and I just clicked that I already had one somewhere. Sure, Burninhell isn’t as polished or as rock’n’roll as later, more accessible material by the band but it’s still a pretty cool d-beat influenced metal record. To me it sounds like Motorhead, Discharge and Agathocles crossed over in a modern studio. I can get behind that! Opener, “Clearance of Century” has a huge punk feel to it, whilst second track “Here We Are” brings the grind that I love so much. The ferocity here is totally non-stop; the vocals are super savage and really match the hybrid sound perfectly. “Commands from the Oval Throne” on side B is another favourite of mine. The whole thing closes out with “Oseriost som fan”, which is crusty as absolute fucking fuck, before ending with some epic chanting shit. This has been out for some time now on CD and vinyl thanks to Insane Society Records. Czech it out in the link below!
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 a massive saturation of the scene. You could look at it now as everybody having a fair chance of exposure, but to me the ease of which people can now make and distribute music also has a huge downside. So yeah, I don’t actually listen to that much harsh noise. But, there was something about Vulgar Disease’s cover art for When You Get Drunk I’ll Be The Wine that made me listen. Perhaps it was because it looks a bit like an old goregrind tape, or perhaps it was because it claimed to be inspired by Bon Jovi. Either way, I listened to it, and not only does it (thankfully) not sound anything like Bon Jovi, but it’s actually fucking awesome. Sure, it’s noisy as hell, but beneath those pummelling walls of distortion are haunting strains and creeping textures which mix together in frenetic unison, creating an unique sound that you want to explore further, but can’t, because it’ll melt your face off. Some tracks incorporate barked, distorted and commanding vocals that again, don’t really sound like Bon Jovi but sound to me like a cross between Swans’ Michael Gira in his early days and J Randall from Agoraphobic Nosebleed. It works for me! The closing title track is much more brooding and atmospheric, building slowly and surely until….it just slowly drifts off into nothingness. Check the entire release out below on Torn Flesh Records, you can also download the entire thing for free too.
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, that would have been first, but hey, it’s not my fuckin’ show haha Since then I’ve looked for an in-road into Tom Waits’ music, which was provided to me in the form of a recommendation of the Frank’s Wild Years album. It’s pretty nice stuff, material of such a type that I rarely partake in listening to, but harking back to a time that no longer exists and conjuring all sorts of fantastic imagery of culture and emotion. It’s bluesy as fark, as was a really nice break for me from a world of grindcore and hip hop (and that one Type O Negative record I keep playing over and over these days). My favourite tracks were probably the gravelier-sounding ones, like “Telephone Call From Istanbul”, “Way Down In The Hole” and “Straight To The Top”. The opening track, “Hang On St. Christopher” also has a wicked, wicked groove, which I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere else already. You gotta keep the devil… down in the hole.
(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. If there is a world in history that was particularly grim and unforgiving, ancient Egypt ranks pretty high on that scale. With sarcophagi bursting open with mystical and disturbing subject matter to fuel Nile’s song-writing fire, the “band what like does songs ’bout Egypt and that” have given us thus far seven albums of Pharoahcious (I went there) death metal. The first thing I noticed through the chunky, Relapse-budgeted production was the immense, seemingly unstoppable wall of drums provided by one George Kolias. On sheer performance, discipline and astounding stamina this record is aeons above other death metal records alone, but couple said drumming wizardry with immensly technical riffs and super-complicated songs about stuff you can never begin to understand, and Nile take the crown with this record for the most elitist death metal performance that wasn’t boring or even maybe contrived. After a brief intro, the first proper song, “Cast Down The Heretic” blasts a fucking hole in your skull. “Sacrifice Unto Sebek”, the single from this album, oddly reduces the pace a bit, before we get the first of three 9-minute epics, “User Maat Re”, which is mind boggling in scope and duration. There’s always time for more ultra-elitist Egyptian tunage – “Chapter Of Obeisance Before Giving Breath To The Inert One In The Presence Of The Crescent Shaped Horns” (lol) – before “Lashed To The Slave Stick” comes in. This track is one of my favourite death metal songs of all time. The album closes off with two more (approx) 9-minute epics, making Annihilation… a long but ultimately satisfying trip into a world of unstoppable death metal force.
