Archive for February 2015

Warning! Self-promotional post! I just wanna take a post to tell you all about my new grindcore band The Judas Cradle (google the definition for epic luls and potential cringing). Formed out of the ashes of Newport death metal crew O.A.P., The Judas Cradle became a real thing in September of last year. We’ve have been rehearsing pretty much weekly since, and we recorded our debut EP in our rehearsal space. It was released in…

It’s easy to write off a band like Deafheaven as pure hipster fodder, but looking past that probably media-perpetuated stereotype (I’m contributing in my own little way by even mentioning it) you will find an extremely talented band with really awesome music. Sunbather opens up to me sounding like the bastard lovechild of post rock and black metal, with “Dream House” punishing you not only in the feels with the melody, but in the face…

I’ve always been a bit hit and miss when it comes to black metal. I think it’s because black metal is easily one of the most over-saturated genres of music out there. There seems to be an endless stream of black metal projects the world over, constantly vying for grimness and struggling to flog their shitty limited run cassette-release demos. In all honesty, I only ended up checking out Lifelover because of the extremely interesting…

How does one approach a review of a revered classic that spawned a genre? There are various debates about whether Scum was the first grindcore record, but there can be no argument that it was the first one that blew up on any particular scale. It was the album that cemented this weird sounding “grindcore” as a real thing. It also put Earache on the map, and seeded the entire worldwide scene that would follow….

This has gotta be one of my favourite rap/hip hop discoveries of the past year or so. Granted, this came out in 2011 but I’m not exactly crawling all over the modern rap scene (because as Eminem so eloquently put it – it’s a landfill). I heard enough episodes of Charlie Sloth on Radio 1 whilst at work to convince myself that hip hop was welllllll and truly dead and anything post-2000 was not even…

With the recent release of Voices’ second album London, I realised that I hadn’t written anything on the group’s astoundingly perplexing debut (if you’re a frequent reader you’ll begin to notice that this happens quite a lot haha). Voices are a band formed out of the ashes of the amazing and forever-mourned Akercocke, with all members bar one of the final Akercocke line up fleshing out Voices, along with new bassist Dan Abela, who played…

I forgot just how absolutely huge this album sounds. When it first came out I didn’t like it because it marked a notable difference in direction from the super-blast-n-bombast I expected and loved from Dimmu Borgir. In Sorte Diaboli showcased a much more streamlined, death metal type of direction for the band, and on initial listens, Abrahadabra seemed like a tame follow up, with too much chuggy chuggy boring passages borrowed from the immensely popular…

A recurring theme in my posting to Lines In Wax is my reluctance to approach my absolute favourite bands. I eventually get to it with most of them (look how many Agoraphobic Nosebleed posts I’ve done!) but with Swans I always hit that wall. How in the fuck am I supposed to describe this album in only so many words? I was still getting my head around The Seer when To Be Kind was announced….

Auerbach is one of a gazillion projects by Merthyr Tydfilian / Aberdare-ian (yeah, I can make up my own words now) Kristian Cole. I sit next to this cunt most days in work placement so I might come across a bit biased as I review one of his creations, but I say with all the honesty in my blackened heart that this is a seriously harsh aural assault of the senses. He goes by many…

C.A.R.N.E. are a porno-influenced groovy grindcore band from the lubed-up lower bowels of Mexico. The Taste Of Latex, despite splits with Oxidised Razor and Fucksaw, is the band’s only full length release to date. Although dirgy as fuck, it is a really groovy album loaded with tupa tupa rhythms and slow, sludgy pornogrind. The vocals are the only let down; when not croaking and spluttering through the genre-defining pitchshifter muck, they are replaced by a…

Every now and then it’s great to hear a rapper who doesn’t rely heavily on endless taboo subject matter to fill his verses. Granted, perhaps I was a little burnt out on the excess of hip hop, as I was listening to Necro’s The Sexorcist a lot alongside Doris, and I’m not exactly saying that this Odd Future member’s solo outfit is clean like a Will Smith album, but it is admittedly refreshing all the…

What a trip! What a dream! I was busting to write about this a few months ago – on my first listen I absolutely fell in love with this smorgasbord of musical tomfoolery, but after every subsequent listen I’ve not been able to replicate my interest for it. That was until I realised that you have to give this album your complete attention; it works as background music but to truly appreciate what it is…

If Pantera and Rompeprop had a baby it would sound like this. I shit you not. In what is possibly one of the most under-rated goregrind (gore ‘ n’ roll? Gore metal?) releases of all time, Splatter Whore burst onto the unsuspecting underground like a full colostomy bag hitting the pavement after being thrown from the roof of a multi-storey car park. It’s wet as fuck and extremely hard hitting. Lol. Metallic riffage and more…

There’s a lot of Jesu stuff out there now – I think this project ended up being much more productive than even Justin Broadrick could have anticipated when he first started lurching out the aching melancholic drones of Jesu. Silver however, simply has to be some of the best material recorded under this moniker. It fights for the top spot against Lifeline, which was the first Jesu release I heard and therefore I have an…