Archive for April 2016

Acoustic Wizard is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an acoustic tribute band to Electric Wizard. I could never in a million years have expected this to work, but fuck, it totally does. If anything this project proves that there is real weight to the riffs that Electric Wizard have pioneered, rather than them being yet another crap band playing really slowly and smothered in distortion. I guess this is one of those things where I really can’t say…

Filth is the second album from Texan death metal legends Waco Jesus. The fact that it shares a title with Swans’ debut is easily overlooked once you’ve gotten a good eyeful of that sleeve cover – this shit is fucking nasty. Now, death metal thrives on being offensive and sick and gory and can often be quite unkind to women (lol), but Waco Jesus are either doing an excellent job of satirising this or they…

Sad Strange Beautiful Dream is a solo album from Taking Back Sunday guitarist/backing vocalist John Nolan. I’ve been meaning to give this a listen for a while, after being a fan of Taking Back Sunday since the beginning as well as enjoying the Straylight Run project, so I thought I’d actually sit down and give it a good listen. This is a very mellow and minimalist album. I actually find it quite refreshing and laid…

Look at all that lovely sand! Well, one assumes it’s sand – like the coloured sand you hammer into crappy glass bottles on family holidays to the beach. No? Well fuck you. Cycle is a pulsing, circular throb of a noise session, that loops and dives into waves of repetition and (yes) cycles; the palpable worm Ouroboros in wave format, writhing itself in undulations of sonic ecstasy. Yeah. At least, that is what part one…

American Head Charge are one of my favourite surviving memories from the early 2000s nu-metal explosion. Their sound owed more towards industrial than straight up nu-metal and therefore they seemed to survive the nu-metal cull that crept in overnight sometime in 2003. They continue to be a big draw live, mainly as a nostalgia trip for most, but they haven’t dropped a record since 2005’s The Feeding, 11 years ago. There was an EP in…

As debut albums go this one is certainly one Pvris can be proud of – what a remarkably strong album that could easily be a greatest hits album rather than that of a debut release, and from such a young band. Opening track “Smoke” is an incredibly good opener and one that shines through as a live set opener for the band too (which I can confirm after being lucky enough to catch them live)….

Caustic layer upon layer. Saxaphone meets blastbeat. Noisecore meets lounge. Rumba, oompah, slide, shake, swing, mosh, grind, kill. Disco Volante; secret songs, leftfield, experimental, techno, disco, rock, electronica. Sophomore, confusion, exclamation, subtlety, song within a song within a groove within a phrase within a suite. Mr. Bungle’s second record is by far their most difficult to get into. It offers a level of inaccessibility that is surprising even for a band whose sole purpose seemed…

I feel like I have an overwhelming urge to trepan my skull in order to fully envelope my conscious with the buzzing, numbing industrial stomp of Pharmakon’s “music”. I’m joking of course, but it kinda feels like the human brain alone isn’t powerful enough to digest this disgustingly intense mix of industrial, power electronics and ambience. Pharmakon is not afraid to balance the serene and low-key alongside the bashing, crashing havoc of sheer noise, and…

I was introduced to Strapping Young Lad when I was in sixth form. Angela Gossow-era Arch Enemy were touring the UK and SYL were main support, so my friend Gavin sent me some tracks of theirs over MSN Messenger (those were the days, eh?) and within seconds I was like – “errrr…fuck this Arch Enemy shite”. The first track I was sent was “Shitstorm”, track 3 off this intense, industrial, almost symphonic death metal beast…

Having considered Weezer’s Blue Album a fantastic debut and one of the best of its era and genre, as well as a being a big fan of their earlier releases (yet admittedly my attention dipped somewhat in and out of Weezer’s more recent releases), I was very keen to hear if Weezer would really grab my attention with the self titled “White Album”. This is overall a very upbeat sounding Weezer album, and also one…

This is a strange one: I’ve never really considered myself a fan of Coheed and Cambria – in fact, growing up alongside the “emo” trend in high school, hearing Coheed’s high-pitch croons would send shivers up my spine. But then, with Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness came a maturity that took a while to sink in, although it added a progressive element to Coheed’s already…

Nonentity is a grating, deafening displaying of analogue harsh noise broken down in to three consumable parts. The first part hisses and belches the way good noise should, before the second track “Abuse” provides us with a break that, in all honesty, seems to come a little bit too soon. The third part kicks back in for a final 15 minute push through a seascape of bubbling static bliss. I find myself trying to loop…

Scumpulse are a crusty black metal band from Edinburgh, all the way up in Scotland – that distant and mysterious land just above the flat and boring desperate shithole that is mainland England. Broken Reflection is a nifty little tape single (can’t remember the last time I saw a tape single, I’ll be honest) featuring two tracks ov blackened crust in the vein of Skeletonwitch-meets-Darkthrone-meets-Discharge (yeah that’s a subgenre of crust now, okay?). The title…

What I usually associate with Ramleh is an unstoppable barrage of power electronics and barked vocal eruptions. Which is exactly what we’ve got here. This does not disappoint. Catching them live with Godflesh a few years ago literally (and physically) blew me away. I am, however, pleasantly surprised by the static, choppy, experimental nature of how 31/5/1962 – 1982 starts off, which leads into a much more digestible forty minutes or so than the more…

Martyrdöd are one of them crust bands that have somehow managed to partly transcend the restrictive confines of the d-beat genre and turn into a full fledged metal band in their own right. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a few crust bands playing these days with melodic riffs and song structures, but none quite manage to mix soaring metal melodies with messy d-beat drumming as well as Martyrdöd have. Melody has been slowly creeping…