Archive for October 2016

Drowned are so metal that I could only dream as being as metal as this level of metal. Metal!!!!!!!!!! Think melo-death, but the raspier, nastier side, married with messy blasts and the odd wiggly riff for good measure. To be honest, I spun Butchery Age on the strength of the cover alone, and to be completely honest, whilst it’s easy for me to take the piss out of just how metal this is, there really…

Eastern Front play an interesting, modern brand of grim and cold blackened metal. As claustrophobic yet desolate as a Siberian no-man’s land, perpetuated entirely by a contradictory boxy and compressed drum sound as a foundation for expansive, frosty riffery. It is, quite honestly, a bit of a clusterfuck, sonically. It’s like the album can’t decide if it wants to be dissonant and mysterious, or tight and precise. Therefore it sits somewhere in the middle, not…

Future Of The Left are one of those rare bands that my friends are into that I can also get into. I’m a stubborn fucking dickhead, so when someone tells me to listen to something, I usually don’t. So, the fact that I love this album is nothing short of a total miracle, but the love comes in heaps, and for good reason. I initially gave the whole thing a chance on the strength of…

Excellent noisecore-meets-harsh noise project (I’m sorry if you are unaware of these subgenres, that sentence must look ridiculous) from the USA. Definitely something that will push the boundaries of my listening patience if all mushed together into one big cube, simply due to the frequency of the distortions used, however once broken up into grinding chunks of noisecore I find it much more humanly consumable, which is just great, folks. This is one of those…

Nuclear Vomit proclaim themselves as “Anal Fisting Scum Grind Core”, which to be honest does a pretty good job of describing the band’s dirgy, sluggish metal-with-porno-grind-vocals approach. Bludgeoning, mid-paced death is the order of the day, complemented by mainly piggy vocals and back ‘n’ forth dancey dancey bits that are so prominent with shit from this part of the world. Hey kids, death metal can be fun! The Czech Republic is almost like a breeding…

Everything I could have wanted from a Billy Talent album is right here. I’m happy that they’ve released yet another solid album from start to finish, as few bands nowadays manage to release cracking record after cracking record with little filler, but so far Billy Talent haven’t let us down there at all, I feel. This is full of catchy hooks – both vocally and musically; the catchy riffs and shouty choruses that this band…

Esoteric Warfare is (at the time of writing) the most recent offering by the current incarnation of legendary black metal icons, Mayhem. For a band that has always been knee-deep in, well, mayhem, it is perhaps of no surprise that their back-catalogue has been somewhat inconsistent; often strikingly different music styles counteract each other as the band continues to unfurl it’s unholy magic on the unsuspecting metal world. Contrary to this, Esoteric Warfare, despite it’s…

The Gorillaz self-titled record was the first album that I ever owned. Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory (unfortunately) holds the title for first record ever bought, but Gorillaz was the first thing that I seriously jammed, and it was instrumental in developing my interest in music as a serious hobby. Back in the day I had this terrible transparent blue Aiwa tape walkman / radio combo, and I played the livin’ fuckin’ guts out of my…

(Words by Griefmonger, archivist of blackened aural misanthropies)  A brutal black metal record? “What?” I hear you exclaim! “Warm bass and deep vocals?” Shock horror! What would seem at first as your average death metal chunk-and-stop evolves into a black death slugger quicker than water into good red wine. We have the drill of the tremolo layering the typical bellow and breakdown-friendly nod that what would normally be a staple of a death metal band….

So pretty much, if you’re not already a fan of The Beatles, then there’s an extremely slim chance you’ll be buying this record, as a live album is pretty much in my eyes a fan-targeted release. Normally I’m not a fan of live albums, I’ll be completely honest. There are exceptions, however I just feel that some moments you can’t recapture when it comes to this type of thing, kinda like how 90 percent of…

Shackles play chunky, crusty powerviolence with energetic flair and manic vocal displays dripping in palpable rabidity. Maunder re-animates the bloated, festering corpse of punk with the spastic electricity of grindcore and the meaty (yet vegan friendly!) deliverance of modern metal. Imagine Nails meets Repulsion, only on a limited 7″, rather than 5000 copies on Relapse in a variety of fucking colours. Bleak, miserable and powerfully heavy stuff. Maunder was the band’s debut release, back in…