Archive for February 2018

The Autopsy Of Jane Doe starts as a promising creeper, where a pathologist / medical examiner father & son duo come across a female corpse that has sustained horrific injuries and is harboring all sorts of bizarre secrets. Dad (Brian Cox) is a methodical and professional character, who offers interesting insights into each increasingly bizarre discovery on or in the girl’s body. I felt that there was over-use of musical queues (I hate being told…

Mid-career Cathedral output is often looked at with a certain degree of scorn, which is understandable in some respects but then, mainly not so understandable in others. Playing Supernatural Birth Machine, which bursts forth from the womb into heavy metal life (I went there) with the highly entertaining and excellently heavy “Urkos Conquest” and firmly establishes itself as a cheesy doom masterpiece within a matter of minutes. Do you need any more ride bell in…

Ba ba doo de da doop. What’s more insane than Mike Patton smoking crack in a jazz club? Why, John Zorn’s Naked City, of course! Meet the album that spawned the band of the same name. Bizarre grindcore elements meet experimental jazz music, resulting in pompous explosions of glorious noise in bed next to smooth, swinging numbers and interpretations of famous TV/movie themes. I’ll never think of the James Bond theme in the same way…

Parazitózis play the sort of goregrind that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Sludgy, toned-to-almost-human-inaudibility guitar mush meets arsehole-for-a-face swamp vocals and drumming that is swifter than instant decapitation. The Taste Of Medical Waste is billed as a one man old school goregrind attack, which kinda undersells it, as there are hundreds of projects fitting that description. Parazitózis is much more adept at invoking intumescent tunage from the suppurating, bubbling vats of putrefying filth….

I have a soft spot for early Celtic Frost; it just seems to tick all of the right boxes as far as metal goes. The overall product is slightly primitive, with a condensed production job, but this allows for a dry, punchy drum sound to penetrate through the fog of guitars. Leads (and oddly, the bass) are fine but the rhythym gets swallowed up in the haze. Asides from the well-known classics here, my favourites…

It is such a weird feeling when you discover something that has been under your nose this whole time (hell, since before you were even born – imagine such ignorance!). Today I’m talking about Cardiff’s Demented Are Go, who are – granted – a band praised for helping pioneer the psychobilly sound, which isn’t exactly my strong point. But, Demented Are Go lean towards the harder, more abrasive end of the scale, and hail from…

This is perfect, considering the current political climate. It dropped at just the right time; days before the election farce of 2016 this came like a wet fart out of nowhere into the face of the world (I wrote this a loooong time ago, the world hasn’t ended just yet – Ed). Anal Trump have gone on to release several short blasts of petulant goregrind wetness, having at the socio-political issues of the day through…

IMDb has this down as a “spaghetti horror”, which is pretty funny. Where does a giallo end and spaghetti horror begin, definition wise? I guess, if anything, Delirium is a late offering to the giallo cause, coming out in 1987. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, despite how bad it looks. The sound effects are so fucking cheap, and couple that with an unbelievable bad overdub, the even more unbelievably bad acting, we have…

The Day Everything Became Nothing play in a dry, sterile, heaving approach to goregrind; the type that can suffocate you beneath its weight, like dying slowly trapped under rubble, or having your fucking head smashed off in one go by an anvil or some such grotesquery. Harking from the school of the CBT vein of gore, TDEBN expand on this template to take the groovy gore into a more solid, straight-up metal direction. The song-writing…

A Chapter Of Accidents is surely the pinnacle of classic Dead Infection? Fuck it, even in the history and development of the goregrind sound itself. Yeah, I’m going with that! A Chapter Of Accidents manages to stand out in an infernal sea of disgusting goregrind, even by today’s standards. The subterranean production of earlier Dead Infection records is replaced by a crispy – yet still repugnant – sound that is far more suited to the…

I’ve always had a soft spot for Bad Religion, despite having a “metalhead” background whilst growing up. It all started when I heard “You” on the soundtrack for the Tony Hawks 2 game back when I was a nipper (along with horrorpunk era AFI and Millencolin’s “No Cigar”, man that soundtrack didn’t half sell punk rock to me!). Although, coming up through a world of extreme metal, I found Bad Religion’s laid back punk rock…

Billed as Full Moon Of The Virgins on Amazon Prime, and known as The Devil’s Wedding Night to most of the world, this fantastic Italian horror movie can comfortably join the Low Budget Movies With 9000 Different Names Club. I’ll go with the original title, Il Plenilunio Delle Vergini, even though I have absolutely no real fucking clue on how to correctly pronounce it. Il Plenilunio Delle Vergini is brilliant. I loved every second of…

I forgot how much I love this record. Sure, it is not in what is considered the high-point of Godflesh’s career, but appreciators of their entire body of work such as yours truly can find a lot of pleasure in the less-trodden paths of the ‘Flesh. My main complaint is that the whole thing sounds a little flat, but this isn’t something that cannot be rectified by turnin’ ‘ting up a bit, ken? That hurdle…

Distant Satellites, upon its release, marked a quietly confident return for the band, with the band’s sound maturing further yet again. Just when you think Anathema could not have evolved any further, they came out and dropped this. Distant Satellites is subtle yet emotionally dense, restrained yet soaring in ravines of ups and downs, warm yet cold with tales of loss and despair. The Cavanagh brothers et al have song writing down to a fine…

Ah, good ol’ Pumpkinhead. Honestly, I only wound up watching this because of the Misfits song of the same name (which I guess is loosely based on this? It has the same poem at the end). On first impressions, I found this to be a fairly crummy movie, but the more I thought about the whole premise and story, I found it to be pretty original and interesting (more so in story than in actual…

Buried deep beneath the sedimentary layers of this wasteland we call a musical landscape, there is a carved plateau in which six unscathed gems wait to be excavated.  After a few days of digging around Spotify radio playlists, I hit gold… or diamond. Unlike the previous releases that these four New Yorkers have put forth DIY, the 2014 EP – Careful Kid – was recorded in an actual studio (Room 17). The clarity shines through…