Archive for June 2019

There is something just so inherently evil about Akercocke’s early work, particularly on the first two records. Perhaps its the air of elegance that the band bring to a genre that is often delivered with the subtly of a war hammer to the face, or perhaps its the smattering of terrifying noises and soundscapes that the band use to decorate their macabre, sexually-charged satanic hymns. Rape… is a dirty, dismal maw, taking heavy inspiration from…

For a long time, M3 was the only OG Mushroomhead album that I didn’t own. Hunting down an OG MRH INC Records version proved nearly impossible before the days of Discogs, and when they did crop up, the discs went for a pretty penny. I ended up getting the 2002 re-issue with the massively improved artwork (this being said I would prefer the OG purely because its the OG, guess I’m a sucker for that…

I remember downloading this when I was a teenager and absolutely fucking hating it, so it was nice coming back 13 years later with a bit more appreciation for anything that isn’t Napalm Death. I was reading a Wikipedia article about Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (night shifts for you) and that eventually led me to this concept album. I can’t say I’m much of a fan of those vocals (to be fair power metal isn’t my…

How I Loved You is beautiful, stunning, eery and lush. A cut of morose sadness dashes the otherwise bright and sun-kissed veins of sparkling instrumentation and twinkling percussion. This was the album that made me fall in love with Angels Of Light; after a few unsuccessful listens elsewhere, everything clicked. “Evangeline” and “New York Girls” have to be two of the greatest songs ever written.

I was inspired to listen to this by my mate Gareth, who has recently caught the group live in concert. Honestly, this record was way better than I expected. Some of the synth sounds are very unique, and the bass sound is fantastic. It is a bit poppy for my taste, but has a dark streak running through it. All in all, a decent listen.

The vibe and theme of this record pretty much sums up the whole knuckle-dragging tupa tupa bullshit of the last two decades or so. Nevertheless, the production is smooth and the riffs are massive, which make for a fun if not entirely and completely unoriginal listen.

There is just something so very special about the music of Patrick Walker. Whilst less metallic in its heaviness than his previous work with Warning, 40 Watt Sun’s debut album possesses its own kind of dense, head-melting fuzz. The way it wraps around the bare bones songs, weaving its way into all of the gaps between the glacial riffs and sparse drumming, is absolutely sublime. On top of all this, the vocals and songwriting are…

It has been a good while since a record has instilled such a physical level of claustrophobic distress within me. Sitting, writing, in a fucking Asda cafe of all places (I was waiting for my car to be MOT’ed), Dark Ages’ ominous journeys through a plague-riddled world crept up and wrapped me in a blanket of suffocating dread. Yeah. Sounds a bit much, but it was fucking great. By the time I decided to get…

Jarboe is just a treasure, having offered so much to Swans in countering the sheer terrifying impact of their music with her lush and iconic vocals and keyboard melodies. In light of this, I suppose, I’ve also found the unhinged lunacy of her solo stuff a bit intimidating in comparison. Anhedoniac is a meandering, hour long trip through hell. It begins with these fantastic Middle Eastern elements to the first few tracks, and trials off…

This is probably the best Rolling Stones record to come out in known modern history. For a band that constantly re-hashes ‘best of’s over and over and over, hearing an album full of blues covers was very unexpected, for me at least. The record lurches into life, and at first seems a bit clumsy, with the Stones showing their age in comparison to the energy of their earlier efforts. After the initial adjustment however, the…

This is a sonic whirlwind of ripping grindcore savagery, to be honest. One of the early purveyors of the powerviolence tag, Dropdead manage to retain that unhinged edge that a lot of later, more polished powerviolence productions miss completely. Pissed off, venomous grind for the thinking man. 

I’m a cynical bastard so its easy for me to see why people complain that ENT isn’t really ENT these days, but the real talk should be about the records that they are releasing and the shows that they are performing. Both of which, I’m glad to confirm (give or take a Dean mishap or six), are still fucking outstanding. This is absolutely savage, like.

Every so often I just gotta come back to early Anathema. Most often, it used to be to Serenades, but as time has gone on, I find myself revisiting this compilation rather than the debut album. Despite the engine of pure brilliance that modern Anathema has become, I do genuinely miss the old doomy Anathema. Honestly, this comp always gets looked over by me, but lets be frank here: as awesome as Serenades is, the…

Man, I absolutely fucking love dungeon synth. If anything makes me wanna re-download TES:III plus a fuckton of custom mods, or start writing a 220,000 word fantasy epic, then one suspects that this is the exact record. Fief is particularly magic, employing a range of instruments that seem authentic to the olde worlde. Yeah, it might be VSTs (or maybe not, I dunno haha), but it sounds absolutely fantastic. There is so much dungeon synth…

More Than Life play that kinda hardcore that has so much youthful energy coursing through its veins. Throw in a splash of something altogether more emo or post- and you should get a good idea of where we’re coming from. The riffs are something else; channeling all sorts of influences (even sounds a bit like black metal in parts) into these morose yet rabid tunes. Love Let Me Go is the band’s debut record from…

Drive Me To Kill You is a fun hardcore punk tinged journey through the sloppy pits of grindcore, brought to you by the guy who runs agzdaredz.blogspot.com, which I got a shitload of noise / grind stuff from back in the day, so kudos to you, my friend. The best part is that I have no fucking clue where I got this CD from, no doubt in one of my trips north, but I’m usually…

There is something unusually uplifting about the rock band / synthesizer combination this record. I guess this is also what makes the album so enduring; the physical – or analog – world meeting the clinical and mechanical world of computers. Couple this with Numan’s bizarre but now trademark delivery and you have an all-round winning combination, that in all realities and existences, needs no introduction.  

(June 2019 edit: this should have been posted years ago, so please excuse the promotional tone in which it is written!) Okay, so here it is, the first release on the new Lines In Wax “label”, the glorious split EP between thrashing Newport grinders and Hereford powerviolence trio Fetus Christ. We’ve been toying with the idea of doing a split for quite some time, so it fit perfectly with the intention to start my label,…

Merzxiu is two back to back 20-minute slabs of experimental noise (are you surprised?) from two of the most experimental and well-respected artists in the entire left field of music. Merzbow, by now surely, needs no introduction. Xiu Xiu on the other hand, play a very unusual blend of styles, but have forayed into the noise world in the past. The two tracks here, simply titled “A” and “B”, are slow, brooding, bubbling, crackling atmospheric…

So, Korn invented dubstep. Oh, didn’t you hear? I wasn’t informed either, but its okay, there hasn’t been any great cultural upheaval; the only thing that the world has missed out on is several more crappy albums like this, where straight-outta-the-box Native Instruments Massive oscillating bass riffs jar awkwardly with mediocre Korn tracks. Y’know what, sometimes…. just sometimes…. it works, but most of the time it really, really doesn’t. Fieldy’s low-hanging bass strings clank horribly…

The filthiest, blasting gore. Sounds more like two sessions back to back (could easily be a split or something) than a gen-up album, but both sessions are highly enjoyable. For fans of disgusting, bloated goregrind. Get it down ‘ew feckin’ gullet, son!

Take it from Agathocles, my friends; grind is indeed protest. Well, not all of it is, maybe just some of it. The protest against over-produced, tired, non-DIY methods seems to come from the punk / crust side of the coin, and that is, perhaps not at all coincidentally, the side of the “Grind Coin” (I might Trademark that) from which the revered Agathocles hail. This is more of what is to be expected of our…

Sextrash play raunchy, messy thrash metal that verges on the edges of insanity. Think Sacrilege, or Hirax, with the “attitude” of Motley Crue and the production approach of a 90s death metal cassette demo. It is honestly, a weird mix. It is almost as if the style of music does not match the cover art that the band have chosen, which I cannot decide is either one of the coolest sleeves I’ve seen or one…

I’ve always found this record to be much gentler than the other Death In June offerings that I’ve heard. That sub-level of sinister atmosphere seems almost completely devoid from these glistening neo-folk hymns. For once, it almost seems like positivity and hope undercuts the morose songwriting, rather than echoes of pestilence, death and sadness. Yes, some of the lyrics allude to some darkness, but generally the vibe is much more twinkly than happy that I…

Through Chasm, Caves and Titan Woods stands apart, for me at least, from the rest of the Carpathian Forest catalog, which is generally a bit more filthy and with a blackened punk vibe. This though… this is wondrous, haunting, mysterious and hypnotically beautiful; not a million miles away from the “magic spell” days of Burzum, back when black metal was transcendental yet didn’t need to declare itself as such, back when it was atmospheric and…

I’d be lying if I said I was anywhere near as enthusiastic about post-OG run Joker’s Cards ICP stuff than I was about everything up until that point. Sure, they had the odd album that was y’know, a bit crap, but after the original saga was complete it almost felt for a while that ICP were trundling forward without a purpose (I’ll get to this in my Tempest review). Furious Fred Fury though (the FIFTH…

Ship Of Fools is a name that I’ve seen thrown about here and there, but I had absolutely no idea that they were an instrumental prog band. Their links to the likes of Cradle Of Filth and Anathema had me thinking that they would be some sort of doomy keyboard offering, but Close Your Eyes (Forget The World) is a cerebral trip through the meandering yet blissful sea of keyboard-driven prog. Some of the tracks…

There is a lot of hype around this lass right now, but spinning this up I can see that all of it is totally deserved. There is something incredibly special about this record. I guess, the genius starts with the production, which is done entirely by her brother, Finneas O’Connell. The songs really pop out of the speakers, the crisp, in your face tracks duck and dive from style to style, led by Billie’s pure…

Two young girls are snatched for a high-paying maniac who is in love with life-sized dolls. A shady biker gang, who is at first a bit skeptical of the idea, soon warms to the $10,000 asking price for the girls, and they quickly kidnap two young hotties from the city. However, despite the premise for all sorts of debauchery, nothing really happens. At all. There is a bit of back and forth between the bikers…

Alternative 4 marked the biggest departure for Anathema from their original doom metal sound. Sure, the melody had continued to creep in on both The Silent Enigma and Eternity, but Alternative 4 jumped ship from metal completely, laying the blueprint for the alternative (lol) rock sound that the band would continue to expand on throughout the rest of the nineties. The production is a little flat, but there are some Anathema classics here. Also, what…