Archive for December 2022

Onwards through the Analord universe! The opening track to this one always lights me up with energy, it’s like something out of an old Sonic The Hedgehog game but in an acid techno style. Track 3 has always stuck with me, with its haunting, warbling synth lead.

Hellripper are fucking class. Taking from the uhh, Midnight / Abigail / Naked Whipper school of thrashy, punky black metal, imagine Darkthrone’s late 2000s crust output pushed up to 11. A compilation, but a good section of material to get your jowls dripping for more. The record’s title gives you all the info you need on whether to press play or not. Personally, I think you should.

Silly yet fun little EP from death meets grind British metallers Foetal Juice. If you like puns in your metal, you’ll love this slice of insanity. Really good production too.

As much as I love Legion I find the production so dense and impenetrable I can’t help but prefer both the self-titled and Once Upon The Cross to it. Legion is arguably more brutal, but there is more nuance here, and I think the record works better for it. The band are firing on all cylinders here. Thick and chunky with a dry, unforgiving production. Not as viscerally decimating as Legion, but still an infinitely…

Solid later-career effort here from everyone’s favourite Third Reich fetishising grandpa. Even after my own in-depth analysis, I still have no idea where Di6 stands politically, at least not in regards to the music that the project creates, but thankfully the overt and endless Nazi references are somewhat subdued here on The Rule Of Thirds (unless of course I’m just too stupid to notice the dog whistles). Honestly though, after an experimental period it was…

Intense, dusty and archaic black metal from one of the guys involved in Morgue Tar (which is excellent by the way). I love how this thing juxtaposes between lengthy keyboard pieces (not in the Cradle Of Filth way, these compositions feel more in line with horror movies and are buried behind a million layers of dust) and intense, raw black metal. Things aren’t “raw” to the point of being unlistenable or becoming the dreaded wasps-in-a-jar…

Haggus, despite being a fairly new band in the lifespan of “mincecore” have gotta be the ones who are holding that gold standard up high (along with Archagathus and Hyperemesis (RIP)). This split with Fentanyl Surprise is no different: intense, super bassy and chunky production underpins the sickening toilet bowl vokills and insane dustbin drums. It’s just so gooey and disgusting! I love it.  Fentanyl Surprise have a bit more of an old-school grindcore sound…

As much as I want to be a grown-up music reviewer and as much as I want bands and artists to naturally grow and evolve, I simply gotta say: goddamn I miss it when 40 Watt Sun was heavy. Distortion-filled 40 Watt, both live and on-record, is some of the best stuff that I have ever witnessed.  Not that I do not appreciate what Patrick Walker is doing here, of course. I saw 40 Watt…

The earlier Berzerker stuff just got harder and harder the closer we got to the “band” Self-Titled (although, to be fair, Luke has always gone hard). Broken (or Untitled EP, depending on your source), is a harsh and head-pounding listen, where all the speedcore craziness gets dialled up every further.  It’s worth checking out if you’re a fan of the earlier full-band stuff but don’t expect any grindcore or death metal here. It’s straight up…

Malad are great. I had a cassette of theirs once, but I’ve lost it or traded it away. Useless!  Anyway, I love the rumbling noisecore carnage here. Not much that can be said, but if you love warm, distorted, horrible old school noisecore on cassette then look no further.  Inopexia have (dare I say) a slightly cleaner sound, and more of a goregrind vibe, but it’s still car crash noise craziness.

Excellent production, but one that is kinda typical for this 10s era hipster hip hop stuff. Like I said though, excellently done, especially in the beats department. For all the vibes here the beats are consistently great.  Lyrically, things are quite clever, but there are some stinkers (like the forced reference to MBV’s Loveless). Likewise the guest spots are equally so-so, with some excellent verses from Danny Brown, El-P and Despot. I’d never heard Despot…

15 traXXX in four minutes? Sounds about right to me, guvnor. Expect the wateriest, most ridiculous shifter vocals, and y’know what, some actually really well programmed drums. And that’s it. No guitars or bass or anything like that. Just drum programmed blasts and toilet vocals. This is gore (porn?) noise as God intende

Raw, fearless and endlessly unfolding live and free jazz! Everything about that sentence sounds amazing, but in practice, between a third and a half way through this two hour twenty minute chungus of a set, I threw in the towel. There’s free jazz, and then there’s FrEe jAZz. The absolute mental breakdown that is “Desert Dance” had me going spongebob_ima_head_out.gif – like, I’m into some wild shit but who wants to hear a twenty minute…

Interesting take on some of the self-titled stuff, with a completely different running order and some omissions / changes. The funniest thing about this for me is that the original working title for “Ignorance” is “Black Metal”.  This little disc is definitely one for the die-hards to hunt down though, and everyone else should go straight to the excellent self-titled release from 2000.

Inextricable Zenith is a notable entry into the evolution of the Berzerker because it was on this EP that the cover version or remix of Deicide’s “Once Upon The Cross” first appeared. It starts to make more sense, upon hearing this, and the EP in general, which is super aggressive, as to how the Berzerker migrated from being a gabba project into a grindcore band. If I had one complaint about this EP though is…

I’ve always loved the production on this record and that super chunky yet warm sound works when the band are playing rousing party-doom or even the slowest, bleakest musical creation that they can conjure up. Speaking of both of these styles, II: Crush The Insects is comprised of both of them. Be fooled not by opening trio of “Doom Over The World”, “The Devil Rides Out” and “Cromwell” (watch out for the bass chords in…

I may be something of a novice when it comes to the Handsome Family, getting into them through them being featured as the theme song to the first season of True Detective, but damn, this stuff is unsettling. I’ve enjoyed the band’s misty, unnerving country music immensely, so I was shocked to fire up Odessa and find a brand of music more in line with the grunge. The guitar work hits incredibly hard though, and…

What a dingy composition! I was expecting early black metal but instead got something a bit more, idk, Possessed? Is that a correct comparison? I’m not sure. That’s what listening to random shit at 2am will do to you! I guess this thing predates most black metal anyway so I should have realised. Visio Dei Beatifica has that early tape demo feel about it which is just beautiful. Oh, and I will say, the drummer…

Solo album from ex Mushroomhead frontman, although this was put out when he was still in the group. This starts off a bit like, how are you still making nu metal in 2011 but then it opens up around the half way point into some absolutely fantastic tunes. Well worth a listen and I am massively late to the party on this one. It’s a treat for MRH fans too, as even though the majority…

One of the best bits of grind / powerviolence records I’ve heard in quite some time. I find this channels Gets Worse kinda energy, with incredibly crisp and clear production but without sounding overworked. It really allows the carnage to breathe, and you can feel every blast, every blurry riff and every shredding vocal with equal intensity. Super recommended.

Super turgid, lo-fi grindcore from the faraway land of Japan. Great shit, with a pinging snare, rancid bass and the front woman is on absolute fire with her range of disgusting offerings. One for the crustier side of grind.

Fathomless death metal with a doom influence, all the way from Brazil. Sporting one of the coolest cover artwork pieces of the last few years, Fossilization channel both Disembowelment and Morbid Angel at the same time, but with the aesthetic of Carcass (or the nastier end of the metal stick – just look at that logo!). A promising start and a tidy EP.

Bizarre, almost progressive piece of death metal with jagged, rough edges. When I say “almost” progressive, I mean that Coffin Dust are still chunky and muddy as fuck, living up to their name for sure. But there’s a spark running through this that separates it from most death metal, which starts in the artwork and permeates the whole recording.

Hiss is to grindcore what Cattle Decapitation’s Harvest Floor is to death metal. I appreciate what the guys are doing here, pushing the boundaries of grind in the way that many greats have before them (Nasum, Pig Destroyer, Antigama, Assuck, Discordance Axis and so on). There’s a lot of dissonant guitar playing here, which is lovely. The drums are absolutely bonkers yet very precise, I forgot how good this guy was, and it’s been a…

When you look past Meat Shit’s ultra misogynistic and homophobic subject matter (if you can actually look past it, as some of it has aged like milk), there’s actually a really dank grindcore / death metal band underneath. Definitely these guys have influenced everyone from Gut to Lividity and plenty in between. This is a compilation of old demos and tons of splits, which I’ll cover separately in order to catch the other bands contributions….

Ah, Crypt Of The Wizard. It is of course probably typical for something as nerdy as “Dark Dungeon Music” or dungeon synth to have such a complicated history. Folk will often mistake this for an album, but Crypt Of The Wizard is a compilation of a series of 12″s released by Mortiis over 1996 and 1997. Despite the LP format, these 12″s contained much more short-form style tracks than what Mortiis was known for at…

File under the more dreamy, spacey end of vaporwave. Expect treacle-like synths and dense atmospheres, as if experiencing an acid trip through a 56kbs dial up connection modem. Stunning stuff.

Ah, wow. Now this is just a glorious fucking mess. I mean, the cover art kinda tells you that before you even press play. Morgue Tar mix the bottom of the sewer style goregrind with d-beat , which is just glorious. I’m not talking about a bit of mince here that’s leant a little heavily into it’s punkier roots, I’m talking 100% d-beat crossed with gore. They should have called this Dismorgue.

Massgrav are fast as fuck. I first came across them on a split 5” with Yacopsae but then I forgot about them until I saw them live and was blown away by the speed of things. This War… is the first full length I’ve checked out and damn it’s amazing. Super fast hardcore punk on steroids. Fastcore is a genre I have neglected for some reason, in my life. It’s brilliant.

I did a lot of digging into Death In June’s politics recently and a lot of people pointed me at Current 93’s “Hitler As Kalki”, which is on this album. It contains a lot of wishy washy references to Kalki and places Hitler in there as the one who will come to destroy the world (or whatever), but for the most part this stuff is so esoteric and dare I say rambling I see no…

Relapse is probably the most “modern” Eminem record that I look on fondly. A lot of the songs are recorded in this weird accent (just check out the first track “3AM”) but that aside, this is pretty solid. The misogyny and homophobia is enormously high as per usual. The bonus disk, Refill, isn’t really up to much (as soon as I heard Lil Wayne my expectations plummeted). Also, for all the years I’ve listened to…

Macabre have a strange and twisted genius to them. On the surface, it seems like silly, childish takes on the disgusting and horrifying works of serial killers, much like Pungent Stench and their comedic view of sex and violence. However, listen just a little closer, and you can appreciate the true genius of Macabre. True – if you don’t like grindcore or death metal you’re fucked out of luck before you start, but this stuff…

Absolutely banging thrash that doesn’t let up from the start to the finish. Really lovely production too, where everything is clear and day and the drums pop through nicely. Disgusted to say that after 20+ years of being a metalhead this is the first time I’ve heard Tankard.

Rainbow’s Rising perfects the formula (or should I say recipe) that was put down in the 1975 self-titled, and builds and expands on the excellent song writing that we saw there. Adding the legendary Cozy Powell on drums, Rising is more ambitious, and is wrapped in a warm analogue production that really signs, seals and delivers this thing across the line.

Festerdecay’s demo was amazing old school gore, so I was pretty stoked to get around to listening to this split, which has more of that gooey sickness. Blasting away with a better production job, it’s still easy to get lost in the primordial soup that is Festerdecay’s riffing. What a glorious, dusty mess! Really great stuff. Crash Syndrom I’ve come across before (one of their EPs, I think), and are noticeably sharper and more dynamic…

In 2007 locust released what would be their final studio album to date. It’s actually incredible how much time has passed since this final studio album and it still even now feels kinda weird to be talking about the band in the past tense. Even from the first few notes, you can tell that New Erections is a different beast to what has come before. The record is full of the bleeping blooping batshit crazy…

I’ve never been too hot on Guineapig, as at first listen it seemed like a much more polished and easily digestible version of what CBT has been doing for years. But this was narrow minded and stupid. Bacteria is a very chunky album, slow and chuggy, but with a few blasting passages too. What makes this thing pop for me though is the insane pitchshifter vokills, which are some of the best I’ve heard in…