Archive for September 2014

Welcome to a world of fuzz. Boasting one of the greatest (yet simplest) guitar tones that I have ever heard, Dead Meadow’s turn of the century debut dreamscape of a record is a fantastic trip through a stoned, lush world of 60s and 70s influenced rock music. The opening track, “Sleepy Silver Door”, is quite simply one of the greatest things ever put to tape. It’s one of my favourite stoner-related tracks, with simple yet…

It’s not that often that I usually listen to shit like this, but I burned this album when it first came out and it’s just one of those things that’s been stuck in my car since. My stereo broke a few months ago when I tried to spin a leaked copy of Swans’ To Be Kind (that’s what I get for pirating music, folks!*) but when my car went in recently to get a new…

Okay then…how do I tackle this one (no pun intended)? This is a revered classic of sorts, but I’ve always had a hard time listening to it (I suppose that is kinda the point? I don’t suppose it was recorded with ‘easy listening’ in mind), but now I have this crazy trip on double vinyl there is no longer any excuse to keep putting off the review/post like I did with my CD copy. Again,…

Death In June is one strange-ass project. For something as simple as acoustic, folky shit, DIJ sure do have a wide, eccentric discography. Brown Book is pretty weird. Death In June’s lazy campfire strumming and monotone vocal meets 80s-to-the-max drum programming and fairly awful female vocals. It kinda sounds like a poor man’s mid-career Swans. I might be slightly biased here however, and even factually incorrect as Death In June were doing this kind of…

I recently did another Reekorrhoea review (for the band’s demo tape) but I can’t get enough of this crusty mincecore-meets-goregrind crossover sound that’s going on here. Mr. Andy is a goregrind genius, and whilst this doesn’t exactly sound a million miles away from his Hyperemesis shit, it doesn’t really fucking matter at all, because this shit fucking rules. Reekorrhoea’s part of this split also includes a Dismembered Fetus cover, but I’m not familiar with that…

Boy, am I happy this saw the light of day! Initially I mistook this release as a new Splattered Entrails album. I was thinking – “shit, they’ve gone back to the gory stuff!?”, but alas it was not to be. Instead though, Undercooked Intrauterine Delicacies turned out to be a compilation album of impossible to find splits that the band did back in the Myspace days. It includes a three-way split/comp on FDA Rekotz and…

I would like to admit that this album is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I’d probably be pushing it a bit too far. Digimortal is a strange one – a rare result of an industrial-influenced death metal band selling their asses out and cashing in on the nu-metal craze of the late 90s. Hey, I’m not saying Digimortal is particularly ground-breaking, but this came across far, far more successful than say, Cryptopsy’s absymal weakening…

Fuck! What happened here? Earth are definitely not messing about on their new record – the heaviest thing the band have done in over a decade. I can get behind this! Since their reformation / regrouping, Earth have been all about calm, serene, bright and wavering tones; colossal monuments of clean guitar work and uplifting instrumental soundscapes – almost like the shoegazing equivalent of their early drone days. But this is something else entirely. Someone…

I came across Mz. 412 on my quest for bands that mix black metal with power electronics. Although to me Mz. 412 takes elements from both genres of music (with both being quite introspectively similar in some respects and also a million miles apart in others), yet it seems to stand alone from both in a sound more rooted in industrial, or experimental ambience. This is something morosely militant about In Nomine… which lends heavily…

We are about to take you into the world of the LSD user… I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia trip recently so I’ve been spinning this record an awful lot. When I was 12, life was all about Slipknot and Mushroomhead. Mushroomhead, despite having some dud album releases in the last decade or so, remain one of my favourite bands ever. I picked up XX on the strength of the band’s image alone,…

Bobby M is upon us again with a slightly-less-gory approach to noise, which is unusual, to say the least. Perhaps surprisingly for music of this genre, Slithis’ Revenge focusses on the destruction that mankind has wreaked upon the earth as subject matter. I’d never in a million years consider there to be a market for environmentally-friendly gorenoise, but the world is full of surprises.  If you think the artwork looks horrendous, then nothing can prepare…

Facialmess is a harsh noise project from Japan. Total Liberation is an EP that was released a few years ago on J Randall’s Grindcore Karaoke, consisting of two tracks, a 7 minuter and a 13 minuter. “Suspicious Activities” starts off by oddly mashing together droning, machine-like background ambience with increasingly-erratic cuttings of harsh noise. It just jolts back and forth without any regard for your hearing, or sanity for that matter. It sounds to me like…

Blood Ceremony’s self-titled is one of my go-to feel good “doom metal” records (I use the term doom like that because I find that this isn’t miserable enough to fall under the doom tag proper, although it does incorporate a lot of elements from that genre). As mentioned elsewhere on this website recently, my distain for the explosion in female-fronted edgy rock music continues to grow, but let’s fuck all that trend-jocking shit for a…

When I first went to Roadburn festival in 2011 I was in waaaay over my head with my bands-I-know to bands-I’ve-never-heard-of ratio. I’m not saying I didn’t have a wicked time (I went again the year after) but I spent a lot of time high, watching shit I’d never even heard of. Black Pyramid was one of those bands, whom I espied briefly through the packed doors of the second stage in Tilburg’s 013 venue….

Wow, this fucking rules! Human Touch is some insane shit, playing grind-speed hardcore punk with frenetic, worryingly spastic female vocals. Imagine mixing Minor Threat with Despite You, or something. I’d absolutely love to see this band perform live, because after only 5 songs (only one which has any substantial length) I’m left a little shocked, and most definitely wanting more. The sound is spot on; definitely paying homage to true hardcore production styles of old…

Wow, just how fuckin’ nasty this sounds is really beyond any words! Fans of Libido Airbag better be scrambling to hit play on this shit – I’m not kidding. There’s legions of lo-fi electronic or techno influenced “goregrind” out there at the moment, and if you’re not deep into this shit then sifting through it all can be a bit of a slog. Thank fuck then, for Gurgle, who are just absolutely fucking amazing. Typical…

Maaan the newer Dead Infection stuff just gets randomer and randomer (I know that’s not a word, but whatever). This particular EP, as you can no-doubt see, features a cat that looks like Adolf Hitler. I’m not sure what the particular meaning is behind all of this surreal stuff, and I don’t really care as long as the tunes are good. Dead Infection have a lot to live up to with every new release, but…

Extreme Putrefaction is another project in the gazillion ranks of noisemongering goregrind king Bobby Maggard. This particular little variant mixes bassy harsh noise with unstoppable drum machine attacks and septic tank gurgles. To get artsy fartsy in the descriptive sense, imagine earlier, analogue pedal Merzbow jamming with Urine Festival. Extreme Putrefaction literally sounds like shit pellets being machine gunned into a cesspool of unspeakable filthy depths. For the uninitiated, ‘gorenoise’ can seem like quite an…

Christ, who’s idea was this? Mixing gabba-techno / industrial kingpin Alec Empire with the father of harsh noise, Akita Masami would surely result in a cacophonous cocktail that would make the world end in any other given circumstance. Somehow the earth didn’t stop turning, and instead we are treated to one of the craziest collaborations in musical history in all it’s glory. This is quite probably the most coherent thing I’ve heard Merzbow being involved…

Now here’s something I have listened the absolute fucking death out of during the last few months. I’ve always been a casual Type O Negative fan but I’ve always put off buying their albums, because I’m lazy as fuck like that. Anyways, I stumbled upon a free copy of this when I worked clearing out unwanted crap from charity shops, and for the next couple of hours in the van I became baptised in the…

The Killing Jar is quite possible one of the crappiest names for an album I’ve ever come across, but let’s not let that tarnish things here. Black Moth are a dirty rock and/or roll band with stoner and doom metal influences. They’ve been around for a few years now but I hadn’t heard of them until they were announced for Temples Festival this year. I was too smashed to watch them (story of my life)…

Whilst I surely can’t review my own material, I can tell you fuckers a little bit about it. With the death of Life Is Easy I’ve started a whole bunch of new musical ventures, including Fire Walk With Me; a project born out of my new love affairs with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and HNW music, if such a crossover isn’t too bold. What I’ve done here however is attempted somewhat at creating texture within…

You probably don’t need me to tell you that the new Pallbearer record is heavy as fuck, but FYI – it’s heavy as fuck. Doom metal is a grossly saturated scene these days, making stand-out records is becoming something of a challenge. I’ve personally given up on loads of underground doom because I literally just can’t be fucked to sift through all the shit, which is a tragedy. When I took the chance with streaming…

Vomir is currently my new favourite go-to name when I fancy a harsh noise massage for my brain and my ever-growing tinnitus. I guess focussing entirely on some endless static attack helps ease the ringing for some reason or other. Anyway, I digress. Vomir is (as far as my knowledge of this scenes goes) the absolute master of the harsh noise wall (often abbreviated to HNW). If you’re wondering what HNW is, well, imagine that…

This was a random purchase for me a couple of Christmas’ back, from some D.I.Y. / punk / hardcore record shop in Cardiff. It’s been a while, and the shop/label is long gone (at least at that location), but I (obviously) still have this record and still spin it every now and then. I picked it up because I am a massive fan of Anal Cunt and was aware that they had done a split…

Is it just me or does it look like the cover says “The fine art of Malevolent Creation”? I snoozed at a chance of seeing these cunts in Cardiff recently, which was a bit silly because how often does something like Malevolent Creation come around 25 minutes from your house? I hate to be Mr. Has-an-excuse-for-always-missing-gigs (which I’m totally not; my bank balance and tinnitus will testify) but I’d been burning the candle at both…

Japanese Torture Comedy Hour was a noise project that revolved around Scott Hull, J Randall and other related musicians, and eventually became a solo project for Randall in it’s own right. Dolphin Meat is an hour-long improvised live performance (entitled “日本の拷問コメディアワー – EP#62”) created entirely out of feedback loops and recorded to VHS tape (because, fuck it, why not?). I tried doing something similar about five or six years ago; bleeding feedback from mic to…