Archive for September 2016

Before I start this review proper I just need to get something off my chest: just look at that motherfucker above; easily the derpiest looking cover for a brutal death metal record… Anyway… Nauseate is a 2011 album by the one man death metal project Splattered Entrails, showcasing a more polished, almost sci-fi approach to the sickening death metal that the name is known for. The opening track “Rewriting Human Genetics” is fucking epic –…

One of my biggest gig regrets of the last few years has been missing Xiu Xiu’s tour in anticipation of this record, as this is one of the best covers albums I’ve ever heard. Covering a song is one thing, covering an entire soundtrack is something else. I’ve been meaning to review this since it came out but I’ve been back and forth to it for quite some time not really sure on how to…

(Words by Burra; The 6th Beatle) This is the debut EP from fresh on the scene South Wales-based female-fronted four piece, Montreaux Fires. The EP starts with a quick spoken word intro taken from the recording process (it’s worth noting that this was self-recorded by the band’s bassist in his living room) before launching into the track “Our Little Life” – a cracking opener and one I can imagine would go down really well live,…

Grim, inappropriate, catchy and scathing – these are the first things that come to mind for describing Wolfbastard’s debut. Self-proclaimed as d-beat black metal, don’t expect later Darkthrone worship as this little 21:41 minutes of fuck you has more in common with Discharge-meets-Carpathian Forest than F.O.A.D. It’s a bastard (forgive the pun) of two thirds of blackened death Mancs Burial (more blackened nowadays). The first four tracks have a very grim feel and you can hear the black…

Computers And Blues was, sadly, the final record by The Streets (2020 edit: they’ve dropped a few singles recently but no full length for nearly a decade). For me, Streets records tend to follow a fairly defined pattern of progression. After the almost ethereal chill out of Everything Is Borrowed, Computers And Blues seems like a bit of a step backwards (only in the order of how things unfolded, not in quality). This final release…

High Tech Wreck is an electronic explosion of sound conducted in the grimmest and trve-est of ways possible for electronic music – in 8 bit sound blips, of course! All four tracks here have been painfully synthesized using the primitive sound forms, and actually make for some seriously interesting listening. It would possibly be a primitive and ham-fisted reviewing technique to make comparisons to Aphex Twin whilst talking about electronic music, but High Tech Wreck…

Every year or so I come back to this project and record something new. I’m currently working on the 4th release for this project, and that got me thinking – I need to do another post about this shit. I can’t review it, as it’s mine, but I can tell you a bit about it. Flesh World is the second Fire Walk With Me record, and is by far my favourite; even out of the…

Holy shit! What a grinding explosion of noise! Intense hardcore meets the savagery of grind on this 5-track / 4-minute EP from American female-fronted mentalists Death Vacation. This really is short and sweet, hitting the “grind” button right on the spot; a no-nonsense approach of getting in, fucking you up, having a little mosh too, and then getting the fuck out. Everything is on point here, and the production is totally solid, but what really…

Demonoir is a ferocious, blasting beast with enough venom to put most of the black metal scene to shame. Mixing volatile, confusing, almost mathematic song structures with endless battery attacks and monolithic, pensive vocal contributions, Demonoir is surely the calling card for the black metal pure bloods. Marrying brutality with subtly, dissonance with solidarity, grimm with the khold (sorry haha), 1349 are on top form as ever. There is simply no way I can ever…

Sardonic Wrath is one of those mid-career Darkthrone records I always seem to look past, so I made the decision to add it to my Spotify in order to get a bit more circulation out of it. I seem to fall into the terrible habit of writing off everything released in between the flurry of early 90s black metal masterpieces and the massive return to form with the crust punk style in the mid 2000s. And yes,…