Posts by SeanO)))

Exmilitary is the debut mixtape/record/whatever from seminal noise-meets-rap maniacs Death Grips. I can’t believe this thing is five years old, especially considering I’ve been planning on reviewing it since I started this website! But yeah – I don’t think the hip hop world was prepared for Death Grips, and neither were the legions of fans from outside of that sphere; would-be converts sidling on over due to this group, and this mixtape. I first came…

Grunt (the Portugese gore/porn/whatever/grind band, not the power electronics project of the same name) have been causing quite a stir lately for various reasons, and the main response among “haters” online is that the music made by Grunt is for neanderthals. So I listened. Ha! I’m not exactly a stranger to the seedier sub-genres of grind (shhh though, don’t tell the real trve grinders I called this grind) but I was very much blown away…

Gore Beyond Necropsy are nothing short of legendary on the noise/grind underground for a multitude of reasons (the hilariously titled split/collab with Merzbow springs to mind). They have long since changed their name and disappeared into total obscurity, but for a short while they kinda flew the flag for this kinda noisy shit, and this 12 minute EP showcases a slightly different side to the band’s infamous noisy grindcore. It all starts off with horror…

Bad Brains are nothing short of legendary so it’s kinda hard to sum this up in two paragraphs or so. I have to admit that I am a recent convert to this group. I’ve always been a fan of dub reggae and the like but not so much hardcore punk, but as time is quickly ticking away the hours of my life I have grown something of an appreciation for the genre, and Bad Brains…

Debridement is (I believe) the third album by Italian goregrind / death metal squad Bowel Stew. Whilst Debridement owes more to brutal death metal than any goregrind record, it manages to maintain that authentic air of dodgy pathological madness that is often lost in the ‘brutalism’ of much death metal. Bowel Stew is a nasty band, and whilst the cover art might not be a real picture of disgusting gore, you know they mean business…

I love power electronics and noise but when this came out I completely lost it….what the fuck is actually going on? Estuary English is one of those rare records that I completely fail to understand, so I wrote it off for a while, completely unable to comprehend what I was listening to. It just sounded like Vyvyan from the Young Ones screaming over sub par bits and blips of electronic mush. If that’s what you…

Surgical Steel is Carcass’ big comeback record, 18 years after their original death rattle – Swansong – in 1995. This was a big noise when it first came out, due to the high profile of the comeback, but my ears were elsewhere, as being an elitist goregrind-loving asshat I had written anything post-Necroticism off as widdly death metal shite. To be fair, I’m still completely 100% right, but I’ve stopped being such a dick about…

(2016 edit: this review was written about 7 years ago for my old blog Even Shakespeare Fed The Worms. I’ve rejigged it so I don’t sound like so much of an immature ass, but please keep this in mind whilst reading. Enjoy!) As I start this compact disc I am unaware entirely of what to expect, but I am met with a fairly typical sample, but it is followed by a very interesting and refreshing…

Glowering is a side project ov the tr00 and totes brutes invokator of gore noise havoc, Bobby Maggard. This time however, Bobby puts aside his hacksaw and bloodstained apron in favour of a pentagram-topped staff and a severed goat’s head hollowed out to make a snug little mask, as black metal is the theme of the day. But this ain’t no ordinary romp through black metal, no sir. It’s quite annoying actually, because a few…

As far as doom metal goes, Cathedral have always been one of my favourites. They were the band that introduced me to the genre in my youth, and therefore have always occupied a soft-spot in my blackened heart. Heading up to London Forum to catch the band’s final show was something that will stick with me forever. The disbanded warriors of gloom have a varied and interesting back catalogue ranging from the downright heavy to…

This double CD package brings together a bunch of old splits and demos from the prolific, blackened grinding thrashers Nunslaughter, as well as a bevvy of live tracks. The splits and demos are fantastic, and I will surely review them on their own with the material from the respective splitting bands, but I just want to cast some light on this little package as I got my hands on a copy recently. Do you love…

The Jesus Lizard are one of those bands that I had been meaning to check out for all eternity but never seem to get around to listening to (until now, obviously). I picked their Goat record to try out at random, simply because the art looked kinda cool and abstract so I just dove in and went for it. Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s just because I’ve taken so long to jump onto this…

Just quickly gonna put dibs on a review of this seeing as there’s three of us writing now (four if Kristian gets off his ass and follows up with more). Darkthrone’s The Cult Is Alive marked a turning point in the band’s career; effectively buffeting their sails with a healthy second wind that easily saw them extending their legacy by another ten years or so. Let’s face it, by the late 90s / early 2000s,…

Closed Casket is surely the definitive Esham record – I love absolutely everything about it; the sound, the lyrics, the samples, even the artwork (for some reason). Closed Casket captures a slice of Detroit “suicidalist” lifestyle in the smog of the early 90s, during that perfect period when Esham was still dank as fuck but not dropping references to the man down below every 20 seconds. I tend to categorise Esham into two categories –…

Enema Shower are a groovy goregrind/porngrind (yadda yadda) band from Slovakia, playing in a slow but funky style of danceable filth. The vocals are low, thick ‘n’ heavy (see what I did there, y’know, because it’s porno grind!), the guitar work is like razorwire despite the slow speed and the drums possess the satisfying piccolo ping that one expects from musical circles such as this. These three guys (and one girl) seem to have a…

I need more stuff like this in my life! I stumbled across this little hardcore punk gem last month, and haven’t been able to get enough of it. It’s not exactly aeons long with six tracks clocking in at just over eight minutes, but it’s a dirty ride, with a proper old-school production style. The bass drum is so fat, and whilst the guitars have Dead Kennedys written all over them, the riffs are busy…

I know these are bootlegs but fuck, the sound quality absolutely fuckin’ sucks. It sounds like a bunch of low quality mp3s jingling their wateriness all over the place. That being said, it is great to hear all these Psychopathic Records affiliated artists all in one place, and kinda reminds me of an extended Dark Lotus, more than anything. The Twiztid guys really bring it on this record, and the odd contribution from Esham is…

Bloodlung were a sludge band from South Wales who called it a day a year or so ago. As a result, free copies of their Roach album filtered out and I got given one at band practice when Judas Cradle used to rehearse at One Louder studios in Newport. I don’t usually listen to metal stuff in the car on the way home because a.) I’m usually sick of hearing guitars by that point and…

Considering how much I listen to goregrind I always seem to let to the big ‘uns slide right on by….*sigh*. Anyway, this fucking amazing goregrind record was released last year by Bizarre Leprous and is a new project of Ex-LODH/SMES vokill puke bucket Erwin De Groot and one Kirill Maestro, who – according to Discogs – played guitars and programming in a band called Jaga-Jaga Massacre (who I’ll definitely be keeping an eye open for…

So today (“today” being a month or so before you all see this post) I was casually browsing through The Graveyard (what I call iTunes on my PC since Spotify came along) and I stumbled across this forgotten relic; it had completely slipped my mind that Sleep had done a $neaky little EP for Adult Swim, and top it off, I find out this shit came out in 2014! 2014!!?? Holy fuck… Anyways, on with…

Acoustic Wizard is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an acoustic tribute band to Electric Wizard. I could never in a million years have expected this to work, but fuck, it totally does. If anything this project proves that there is real weight to the riffs that Electric Wizard have pioneered, rather than them being yet another crap band playing really slowly and smothered in distortion. I guess this is one of those things where I really can’t say…

Filth is the second album from Texan death metal legends Waco Jesus. The fact that it shares a title with Swans’ debut is easily overlooked once you’ve gotten a good eyeful of that sleeve cover – this shit is fucking nasty. Now, death metal thrives on being offensive and sick and gory and can often be quite unkind to women (lol), but Waco Jesus are either doing an excellent job of satirising this or they…

Look at all that lovely sand! Well, one assumes it’s sand – like the coloured sand you hammer into crappy glass bottles on family holidays to the beach. No? Well fuck you. Cycle is a pulsing, circular throb of a noise session, that loops and dives into waves of repetition and (yes) cycles; the palpable worm Ouroboros in wave format, writhing itself in undulations of sonic ecstasy. Yeah. At least, that is what part one…

American Head Charge are one of my favourite surviving memories from the early 2000s nu-metal explosion. Their sound owed more towards industrial than straight up nu-metal and therefore they seemed to survive the nu-metal cull that crept in overnight sometime in 2003. They continue to be a big draw live, mainly as a nostalgia trip for most, but they haven’t dropped a record since 2005’s The Feeding, 11 years ago. There was an EP in…

Caustic layer upon layer. Saxaphone meets blastbeat. Noisecore meets lounge. Rumba, oompah, slide, shake, swing, mosh, grind, kill. Disco Volante; secret songs, leftfield, experimental, techno, disco, rock, electronica. Sophomore, confusion, exclamation, subtlety, song within a song within a groove within a phrase within a suite. Mr. Bungle’s second record is by far their most difficult to get into. It offers a level of inaccessibility that is surprising even for a band whose sole purpose seemed…

I feel like I have an overwhelming urge to trepan my skull in order to fully envelope my conscious with the buzzing, numbing industrial stomp of Pharmakon’s “music”. I’m joking of course, but it kinda feels like the human brain alone isn’t powerful enough to digest this disgustingly intense mix of industrial, power electronics and ambience. Pharmakon is not afraid to balance the serene and low-key alongside the bashing, crashing havoc of sheer noise, and…

I was introduced to Strapping Young Lad when I was in sixth form. Angela Gossow-era Arch Enemy were touring the UK and SYL were main support, so my friend Gavin sent me some tracks of theirs over MSN Messenger (those were the days, eh?) and within seconds I was like – “errrr…fuck this Arch Enemy shite”. The first track I was sent was “Shitstorm”, track 3 off this intense, industrial, almost symphonic death metal beast…

This is a strange one: I’ve never really considered myself a fan of Coheed and Cambria – in fact, growing up alongside the “emo” trend in high school, hearing Coheed’s high-pitch croons would send shivers up my spine. But then, with Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness came a maturity that took a while to sink in, although it added a progressive element to Coheed’s already…

Nonentity is a grating, deafening displaying of analogue harsh noise broken down in to three consumable parts. The first part hisses and belches the way good noise should, before the second track “Abuse” provides us with a break that, in all honesty, seems to come a little bit too soon. The third part kicks back in for a final 15 minute push through a seascape of bubbling static bliss. I find myself trying to loop…

Scumpulse are a crusty black metal band from Edinburgh, all the way up in Scotland – that distant and mysterious land just above the flat and boring desperate shithole that is mainland England. Broken Reflection is a nifty little tape single (can’t remember the last time I saw a tape single, I’ll be honest) featuring two tracks ov blackened crust in the vein of Skeletonwitch-meets-Darkthrone-meets-Discharge (yeah that’s a subgenre of crust now, okay?). The title…

What I usually associate with Ramleh is an unstoppable barrage of power electronics and barked vocal eruptions. Which is exactly what we’ve got here. This does not disappoint. Catching them live with Godflesh a few years ago literally (and physically) blew me away. I am, however, pleasantly surprised by the static, choppy, experimental nature of how 31/5/1962 – 1982 starts off, which leads into a much more digestible forty minutes or so than the more…

Martyrdöd are one of them crust bands that have somehow managed to partly transcend the restrictive confines of the d-beat genre and turn into a full fledged metal band in their own right. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a few crust bands playing these days with melodic riffs and song structures, but none quite manage to mix soaring metal melodies with messy d-beat drumming as well as Martyrdöd have. Melody has been slowly creeping…

Very, very spicy goregrind, my friends. Lo-fi blast fest featuring members of Super Fun Happy Slide. Unsure exactly what is going on in that album art and I don’t really want to know, either. Oh, the clogged drain, how she gurgles so eloquently… 

Being an absolute pinnacle of modern grindcore, it is almost impossible to fault this Magrudergrind record. With that in mind, I will start with my only gripe. Where’s the bass? I fucking love bass. That’s literally all I can criticise. I remember making some unsavoury comments about Pig Destroyer getting a bass player and having seen them live several times since the change I can only long hopefully for Magrudergrind to one day pack that…

Without getting too cringe there is something magical about Om’s music. Perhaps it’s the chanting, trance-like rhythm of the majority of their songs, or perhaps it’s the seemingly perfect balance that Al Cisneros strikes between riff and distortion. Either way, Om can turn a 20 minute song into what feels like one of those daydreams that has lasted only seconds but in your head you have traversed entire worlds. “Shit, how long have I been…

Fuuuuck me this shit is so heavy, I just had to get my oar in just incase the Doomfinder General shits out a review for this before me! I don’t write about that much doom metal these days so I’ll take this fairly rare opportunity to plug a new supergroup of slow. With The Dead features the original Electric Wizard backbone dynamic duo (later to perform as Ramesses) joined with ex-Cathedral/Napalm Death crooner and Rise…

Gorrendous Whoreplasmia is a goregrind/gorenoise project I started in 2013 simply because I’d thought up what I considered to be a really cool fucking name (LOL). I even had a proper logo drawn up (by the late Sludgesicle Records owner Mike Stock, who sadly passed away last year) because I thought the name was just that golden. I can be a total idiot sometimes when it comes to stupid musical ideas, so now that I…

Vomitoma have been around for a while, and whilst their sound varies a bit from time to time, their material on this split sounds like a mix between Libido Airbag and something altogether more traditional-drum-machine-goregrind (lol), like, I dunno, Dehydrated Tissues? Either way this is boss as fuck and should fill all of your lo-fi dirgy goregrind needs. Hyperemesis just get better and better and every single thing I hear by them just cements them…

I’m getting the most incredible Om-meets-Earth vibe off these guys. If that fact alone doesn’t make you want to check ’em out, then let me tell you a little bit more about Queen Elephantine. Interestingly, the band are from Hong Kong but are now located in New York City and Scarab is their 4th record. Crawling around behind the abstract sleeve art is a minimalist yet lush soundscape consisting mainly of vast instrumentation – be…

Urine Festival is one of those things that exist to challenge you on how you feel about a particular genre, sound, theme or subject. A ridiculous form of music at the best of times, goregrind (or porngrind) is known for it’s reams of dodgy content and greasy subject matter. Often, it takes somebody or something pushing the elements making up your favourite genre to the absolute maximum extreme before you can begin to reflect and…

For me, this is the ultimate Fukpig release, and it trumps anything else they’ve ever done (which in itself is no small feat). If the first three tracks alone aren’t enough to get you hooked then I think you are listening to the wrong genre, mate. “Die Bastard” is fucking vicious, “Britain’s Got Fucking Aids” is a rabid stroke of pure genius, and “This Is England” completes the hat-trick of brutality with a back’n’forth blasting…

With the recent hat-trick of absolute stinkers in the form of Thornography, Darkly Darkly Venus Aversa and the incredibly turd-like The Manticore And Other Horrors (the amazing Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder acting as an interesting anomaly in a long string of crap albums), and not to mention the recent spate of shameless cash-in releases (Midnight In The Labyrinth, the Total Fucking Darkness re-issue), I had given up all hope on Cradle Of Filth ever…

LINES IN WAX 500th POST EXTRAVAGANZA! Who in their right mind would have thought I could write 500 album reviews? Actually who in their right mind would write 500 album reviews? Well the answer is little old me. As Lines In Wax passes it’s 4th birthday, we also reach this milestone in posting. As with the 100th and 250th post, I would like to quickly thank everyone for their continued support and readership. Without your…

Urrrrrghhhh! 1349 returned from the misty fjords last year with the excellent Massive Cauldron Of Chaos. Personally, I would have called it Massive Cauldron Of Endless Blastbeats to more suitably match 1349’s sound, but that would just be silly. Despite the expected ticking of mental drumming speeds, MCOC gets fairly melodic now and then, something which admittedly caught me off guard at first (see the tinkling passages between brutality in “Slaves” as an easy example…

I’ve already declared my undying love for Cloud Rat, so with the risk of crawling too far up their arse set very high, I will keep the summary of their contribution to this split 7″ as brief as possible: Fucking. Perfect. Ha! I love everything about this band and their progressive / weird take on the grindcore template. If you’ve not already heard them, please please please check them out. Orgullo Primitivo are completely new…

Phyllomedusa’s blasting, burping and croaking froquencies have quickly become a firm favourite here at camp Lines In Wax over the last few months. It’s kinda hard to define Phyllomedusa’s sounds but after listening to a lot of it I’ve noticed a pattern emerging – you can divide the majority of the sounds presented into four categories; ambient / field recordings, gorenoise and/or goregrind, more traditional harsh noise and finally, err, doom metal. Their part of…

It turns out that sometimes you just can’t polish a turd. Back when this steaming pile of shit was first released, I, like many other Misfits fans clinging onto hollow vestiges of hope, checked out this record with fingers crossed. Hey, you gotta admit that the cover art is totally fucking epic – what fiend wouldn’t be half-tempted by the glorious image of Mr. Skullface looking all power metal? But, when a masterpiece of a…

Now this is a weird one… Ahumado Granujo (which translates as “smoked pimple” in Google Translate) are a band that I was turned on to after seeing their mental live performance at OEF 2013. They play dirgy, pig-snorting goregrind along the lines of RazorRape, Eardelete and fellow Czech countrymen Destructive Explosion Of Anal Garland (who might actually share members with this band, their sound is very similar). The biggest stand-out difference with Ahumado Granujo from…

Abominable Putridity are a slam death metal band from Russia (although they now have an American member) who formed many moons ago. In The End Of Human Existence is their debut album from 2007, containing 10 cuts of liquescent groovy guttural brutality. As far as this type of shit goes, In The End Of Human Existence is a fairly no-frills record, but it has a solid, meaty production that hammers the heaviness home with impressive…

Killing Joke have a long and varied discography but Absolute Dissent is the album I end up coming back to again and again. Everything since the 2003 self titled record has been brilliant (even the dub remix album) but Absolute Dissent takes the crown for me, every time. It possesses a clarity and melody that is equally matched with heaviness and bite. All the songs here seem to follow a certain method or blueprint, but…

Keep On Smiling is one of my favourite goregrind albums ever. It falls into the dancing/groovy/beer-soaked/happy goregrind camp (that also may or may not empower you to dress as a monkey or a banana) rather than the gore-soaked/nasty/primitive/worryingly-graphic goregrind camp. It’s hard to do a lot of description about groovy goregrind because once you know what it is, you know what you want to expect and you listen and love it (or hate it) and…

Wail Of Sirens play dark, metallic hardcore with an artistic flair, giving this EP a Converge-meets-Discharge vibe, which as you are more than likely aware is not a bad thing at all. It seems Wail Of Sirens are a fairly new band because I can’t find absolutely any information about them online (but then again, I’m an idiot) but that to me is even more of a reason to check these guys out and give…

Abaddon Incarnate are a blasting, vicious-as-fuck death metal influenced grindcore band from Ireland that have been going for almost 25 years. Nadir is their second album from way back in 2001, although it still sounds as fresh and vital as anything, and could have been recorded last month for all I know. I love it when this happens; it surely is no easy feat to create a recording that comes across as almost timeless, whether…

Forgotten Pathways play really retro-sounding ambient / medieval “dungeon music” in the vein of early Mortiis or some shitty video game soundtrack. What makes it more akin to a game soundtrack or something like that is the often-appearing drum machine, something which is absent in a lot of this type of music. It makes actually quite a lot of difference; instead sounding like some cheap classical music, Shrouded In Mystery sounds like a lo-fi journey…

Widely known to have been the album that propelled Mike Skinner’s The Streets project to international recognition, spawning two charting singles (one of which went to number 1 in the UK); the group’s sophomore effort is a concept album based around a few weeks/months in the life of Mike. A day in the life of a geezer, finally recognised as a full blown record. A Grand Don’t Come For Free is one big story, each…

Mega apologies for the shitty low res image in today’s post. Well then, I’ve heard a lot of disgusting goregrind/gorenoise stuff, but I’ve never heard a band or project in this vein do a fucking Rihanna cover before. Lol. Menometrorrhagia stands in the no-mans land between the super-niche genres of goregrind and gorenoise, unwilling to fall firmly into one over the other. I’d say it was more akin to gorenoise but the more intelligible drum…

Static Age is probably my favourite “early” Misfits release (even though it wasn’t released for sometime after). Earth A.D. is fast and even heavy, Walk Among Us probably the most legendary, but Static Age the most solid and consistent. Static Age to me, feels like a true long player, despite the fact that these songs have been released here there and everywhere over the last 30 odd years or so, in various guises and mixes….

Phyllomedusa is a frog-based (yes!) goregrind band from, I believe, the US. It’d be easy to write this off as a gimmick but Phyllomedusa has a long-running, high quality output of over 50 albums of frog-based goregrind and gorenoise (2021 edit: and the rest!). Lunatic Girl And Her Frog is probably one of the more better known Phyllomedusa albums – I’ve seen it frequently in the past on forums / YouTube / Facebook groups etc….

Gut’s The Cumback is perpetually the best and worst comeback record of all time. How do you modernize the sound of a band whose lo-fi dirges shaped the porngrind genre so much? Why, with rap metal and dodgy electronic passages, of course! What The Cumback lacks in genuine grind it makes up for hilarity and dodgy European porno vibes. If you can see past the filler (and there’s a lot of filler – you could…

Another long-awaiting comeback that paid off by the truckload! Eyehategod have been brewing their self-titled return for nearly 14 years, so it was understandable that fans were getting a bit itchy. But, like I said, the wait paid off. This album is absolutely fucking incredible. You’ve got the classic Eyehategod vibes as if they never went away, but they’ve given them a cleaner, modern spin. You could argue that the mud and sludge surrounding Eyehategod’s…

I was a big COF nerd when I was a teenager. Thankfully, the lust for hammy symphonic metal didn’t follow me far past the age of 16, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t jam any Cradle now and then. Cradle of Filth have a long, meandering, hit-and-miss series of records, but Vempire is my absolute favourite by a country mile. You cannot beat the atmosphere, songwriting and musical dexterity on display…

What a gem! Brutal death metal is over-saturated as fuck (and I’ve made no secret of mentioning that in nearly every death metal post I do) and every time I load up a YouTube vid, a Spotify link or even put a CD in the stereo (imagine such sorcery!) that has some spiny logo and a compromised / disemboweled female on the cover, I sit there and wait for the disappointment to come, to wait for…

Wow, this is an unusual one! Take death metal tunings and riffs, the swagger of crossover-thrash era d-beat and the lyrical content and delivery of punk and hardcore, and you’ve got Emissaries Of Syn. Imagine all this “dark hardcore” type of stuff that is being peddled by Southern Lord given an injection of British authenticity and humour. It’s like Black Breath but with Mitch Dickinson from Unseen Terror on vocals. This EP kicks off with…

I’ll admit to have never heard of Sedem Minut Strachu before they were recently announced for this year’s Obscene Extreme Festival but hey, as much as I like to pretend I’m the all-seeing eye of grindcore, there’s oceans of the stuff out there I’ve yet to hear. Overmasonnizationated Twist is a surprisingly coherent romp through a strange mixture of harsh noisecore and harmonica improvisation. The drum sound is clear as fuck, which is refreshing compared…

I have been beyond in love with Jucifer (or maybe it’s just frontwoman Amber Valentine ;D) ever since I saw them playing in Temples Fest last year. They have always been one of those bands that I wanted to check out but I never got around to doing so. I was expecting some half-arsed female-fronted stoner rock bullshit that’s all the rage these days, but Jucifer tore me a new arsehole and blew away most…

Urinary Tract Infection From Severe Pus Clots is one of Bobby Maggard’s more prolific and well known projects, this one bridging the gap between noisecore and goregrind very nicely. Demo 1 contains 98 bursts of pitchshifted bile-inducing noisecore madness. A lot of this stuff kinda all blurs into one but this has a really good vibe and it’s absolutely sick as fuck. The bass is a bit furry and the Myspace-as-fuck Rhythm Rascal drum programming…

Rainforest by Clams Casino is probably my top contender for favourite driving music at the moment, especially during the night time. Rainforest is as dense and multi-layered as its moniker suggests; overlapping, almost distorted layers of electronic auras mingle freely over retro drum programming and ethereal vocal tomfoolery. Honestly, the whole thing is a bit disjoined but each individual track works so well in unfolding its own world that you don’t want it to end….

This is my first (and loooong overdue) experience with Death Toll 80k, the noisy grindcore machine that has eluded my ears for so long! What an unstoppable mess! This is the grindcore that I fell in love with; dingy, flat-out, unstoppable blastbeat carnage with a cheeky smattering of riffs thrown in for good measure. The order of the day though is mind-boggling grinding carnage. Get it down your Gregory Peck, son! Sete Star Sept have…

I’ve really been jamming the guts out of this album for the last few weeks. Fistula mix sludgy, messy doom a la Eyehategod with elements of crust and hardcore punk. I personally think that any genre of metal can be vastly improved by adding musical elements of (or just the spirit of) crust punk (Darkthrone’s The Cult Is Alive being a prime example; a vicious bastard of an album that followed a long string of…

It says a lot when your favourite album by a band is a covers album (Undisputed Attitude). Add to that the sea of shit Slayer have been peddling both recordings wise and sensationalist news wise the last few years, and sprinkle that with me happening to catch a series of lacklustre live performances over the last five years or so. Cumulatively, I could be forgiven maybe for overlooking the fact that Slayer do actually have…

Destructive Explosion Of Anal Garland (who possibly take the award for most unreadable logo ever) are a Czech goregrind band with brutal death metal influences. Sealing Off The Vagina By Sewer Lid has a lot of slam-style parts and farmyard vokills associated with the realms of death metal but the overall vibe is one of groovy porno grindcore. It’s got vibes of Jig-Ai, RazorRape and even Ahumado Granujo (just look at the cover art), but…

To be fair, CODC are one of the few bands that successfully managed to mix death metal with grindcore. I bought Zero Comfort Margin when I was a teenager and didn’t really get it; the band play quite an artsy, progressive spin on grinding death metal, and also in hindsight I realise that Zero Comfort Margin probably wasn’t the best place to start with this band. But thanks to the powers that rule on the…

Trepanation Penetration is a gorenoise (or is that pornoise?) project in the vein of Urine Festival, Enema Fountain and the likes, and probably is the first project of this kind I’ve done a review for that wasn’t recorded by USA’s Bobby Maggard (lol). Bound Torture Fantasies is the second demo / EP / release under for this ‘band’, and contains 20 untitled blasts of watery drum machine harsh noise. It warbles and farts rather than…

There’s a whole ton of crap Agathocles out there so it’s always enormously refreshing to come across the band’s absolute golden material, especially on the 7″ format. With the full lengths you kinda know where you are, but it is so easy to get lost in the group’s endless reams of releases. Fascination Of Mutilation was a flexi released in 1990 on Rigid Records, so it’s an early one in the band’s life. General rule…

Horsebastard are a grindcore band from up’t’north of England. Well, I’m in South Wales so they are pretty fucking far north to me, at least. The hilariously titled Giraffetermath is the band’s first release since their Equestrian Blastcore CDr demo, which I also have lying around here somewhere or other. This second EP is also a massive step up in recording quality, and looks fucking cool as fuck on a 10″ record rather than on…

Cemetery Rapist is perhaps the wiggerest of all slam projects. I guess if you’re gonna listen to this type of stuff, go straight to the most ridiculous, insane project of the lot. He might not have gansta grills like members of more recent slam bands, but Cemetery Rapist is also probably one of the longest running projects too, and according to my I-used-to-spend-too-much-time-on-Myspace radar, he’s probably been going for about a decade. When your game…

I’m not touching that fucking Scion debate shit with a fucking barge pole. I covered it briefly on my Magrudergrind Crusher post, and I’ll leave it at that. This EP, whoever fucking released it, is absolutely sick as fuck, and is easily probably some of the best grindcore on the entire planet. 5 tracks in 5 minutes is a decent pace to keep to, and it suits Wormrot’s riffs-then-smash-shit-up approach perfectly. I never noticed how…

Fukpig bring their haunted crusty d-beat mind-melt to this 10″ with Kroh; a confusing clean vocals ‘n’ super heavy doom combo act. I believe both bands share the same guitarist, but I could be wrong. The guitar tone is really similar by both bands though, even if musically they are completely different. Fukpig bring us three tracks of blackened punk madness, my favourite of which must be “The Prisoner”, although opening track “Docile Subjects” brings…

Total Abuse play messy, vicious hardcore with a downtuned, sludgy twist. Tracks range from the short ‘n’ fast machine gun cannon to more plodding, progressive numbers, and to the downright weird and unusual. This self-titled record is noisy as fuck, and probably has some roots in the harsh noise or avant garde. I originally mistook this as a full length album but it’s classed as an EP (2020 edit: I think?), which is unusual because…

I’ve never really been impressed by this split. It’s just been one of those ‘meh’ releases for me that I ended up owning through a trade or something similar. I’m only really doing a review of it because I’m selling it and if I don’t review it now then it’ll just fade out of my memory forever and I’ll forget I ever had it. To be completely honest with you, better material exists out there…

Burzum’s comeback record effectively split his fanbase in half. Many called out for the lost ferocity of old, yet equally he was praised for his progressive approach to rebirthing the project (heading in a more folky and mature direction). Personally, I don’t see what the problem is – the metal re-recording of “Belus Doed” from Daudi Baldrs sounds like it could have fallen off the arse end of Filosofem, give or take the shitty drum…

I love it when weird, totally out of the blue splits happen with two bands that are in absolutely no way related musically. This phenomenally weird split 12” between American sicko porno grinder XXX Maniak and Japanese death-doom titans Coffins is no exception to that rule. I guess the only  link between these two bands that I can decipher is that XXX Maniak love their slow, death doom shit; their label released a fancy box…

I recorded this beast over a year ago and I still haven’t written to ya’ll about it because I’m a festering bloody idiot. Hot off the heels (lol) of my first EP on Grindcore Karaoke, I decided to make hay when the sun was shining and go straight into recording a Tetrahydrocannibal full length whilst the gimmick was still fresh. Weed-themed grindcore is nothing new, even in the minuscule gorenoise department (I’m thinking Boggy Bong,…

Sakatat are a relentless old-school grindcore band from Turkey (yes!). I first heard them on a split 7″ with Agathocles, which fucking ruled, so I eventually got around to checking them out again properly. Bir Devrin Sonu is a 2012 EP consisting of 8 minutes of flat-out blasting goodness. The resemblance to some of Insect Warfare’s shit is uncanny, but perhaps Sakatat pull it off with a bit more of a hardcore punk edge. Regardless,…

Like any doctor worth his salt will tell you, at least several weekly listens of guttural groovy gore and/or porn grind is vital to maintaining a.) a happy soul and b.) the ability to dance like a total spastic and get away with it. And Analkholic are just what the doctor ordered. That doctor might be dancing around a muddy field in Trutnov with a dildo strapped to his head, but he’s still a doctor,…

Flesh Grinder are a long-running gory death metal band from the increasingly-metal-as-fuck nation of Brazil. Necrofiles is one of their later releases, being an EP unleashed on the public in 2013. What we have here is classic romp in the traditional Carcass take on death metal mixed with goregrind influences; low pitchshifted gurgles meet throat shredding screams in a mid-paced chuggy bog of deathly goodness. I’ll admit that some of the riffs are a little…

Voices’ follow-up to their insane 2013 debut is a puzzling, intricate concept album based in their home city of London. Whilst their debut blasted at 96,000bpm, the band (consisting primarily of ex-Akercocke staff) still managed to fit a lot of subtly, emotion, delicate guitar work and other elements of beauty into their high-speed aural assault. It was pretty similar to Akercocke, only dragged kicking and screaming into a cold and modern world. London expands further…

Christ, this band has come a long way since I heard their 7″ EP Whiskey Sierra that was put out by Dead Chemists Records a few years ago. I knew the momentum was building for them; their ever-increasing dominance over the UK live circuit testifies for that, but it wasn’t until this album dropped that Corrupt Moral Altar really made me turn my head. Now I feel like I’ve been missing out on something really…

Nada! is my favourite Death In June record. Brown Book is kind of similar but I prefer Nada! for its dominating dark 80s synthpop vibes and martial background. There’s also less Nazi imagery flirtation going on here, which is always a plus. I believe that this album was the last the group did as a three piece; and seems a fry cry from the acoustic solo project that Death In June has been for so…

Broken Hope have been on my stuff-to-check-out list since they were announced for OEF this year. It’s funny, death metal’s appeal for me is growing as I get older. When I was younger I didn’t have much time for a whole lot of death metal, it all sounded the same to me, despite the fact that I am heavily into grindcore and all sorts of other metal. But hey, I guess it’s just one of…

To say that the recent Electric Wizard album sounds like Electric Wizard would possibly be a very lazy analysis of the situation, but hey – this sounds like Electric Wizard. It sounds so much like Electric Wizard that it literally hurts. Even with Mark Greening back on drums (for long enough to record this record anyway) it just sounds to me exactly like the last two albums. It seriously boggles my little mind how Wizard…

When I heard of Urine Cop being a collaboration between Adam Jennings of Winters In Osaka and Putrefaction In Progress-era LDOH vocalist Erwin De Groot, I got very, very excited. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed with what is on show here. Bass, noise and LDOH vocals sounds fucking class in my book, but you literally can’t hear a thing here. You’ve basically got 8 minutes of…

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but Dragged Into Sunlight have become one of my favourite British bands of all time. From misty beginnings catching them unknown on the smallest stage of Leeds Deathfest in 2009, to seeing them release two records and headlining tours, packing out huge rooms at festivals. I think it must be the air of mystery, darkness and intrigue surrounding the band and their music. I’m a sucker for shit…

Who would have thought that a split between two uncompromising legends of the goregrind genre could be so fuckin’ shite? Lymphatic Phlegm are not exactly my favourite band in the world; although I respect what they do I find a lot of their stuff kinda sounds like really crummy bedroom black metal. Once you’ve heard one Lymphatic Phlegm song you’ve heard them all, if I am to be brutally honest. That’s not meant as a…

I absolutely love (The) Dwarves. They are probably one of the most fun bands I’ve seen live, and all their albums (even the dodgy pop punk ones) are bursting with a childish, youthful punk energy, even as the band continue to age in the physical world. Blood Guts & Pussy shows a much more hardcore punk orientated side to Dwarves that unfortunately quickly died out as they adopted a cleaner, more mainstream sound. It matters…

The story surrounding Gore & Perversion always comes up at some point with Welsh metalheads over a certain age – we all have our own stories to tell about it, and there’s always one person who knows someone who also knows someone who’s uncle’s dog still has an pristine, uncensored copy of the original. But thanks to the absolute twattery and/or dickfuckery of Gwent police, a piece of death metal history has been blasted off…

You simply can’t beat Unholy Grave at their game. Okay, so they kinda fall into the same trap as Agathocles with releasing billions of EPs every week (slight overstatement maybe) but at least with Unholy Grave they have much a higher ratio of original-to-rehashed material than Agathocles. But if it’s raw, uncompromising grindcore that you are looking for then you don’t have to go much further than Unholy Grave. This 2007 release doesn’t exactly break…

Anamnesis is a ‘rarities’ collection from Mick Harris’ genre-spanning project Scorn. It’s actually a bizarre cross-section of the sounds that Scorn had made up until the late 90s; encompassing the early Nik Bullen material, the loud beatwork of the Logghi Barogghi era and the minimalist, bass heavy electronic beats that would come later. It’s all a bit of a mess, to be honest. It’s like this CD can’t decide if it’s a b-sides collection, a remix…

Warning! Self-promotional post! I just wanna take a post to tell you all about my new grindcore band The Judas Cradle (google the definition for epic luls and potential cringing). Formed out of the ashes of Newport death metal crew O.A.P., The Judas Cradle became a real thing in September of last year. We’ve have been rehearsing pretty much weekly since, and we recorded our debut EP in our rehearsal space. It was released in…

It’s easy to write off a band like Deafheaven as pure hipster fodder, but looking past that probably media-perpetuated stereotype (I’m contributing in my own little way by even mentioning it) you will find an extremely talented band with really awesome music. Sunbather opens up to me sounding like the bastard lovechild of post rock and black metal, with “Dream House” punishing you not only in the feels with the melody, but in the face…