Posts by SeanO)))

Carnival of Carnage appears to be a pre-Tumour project of Rogore (ex-LDOH). As far as I can tell it was a fairly short lived affair, with one album, one EP and one live 7″ (this) (2021 edit: the band have a lot more releases than this, I suspect Discogs just hadn’t been updated). It’s pretty cool to listen to, it’s like Tumour with a full band and a bit more of a groove. I don’t…

How else can a band cash in on what was supposed to be their final album? Remember, the story went that after the sixth joker card fell…….well nobody fuckin’ knew what was going to happen, so they needed to milk that shit, let’s be fair. The Wraith itself was split into two separate albums and released two years apart, and then this remix album came trailing behind a few years later. It is no secret that anything…

This was one of the first goregrind splits I ever got hold of, so therefore it holds a very special place in my heart (ha ha). Both bands seem to have fallen into obscurity these days, but this is still worth talking about. It’s maybe not the longest CD in the world, but it’s still worth getting if you see it around. If you are interested in groovy, nasty goregrind in any way I strongly…

This split opens with a disappointing Deche-Charge recording of a live set. It takes forever to get started and when it does, it really doesn’t amount to much at all. Recorded grind/noisecore/whatever can go one of two ways (both of which sound awful) – the recording can really capture the energy and/or dirty sound in a nutshell, or just fall flat on it’s fucking face. Unfortunately for the legendary Deche-Charge, their contribution to this split…

Death metal has a limited appeal for me, but when it’s done right I just fucking love it. Maybe it’s coincidence that I love my “local” death metal band Desecration more than most other death acts, or maybe it’s not. I donno, I’m not a psychologist. All I know is that Desecration is fucking awesome. The sound (on any record) is spot on; the drums are dry and precise, the guitars clinical yet fuzzy and…

If Shitfun isn’t one of the greatest names for a band ever, then I don’t know what is. And if that cover picture isn’t one of the creepiest, nastiest sleeves for a band ever, then I don’t know what is! Shitfun are here to ruin everybody’s day with some “serial killer grindcore” from the deepest, darkest parts of Brazil. They have a growly death metal approach to the vocal side of things (this might explain…

Apartment 213 are fantastic, muddy as hell powerviolence-fused grindcore. This is all well and good, but they are annihilated here by the material on the ANb side. We all know splits aren’t competitions, but sometimes one band will just totally outweigh the other. Sorry guys! It is with a small irony then that Apartment 213’s vocalist guests on all the songs on the ANb side. The Agoraphobic stuff here is unlike anything else in their…

This song is part of my childhood! Quite a strange thing to say, considering I’m not from the streets of CPT, and that I never grew up to develop a taste for gin, khakis and mackin’ bitches. I’m partial to the chronic, however I doubt that has got anything to do with Nate Dogg’s g-funk serenading. This is a classic Dr. Dre track, and it’s a shame that he never made more solo albums; this…

I’ve not heard the source material for this remix, but I’m not entirely sure if I need to, if I’m honest. The thing with remixes of this nature is that the songs are usually so mutated from their original form that they have become brand new entities in their own right. Mixing gabba techno with awkward synths and nifty, sneaky little drum’n’bass passages, NUH really makes a fucking meal out of whatever source material Hideous…

I know this doesn’t exactly rank high amongst the playlists of many black metal enthusiasts, but I am a huge fan of the prison-Burzum era. I think we need to reflect on what the man was simply left to work with; any country that allows you make an album whilst serving prison time for murder is pretty unusual in my opinion, and to be fair, considering Varg was supposedly only allowed to use a synthesizer,…

Now this is a funny one. Meet STLS, an all-percussion group. This is their debut – and only – release to date, the Drumcore EP. Drumcore is basically four “songs” constructed out of the grooves and percussion of two very busy drummers. A bit dull at first, even a bit artsy-fartsy for some, but once you’ve played it for long enough you begin to appreciate the effort involved here. Gone are the days of my…

There are several reasons why I will miss going to Roadburn this year (May 2013 Edit: Roadburn has already happened – where does the time go?). I could spend a lot of time writing about them all, but I won’t do that. I’ll just get to the point. Missing Goat play live is pretty high up on the list of reasons why I want to cry about not going. I had this album on mp3…

Where Björk’s Debut record gets off to a confusing yet almost “cute” start, her follow-up record Post really starts to push the boat out. Holy mother of fuck what is going on here? One has to simply compare album covers to get an idea of the difference. Debut was different in so many ways, but seemed to have one guiding theme. Post, on the other hand, seems to have not been planned out in any…

This is probably the one release in Swans history that is looked down upon the most. As with The Burning World, Gira has retrospectively scorned this release, and insists that the cover was a mistake. Think what you will, but I think it’s pretty good. I’m not too fussed on the black version (sung by Jarboe) but the red version with Gira on vocals is a great cover of a fantastic song. I’m still gonna…

Can you imagine how excited I was knowing that the next Atomçk record was gonna drop as a physical copy thanks to Hygiene Records? No, probably not. But I was pretty fuckin’ happy, I’ll tell you that. As much as I love sites like Grindcore Karaoke (seriously far too much good shit for one website) I am a total sucker for physical copies. Grindcore Karaoke could have a download link to 320kb mp3s of every single album in the…

Now this is what I’m talking about! Trading pays off when you get gems like this! Starting off sounding like demo-quality Converge with Iron Monkey’s Johnny Morrow on vocals, it doesn’t take long for To Die to burst into mental grindcore and body-slamming breakdowns. Most of the songs are notoriously short, but they are mental as fuck and really really rabid. The guitar has a really mournful undertone to it, almost like black metal riffing…

Jig-Ai play goregrind; pulsating, menacing, phat as fuck, groovy goregrind. Oh boy! The overall production is heavy and fairly downtuned but sprightly enough to not get bogged down. The vocals are an endless mix of styles, defaulting unusually on pig squeals (not entirely typical of goregrind, one must point out) but also throwing in a whole spectrum of weird noises in too. It’s like farmyard grindcore here! This album was out for four years on…

In my many years of D12 / Eminem fandom it never occurred to me that other members of the group might have solo projects. After giving myself the ultimate facepalm, I began hunting down those records. I started with Bizarre, who is by far my favourite member of D12. He’s like the Frankie Boyle of rap music. A lot of rappers say shit that gets them shot; Bizarre is so offensive he goes beyond that and just…

Burzum is a tricky subject, but I am not going to try and navigate it here. As I’m sure I mentioned in my last Burzum post many moons ago, I try to keep politics out of music. If politics happen to be the driving force behind music, then that is fine by me, but I don’t let it get in the way of my enjoyment of it. I’m no more a racist for wanting to…

I bet you’ve all always wondered what happens when you apply the noisecore ethic to bedroom black metal? Well, if you have or not, Ostie are here to either brighten or ruin your day, depending on your outlook on life.  Combining the production values and attitude associated with noisecore into the elitist and grimm as fvck black metal sound, Ostie create one hell of a disorientated, erm…racket. The major let down for me is the…

It’s that time again; another Godflesh post! How long will this one be? How far up Justin Broadrick’s arse can I get this time? Ha ha! All jokes aside, my love for Godflesh is seemingly never-ending, although I do have lapses in listening time these days as there is so much other stuff out there I’m currently wrapping my lugholes around. At the moment I’ve been on a tremendous (and possibly worrying) hip hop /…

An instant porngrind classic. 2006’s debut from Italian noisecore-cum-grinders 2 Minuta Dreka really made it’s mark in a time where pure groovy grind had gone a bit stagnant (GUT’s Cumback, anyone?). For me it holds the perfect production; that excellent fine line between studio quality and rehearsal room feel. I guess it is the very organic drum sound (count-ins and all) that helps keep this record’s garage vibe locked down. Let’s Start A Porn… was…

This is solo hip hop effort by Mushroomhead’s drummer Skinny and ex-vocalist J Mann. Being a fan of all things Mushroomhead in my early teens, I naturally began hunting down physical copies of side-project albums when I found out about the existence of Discogs a few years back. I started with 10,000 Cadillacs because I love J Mann and also have quite the penchant for rap music, as I’m sure some of you are aware….

I absolutely love Splatter Whore. It’s a bit sad they have gone rather quiet these days, but their first album remains one of my favourite goregrind (or grind’n’roll!) releases ever. I wasn’t as fussed on the second album (with an almost completely different line up, I believe) but this split 7″ with Bowel Stew showcases material that displays openly the transition between records. The sound is fantastic and extremely well produced. The band are tighter…

Soundtracks for the Blind is often hailed as something incredibly special in the original Swans catalogue. After spending the majority of the 90s focusing on much more softer material, Swans’ issued a perplexing final death rattle with this double album. Listening to it, even from the first few opening seconds, evokes deep feelings of sadness for me, even though I never got into the band until they reformed three years ago. This record was literally…

I got this nice little EP when HMV still sold vinyl at decent, affordable prices. I think it was fiver, so you can’t argue with that (April 2013 Edit: I actually got this from Spillers Records on my birthday last year. Sometimes it’s hard keeping track of where I get all this crap). As far as Venetian Snares goes this record is pretty tame, there is a lot more ambient and nice synth sounds than…

I’ve had this EP (or mini-album?) for a while thanks to Grindcore Karaoke, and considering it is powerviolence to the core I really enjoy it. I can never seem to shake the comedy value behind the “low” powerviolence vocals (and this is coming from a guy who loves goregrind), but sometimes the music is so awesome that it all just fits together and I totally see where the sound is coming from. The record initially…

This is where it all began! Well, not all of it, but as far the Dark Carnival thing goes and the Joker’s Card legacy shit, it all began here. ICP’s debut record is like nothing else in their history and it remains to this day one of my favourite records by them. It possesses an extremely amateur mix by an at-the-time fresh-faced Mike Clark, and shows the group before they had fully adjusted to their new Insane…

Welcome to what is quite possibly one of the most chilled out things in the world. I’m not talking that lovey-dovey “ambient” chill out shit that comes in box sets of 5 CDs, I’m talking about modern, chillax-to-the-max experimental dub. After being recommended Burial by about 40,000 different people I decided to actually check out some of his tunes on Spotify and I was an instant convert. One thing I don’t agree with here though…

I had the shock of my life when I saw a tweed jacket wearing Steve Moore perform as Stebmo in 2009, supporting Earth in The Croft, Bristol. What the hell was I watching? To be fair, who knew? And whilst that jazzy-jam of distorted electric piano and drums doesn’t sound anything like the Stebmo record, it was entirely responsible for my purchase of it. It took me a while to get around the idea of…

Björk has always been one of those artists I’ve always been interested in but never got around to properly checking out. With my recent upgrade to Spotify Premium, I now have easy access to thousands of records I would otherwise overlook. Sure, I’ve always downloaded music, but typing “Björk” into Spotify and pressing play is easier than researching a band and then finding links to the “best” record, downloading the .rar, importing into iTunes, yadda…

This 12″ marks my first Record Store Day purchase, even though it was accidental. I decided to visit Cardiff on Record Store Day this year, which was fairly disastrous, but I ended up in Catapult browsing where I picked up another King Midas 12″. When I took it to the counter to pay for it, the chap at the desk kindly informed me that the band had put another 12″ out on Ninja Tune just…

Here’s an EP I’ve been meaning to check out for a long time now, but me being me, it’s taken me the best part of forever to finally stumble upon a copy. Maaaan this shit is so fucking heavy – so heavy that on my car stereo all I can hear whilst driving are the cymbals and vocals. This is something that generally happens with muddily produced grindcore records, but Pus’ epic low end just…

All these years I’ve been collecting records and I’ve never come across a flexi and all of a sudden I have three of them in a month. When it rains, it pours, eh? I don’t really know of that much stuff on flexi that I want; there’s a Swans “New Mind” promo flexi which I hope to end up owning and a live Enemy Soil flexi, but other than that, there isn’t much else. It…

Another nostalgic blast from the past for me! Thanks to Zoverstocks selling on Amazon for 3p a record, I managed to get my hands on another album that I’ve put off buying for years. Before the industrial brigade get all up in my grill about how my info on Mr. Empire is all wrong, I must tell you I write this all as an outsider to Alec Empire’s / Atari Teenage Riot’s long career(s). This…

This is one my favourite splits ever! Limited to 2000 copies thanks to Relapse Records. There is the usual Relapse 100 clear, 100 on orange, a bizarre 50 on white, and the remaining 1750 on black. I was lucky to get a black copy at a fairly decent price, but be wary that the white and orange pressings can fetch hefty price tags on record collector websites. Classic Pig Destroyer are on top form, covering the…

Probably not my favourite Chemical Brothers tune but a good one all the while. I got this for I think £1 in Virgin Megastore when that was still around. This was released on every format possible for a single, barring tape. The 12″ contains an extended mix and a different B-side, and the CD version contains an edited mix and a remix. It seems the only place to get the un-altered single (other than to…

Don’t let the heart-melting picture of Mr. Phipps’ dog Levi on the centre-label give you the wrong idea; this record is an absolute nightmare! Paul Phipps – the guy behind Rectal Twat, Cocksnot., Wolf Pussy and many other projects that are hard on the ears – presents a small cross-section of “songs” that he considers his personal best. That sits well with me! Prepare your lugholes for 2 sides of absolute noisecore annihilation! This even…

Is there anything quite so harrowing as the story behind Stalaggh? Probably, but still, their tale is one of the sheer lengths (or is that depths) that people will go to in the name of art. Basically, the short version is that Stalaggh was formed by some of the leading names in the European black metal scene (who come together anonymously) to make the most nihilistic and horrible noise terror ever heard. As vocalists, Stalaggh…

Whilst I wasn’t quick enough to snag one of the original hand-made run of 1000, and whilst I am not rich enough to pay some prick hipster cunt with a wardrobe full of berets £90 for a second hand copy which no doubt they have never even played, I was finally able to get my hands on this live album when Mr. Gira thankfully re-pressed an unlimited, non-special edition run on CD. Phew. Unfortunately, this…

This is the first CDr in the ongoing noise collection called “Redlight District” on Germany’s Shit Noise Records. This is the only one so far I have seen that does not have a colour assigned to it (well, it’s called the “black” edition, but still, black technically isn’t a colour, and if the images were tainted black, surely they wouldn’t be visible?). Limited to 50 hand numbered copies on CDr. Torture Border open things up with…

When I got this through the door the other day it took me right back to the thick of the good ol’ trading days! Gotta love these insane underground goregrind compilations and splits, there really is nothing like them anywhere else in the music world. As with most Dehydrated Tissues releases, this has been put out on the band’s own label Regurgitated Stoma Stew Productions, who deal in a plethora of absolutely fucking filthy goregrind,…

Welcome to quite possibly the most perfect goregrind sound. Last Days of Humanity are probably better known for their later, 9000bpm efforts, but Hymns of Indigestible Suppuration is more my bag of disfigured body parts. The whole thing starts off with a frankly odd sample, before kicking into some of the best down-tuned slop I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing. Could that artwork be summed up in a more perfect sound? I doubt it. The guitars…

I’ll quickly start this post by asking if anyone reading has any idea what’s become of Tumour these days? Is the project still going? Any news at all? Drop me a comment below if you know. Thanks!!! This was the first Tumour record I heard, and I got it through a trade with the label in (I think) 2007, so it was a while ago now. I’m not sure if I fell in love with…

Gut sounds absolutely huge on vinyl, I just wish they’d stop fucking around and play some more grind! I love the fun element of modern Gut whereas a lot of goregrinders shun them now, but on this record for the most part it’s a template of “typical porn sample followed by uninspired five-to-ten second song with silly vocals”. I am glad that I didn’t shell out the earth for the original CD version of this,…

Since I began listing not only my vinyl but my entire music collection on Lines in Wax, I knew the day would come where I would have to touch upon the questionable purchases I made when I was younger. Today that day has finally come. Scorn at nu-metal all you like, but I actually like this CD. I actually prefer it to say, I dunno, Deathcrush by Mayhem. Well, maybe not prefer. Wrong choices of…

Okay. I’m confused with this Dead Infection side here. What the hell is the furniture obsession thing about? The artwork, instead of some putrefying gore, is a table and chairs. The songs, instead of your usual goregrind fodder, are all about furniture. What the hell have these guys been smoking / snorting / injecting? Nevertheless, the music here is top form and Dead Infection blast and chug through some dank grindcore for us all. Have…

Holy shit this is some of the grooviest goregrind stuff I’ve heard in a long while! I just wanna get up and dance around the house, or more preferably a muddy field in the Czech Republic. I’m glad to be set to release a 4″ record of this guy later this year – that is something I am greatly looking forward to. Pairing the nasty sounds of early LDOH with the “vibe” that I can…

To celebrate the recent “fixing” of my record player so that it now plays records smaller than 6″, here is another 5″ review! Where can one possibly go wrong with a 5″ full of Gang Green covers? ANb’s cover of “Alcohol” is punchy and bouncy, and is virtually flawless with Randall back on the mic. That’ll do Hull, that’ll do. I am unfamiliar at this point with Armageddon Nuclear System (more commonly known as ANS)…

Now this IS interesting. I suppose just like me you have always wondered what happens when you mix Anal Cunt’s offensive comedy / hate grind with pitchshifted goregrind from hell? Ha ha! Well, the end result turns out sounding a lot like Bowel Rot, who have managed to surprise me with some originality regarding the mixing up of sub-genres. I can safely say I had never thought of this type of mix before. The guitar…

Nearly a year in the works, Ohio’s one man harsh noise and power electronics magician Arseterror finally meets the ongoing experiment Life is Easy on the format of split tape. featuring roughly 20 minutes of music from each artist; Arseterror first with the 20 minute maddening contribution, “Camptown Racist”. Life is Easy contributes two unreleased drones from 2007 that have been festering away in the vaults for years. Strictly limited to 15 physical copies, all…

For me, Endtyme stands apart from anything else in the Cathedral discography. They have done dark before, sure, one needs not look further than the debut album to realise that, but that record is a whole other sack of decapitated witch heads. Here, Cathedral are chuggy and enormously groovy-heavy; and in a certain way take their groovy doom and smash it head on with the styles on display in the debut. Once I read somewhere…

I’ve never been a big Linkin Park fan, even though Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought with my own money when I was 11 years old. I’d lost all interest by the time the second record came out, but when the third album came out around 2007 the band (or more likely the label) came up with the idea to release the singles off that album on mini 7″ picture discs, which…

It’s been absolutely yonks since I last reviewed a 5″ and upon receiving this I was horrified to find that my current record player doesn’t player the little fuckers because of the auto-return function. Now, my old deck is a mixing deck and plays them fine, but it doesn’t have a pre-amp, and therefore lacks volume when connected to my current, all-digital stereo set up. I wasn’t exactly in the position to rush out and…

If the name of this record and the artwork above screams out to you – “Porngrind!” then guess what? You’re fucking wrong, bitches! What we have here is an ear-melting cacophony of rancid fucking gorenoise. Ok, maybe not flat out noise but noise-core. Don’t forget the core! It reminds me of VRV, the way the drum machine is pushed out to the max and just left to blast away unhindered, when all the wasps in…

I’ve lusted after this collectable for a good while, and I finally saw it on Discogs at a decent price so I nabbed the bastard! I gotta be honest though, after all that waiting, I was a bit disappointed to find out that this Accident Prone-released 7″ is fecking one-sided record (don’t get me started on one-sided records!). What also surprised me is that there are no original songs here, just three early Cattle Decap cuts re-recorded in Spanish. Go me for researching! Although,…

I first saw these guys by chance when I went up to Bristol to catch Weekend Nachos. Little did I know until a few days before that the show was an all dayer, filled to the brim with some of the best fuckin’ grindcore bands the UK has to offer right now. Despite the fact that I had completed the Ultimate Burger challenge (I won’t go into it) pre-gig and was in a state of…

I got these two when they were around (I think) 70p each on the Earache store. An utter bargain! Every now and then they put the shit that I assume wasn’t selling down to some retarded low price. Once I went on there and they had Adema 7″s for 10p each. I was almost tempted to make a large purchase and then build a fire out of Adema singles. That would have been a good day! Too…

Crossface aren’t particularly bad for your average hardcore band. I don’t understand hardcore at all so I’ll skirt over this before I say something to embarrass myself and bring down a sea of X-marked fists upon my head. Schnauzer on the other hand is one of my favourite things ever. Why is it then, that it has taken me so long to finally write a post for this, one of my all time favourite 7″s?…

This EP has a mega-random story behind it. When I was around 13/14, our gang would always chill / play fuck in this one street in upper-Abercanaid. The wannabe-middle class fucks up there hated us, but we had a few friends who lived there so we always hung around there. Not everyone there was bad, but there was the usual crowd of grouchy middle-aged meatbags who despised children. Not to mention, we did play fuck quite a…

This is Volume 4 in the ongoing and extremely extensive noise series entitled “Redlight District” by German record label Shit Noise Records, who really do have a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin attitude. Each release is identifiable by a new colour, and number 4 (or is that IV) is purple. Limited, as always with this series, to 50 hand numbered copies. Painburn open the disc with what seems like a harsh noise-meets-instrument experimentation. Underneath the garbled layers of hell…

Mad props to Mike from Vaginal Necrosis / Dead Chemists Records for sending me this CD for free, you’re a legend! This has been out for a few years now on Parkinson Wankfist and Alarma Records. To be honest, I expected a compilation CD with 100 Myspace bedroom goregrind bands, but this CD seems to contain about 50% Myspace bedroom goregrind bands, 25% crappy digigrind/gabba/noise artists and 25% actual death metal and goregrind bands. Those…

“Slateman” is one of my favourite ‘Flesh songs, and is a prime example of what excellence can be achieved by simply using a drum machine right. This isn’t particularly heavy or drawn out or even harrowing in any way, but it is the perfect example of Godflesh’s sound. The drum sound is absolutely spot on, I don’t really know what does it here for me but it’s just so right. The bass is clanky and…

I can’t exactly review this as it’s my creation, but I got one in my collection so it’ll have to wind up on here eventually, so I’ll just do a brief run down to plug this fucker. I recorded this bastard of an EP back in 2007, simply by running a distorted B C Rich through a whole world of filters and then recording a cold, mechanical drum beat over the top of it before…

I remember back in the day when I first heard of this album. I remember how ridiculously excited I was to hear something so musically challenging. 100 songs? Less than 20 minutes? Bitch please, you must be trippin’! And trippin’ I was when I first got this record in it’s original 3″ CD package from some crazy-mainstream outlet like Virgin Megastore or Zavvi (I forget which). I now own this testament to insanity three times; on the…

I always have mixed feelings about D12: the potential with the group was absolutely fantastic; each artist is an excellent rapper in their own right, but if they work together as a group or not is something that has always bugged me. I guess it’s the endless “it’s Eminem’s old band, innit” that pisses me off. The first record shared the load fairly but the second album parodied this yet lived up to it entirely; employing Mr….

So, Nirvana. A touchy subject. Well, not touchy but a hard one to define. Awful? Maybe. Terrible? Maybe. Over-rated as fuck? Definitely. The thing with Nirvana is that the songs were fantastic. The songwriting was spot on, it’s just when the songs unfolded into real entities they were boring, nauseating grunge numbers. But, it would seem, a lot of people like Nirvana’s music, and that includes dub legend Little Roy, who for some godforsaken reason decided…

I put this out around Christmas time on my part-time label Pointless Records, and even managed to shift all ten copies. Holy shit, that’s a fucking first! Ha ha. These were cut for me by a lovely American chap by the name of Graham, who was exceptional in handling this project. Get at me for his contact info, if your looking for some cutting. Obviously I can’t review Clunge as it’s my creation but I will…

Another few months sail by, another Agathocles or Necrocannibalistic Vomitorium record falls into my claws! Ha ha! It’s good because I think that if I listened to Necro Vom on a regular basis I’d become a serial killer of skanky heroin-riddled hookers, but every now and then I need my fix of cold, Eastern bass-grind and this 7″ out on Escaravelho Records does not disappoint. The Necro Vom sound here is at it’s most typical, which is also…

I don’t know if I like Throatplunger because of their wigger-slam-cross-hypergrind nonsense, or because of their absolutely fucking excellent samples. Mingling both in disgusting pornographic unison, Throatplunger hit the fuckin’ spot with their sounding-suspiciously-like-XXX-Maniak grindcore. Pummeled by Cocks comes in DVD case with a photocopied cover featuring all the awful xeroxed porn you could ever want. What bugs me is that on the back, the tracklist is a couple of songs short! What’s up with…

This, along with the other Akercocke records, is something I have always wished to be released on vinyl. It’s fuckin’ death metal! Death metal belongs on vinyl! Ya hear me Earache / Peaceville? Re-press this shit on wax or I might blow a gasket. Ha. (2020 Edit: I believe this has now been pressed on vinyl? – Ed) Anyway, The Goat of Mendes is probably Akercocke’s most black metal of records, although they somehow retain…

Misopsychia seem to want to break my stylus. Here they play a down-tuned, faster than fast mush with endless blasts and EQ-piercing screams that want to escape up my needle, through my stereo and punch me in the fucking face. The music is a bit uninspiring (that’s not to say it’s awful) but the vocals are mental as fuck. Top points for the insane level of effort here! Why Suppression would collaborate with experimental noise…

This is my second £1 Mahler purchase, and the second time I’ve been disappointed at not receiving some bat-shit insane classical music. I’m guessing that maybe Mahler gained his ambitions over time? The 4th is rather straight forward but complex in it’s own way, and number 6 (the final symphony he wrote) is absolutely maddening as fuck. Number 1 however, after building and building from nothing over a long period  breaks into something that sounds like a typical background film…

Some of my most favourite ANb stuff ever! What a mess! There are like 28 songs on this 7″, all of them micro-blasts of pure grinding hell. For those of you that have Bestial Machinery, these tracks are on disc 2, so you’ve probably heard them before. I can waffle on about like I can with any other ANb release but this really just has to be heard. It’s been out since 1996 on Bovine…

Kroh are on top form here, bringing up more mega-heavy tunage with their trademark crooning vocals. This could be a B-side from the S/T recording sessions for all I know, the sound is that similar to the recordings used there. Does it matter? Nope. Great stuff! Fat production, brilliant singing and THAT guitar sound that we love so much from Fukpig. Ice Dragon I can’t get my head around, unfortunately. The sound is an absolute…

So I’ve been holding off buying this fucker for a long time, mainly because I was plagued with the dilemma of getting it on vinyl (the far superior format, of course) or on CD (song plays through in one go rather than in three parts). As collectable as the vinyl pressing of Tee Pee’s release might be, I forever shied away from it due to the fact that the hour-plus trip that is Dopesmoker would…

The sound on this record is huge! Kudos to the pressing people, they really packed this one in. Having grown up through the nu-metal generation I have always had a soft spot for System of a Down, and I was fairly impressed by Serj’s first solo single. Unfortunately, the fun ends there as the album turned out to be rather disappointing (who saw that coming, eh?). Side B is just a shitty dance remix so unless your…

Another Agx split with (apparent) original songs here, so I went ahead and got it from the Goatgrind Records distro. The Agx stuff is fairly good but the sound leaves a lot to be desired. As far as I can tell it isn’t live or anything, but it really is a nasty recording. Yes, yes, I am still fully aware of what genre I’m reviewing here but is it too much to want on some clarity every…

This is one of those albums that I forgot about for nearly a decade until one day it’s existence just came crashing back to me like some sort of acid flashback. Of course, all that was left to do was to buy it off Amazon for 3p. In hindsight, I’m not sure if it was worth it. The title track is a totally epic and original composition of heaving modern-classical and emotional vocals. It builds…

This is such an awesome looking tape! Just look at those colours! This is pure noisecore. I can’t tell who’s side is who’s as there is no information but one band plays in a slow, dirgy and nasty style whilst the flip-side counterpart seems to be smashing fuck out of an electric guitar in the name of noise. Very, very under the radar and for fans of true noisecore fuckery only. Limited to 20 pieces on the…

Another piece of goregrind history that is now mine! Hahahahaha! LDOH splits in the original forms are rather hard to find these days, so I am very lucky in the respect that the two I have (to date) I’ve gotten for fairy reasonable prices. What we have here is their split with Rakitis, which was, if I’m not mistaken, out a while before the Hymns…. album, so it’s fairly aged by today’s standards. In fact,…

This marks the first time in fuuuuuuck knows how long I’ve actually paid full retail price for a CD (by that I mean £9 or higher) but it is just impossible to get the career-end late 90s Swans stuff anywhere any cheaper (in Britain, at least). Swans Are Dead is a retrospective live album, released not that long after their original demise, and features two discs of live performances. 1995-1997 was an interesting time for…

What better way to see in the new year than with some head-pounding Scorn music? Stealth is probably one of my favourite Scorn records and it is the record that I recommend to people that are new to Mick’s work and who are familiar with the concept of dubstep. Stealth is very similar to the album that followed it (Refuse; Start Fires), but unlike Refuse and its exploration of the one-dimensional sound by using real…

In my quest to own all Swans shit I endeavor to pick up all the singles as 12″s (2020 edit: that didn’t exactly go to plan), with the exception of New Mind as the 12″ doesn’t really offer me anything for the increased price. For the singles that follow, a lot of alternate versions / exclusive tracks occupy the B-side, but with New Mind all the 7″ gets is a shorter version of what’s on…

The best thing about this tape is that I have no fucking idea how I ended up owning it. I cannot for the life of me remember where I got the thing from! Anyway, this is a transparent purple tape containing a live set of Birdflesh performing in Japan. The quality is fairly clear, and the band play all the hits, but it definitely remains at the level of being a completist item for Birdflesh fans; I…

This isn’t as distorted and harsh as I originally thought it would be. The noise slowly builds and builds, and when the hellish garbled drone kicks in fully it is still without any eardrum penetrating fuzz or hiss. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; Torturing Nurse’s rumbling, harrowing soundscape of death is perfect just the way it is. It levels out a bit as it continues and some nice haunting female vocals weave in and…

Welcome to part 2 of my Christmas Day double post! Not sure how many of you will actually be reading this on Christmas but I hope the festivities have progressed satisfactorily for you all. I for one will be no doubt smashed off my face by now on my parent’s free beer. Can’t beat the Christmas visit! This year’s Decibel Christmas flexi is a follow up to last years cracking ANb EP, A Joyful Noise….

Ho ho ho! Merry fucking Christmas! Hope your having a good one and that plenty of turkey and grog is consumed. In line with the festivities, I have planned a double post for today, showcasing both the Agoraphobic Nosebleed flexis put out by Decibel magazine. I’ll start with my favourite – the former of the two; last year’s Make A Joyful Noise on square transparent red. These flexis are an absolute bastard to get in…

Look It’s been a good while since I last reviewed a tape (the Electric Wizard one that went up yesterday was written months ago), so seeing as I bought a few recently it’s high time I did some more tape posts. This is my first ever Merzbow purchase and potentially an in-road onto a long slippery slope of trying to collect all his shit. I went through the same fad in 2007 with Agathocles, and…

So if you weren’t at the London show when this 7″ came out, you were pretty much boned for an original copy! Represses exist on 7″ though thanks to Rise Above, and the EP was released more nationally as a free copy by the good folk at Terrorizer magazine, on the excellently under-rated format of tape and with a couple of extra tracks thrown in for good measure! You though vinyl had a warm sound?…

Every now and then, in all scenes of music, a band or artist will come along and snowball into something massive. Insect Warfare were an absolutely fantastic grindcore band, so at least in that case they weren’t shite as well as overrated. It’ll just be the latter then. Phew. I feel bad writing that because I believe and want decent bands to get the attention and exposure that they deserve, but I don’t think anyone can deny…

This is the first Jesu record I heard and it is still probably one of my favourite releases by him. It also introduced me to Jarboe, which opened up a whole can of worms in my life in the form of Swans (another very long story for another day), who appears here as a special guest, not to mention as a precursor to the pair’s collaboration album that would follow. Lifeline was released on the…

One doesn’t really know where to start when it comes to analyzing the works of Steve Albini, and if I’m honest I’m still a total amateur on the subject; although I guess Songs About Fucking is a great place to start considering it is rather well known. I kinda worked my way backwards through the world of drum-machine propelled music, starting with Agoraphobic Nosebleed and other digigrinders, then onto Godflesh and other industrial. Big Black,…

Pig Destroyer’s Prowler record is considered a modern classic in the world of American grind, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why. Adding a poetic, dark and downright creepy edge to the hyper-precision blasts helped Pig Destroyer stand apart from the legions of other grindcore acts clamoring for attention; and despite what your opinion is on what Pig Destroyer has become these days, it is very hard to deny that Prowler isn’t an absolute corker…

This here is the fantastic repress on Power It Up Records. Mine, unfortunately, is not the edition with the bonus 7″ (I didn’t know it existed when I bought this, which is a shame as I wouldn’t have minded paying a bit extra for the whole set). This set contains Effortless Regurgitation… on one slab of wax, and the Concrete Human Torture tape plastered onto a single side of another slab of wax. Adorning side…

Om were an accidental discovery for me. I have had the mp3s of Pilgrimage for years thanks to a friend, but I had never truly appreciated them. To me it literally just seemed like SleepLite. What was the fucking point? Anyway, I’ll cut the bullshit and get straight to the point. One day I decided to try and smoke as much weed as I possibly could. I’m not talking “oh, let’s get totally baked”, I’m talking about…

What I’ve got here in today’s post is Bongripper’s 3rd pressing of Satan Worshipping Doom, which I wisely picked up at Roadburn in April. The band release all their records themselves, and it is now worth a small fortune on Discogs. Also, this is going to sound rather bizarre, but I see this as less of a record and more as a reminder, or a testament, to the band’s fucking mind-blowing set at Roadburn festival 2012. I gotta…

Imagine how stupid I felt after shelling out for the super-ultra-mega-wicked-limited edition of this record that was ONLY available at day one of Roadburn 2012 when I found out there was actually less to it than the normal Relapse package and a few quid more expensive! Bitch please! In a European world where records cost an average of 20 Euros each I was not impressed. Never mind, I guess it is the same record regardless,…

(2020 edit: It’s worth mentioning that in the last 8 years since this review was written, I have grown up considerably, and now appreciate The Burning World for what it is. Either way, here’s the 2012 review in its original format, some of which is also a bit factually inaccurate, so please take it with a pinch of salt.) Hmmm, this is going to be a controversial one for me. I don’t know how I…

This is one of the chunkiest metal productions I have heard in quite some time. Nothing Violates This Nature is an amazing performance from start to finish; mixing the blistering ferocity of grindcore with the, dare I say it, artsy hardcore edge of stuff like Converge, even Dillenger et al. (2017 edit: I have since discovered that not only is Converge drummer Ben Koller in the fucking band, but this record was produced by Kurt…