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…

I’ve always been a bit hit and miss when it comes to black metal. I think it’s because black metal is easily one of the most over-saturated genres of music out there. There seems to be an endless stream of black metal projects the world over, constantly vying for grimness and struggling to flog their shitty limited run cassette-release demos. In all honesty, I only ended up checking out Lifelover because of the extremely interesting…

How does one approach a review of a revered classic that spawned a genre? There are various debates about whether Scum was the first grindcore record, but there can be no argument that it was the first one that blew up on any particular scale. It was the album that cemented this weird sounding “grindcore” as a real thing. It also put Earache on the map, and seeded the entire worldwide scene that would follow….

This has gotta be one of my favourite rap/hip hop discoveries of the past year or so. Granted, this came out in 2011 but I’m not exactly crawling all over the modern rap scene (because as Eminem so eloquently put it – it’s a landfill). I heard enough episodes of Charlie Sloth on Radio 1 whilst at work to convince myself that hip hop was welllllll and truly dead and anything post-2000 was not even…

With the recent release of Voices’ second album London, I realised that I hadn’t written anything on the group’s astoundingly perplexing debut (if you’re a frequent reader you’ll begin to notice that this happens quite a lot haha). Voices are a band formed out of the ashes of the amazing and forever-mourned Akercocke, with all members bar one of the final Akercocke line up fleshing out Voices, along with new bassist Dan Abela, who played…

I forgot just how absolutely huge this album sounds. When it first came out I didn’t like it because it marked a notable difference in direction from the super-blast-n-bombast I expected and loved from Dimmu Borgir. In Sorte Diaboli showcased a much more streamlined, death metal type of direction for the band, and on initial listens, Abrahadabra seemed like a tame follow up, with too much chuggy chuggy boring passages borrowed from the immensely popular…

A recurring theme in my posting to Lines In Wax is my reluctance to approach my absolute favourite bands. I eventually get to it with most of them (look how many Agoraphobic Nosebleed posts I’ve done!) but with Swans I always hit that wall. How in the fuck am I supposed to describe this album in only so many words? I was still getting my head around The Seer when To Be Kind was announced….

Auerbach is one of a gazillion projects by Merthyr Tydfilian / Aberdare-ian (yeah, I can make up my own words now) Kristian Cole. I sit next to this cunt most days in work placement so I might come across a bit biased as I review one of his creations, but I say with all the honesty in my blackened heart that this is a seriously harsh aural assault of the senses. He goes by many…

C.A.R.N.E. are a porno-influenced groovy grindcore band from the lubed-up lower bowels of Mexico. The Taste Of Latex, despite splits with Oxidised Razor and Fucksaw, is the band’s only full length release to date. Although dirgy as fuck, it is a really groovy album loaded with tupa tupa rhythms and slow, sludgy pornogrind. The vocals are the only let down; when not croaking and spluttering through the genre-defining pitchshifter muck, they are replaced by a…

Every now and then it’s great to hear a rapper who doesn’t rely heavily on endless taboo subject matter to fill his verses. Granted, perhaps I was a little burnt out on the excess of hip hop, as I was listening to Necro’s The Sexorcist a lot alongside Doris, and I’m not exactly saying that this Odd Future member’s solo outfit is clean like a Will Smith album, but it is admittedly refreshing all the…

What a trip! What a dream! I was busting to write about this a few months ago – on my first listen I absolutely fell in love with this smorgasbord of musical tomfoolery, but after every subsequent listen I’ve not been able to replicate my interest for it. That was until I realised that you have to give this album your complete attention; it works as background music but to truly appreciate what it is…

If Pantera and Rompeprop had a baby it would sound like this. I shit you not. In what is possibly one of the most under-rated goregrind (gore ‘ n’ roll? Gore metal?) releases of all time, Splatter Whore burst onto the unsuspecting underground like a full colostomy bag hitting the pavement after being thrown from the roof of a multi-storey car park. It’s wet as fuck and extremely hard hitting. Lol. Metallic riffage and more…

There’s a lot of Jesu stuff out there now – I think this project ended up being much more productive than even Justin Broadrick could have anticipated when he first started lurching out the aching melancholic drones of Jesu. Silver however, simply has to be some of the best material recorded under this moniker. It fights for the top spot against Lifeline, which was the first Jesu release I heard and therefore I have an…

I picked this up because a few of my mates really like Exit_International, and swear by their unusual bass guitar driven sleazy rock swagger. It was also nice to see a 7″ for sale locally, of a local band, so that swayed me. I love bass guitar focussed stuff, and I’ve heard a fair amount of it over the years, but this, well, it just bores the guts outta me. Exit_International have got their sound,…

For me, the blow of Strapping Young Lad’s dissolution was softened somewhat with the release of this album shortly afterward. The recent release of Z2 (the sequel to this record for those catching up) reminded me that I haven’t written a little bit about the original Ziltoid, which is a modern metal classic, in my opinion. If you’ve not heard of Ziltoid The Omniscient I suspect you may have been living under some sort of…

Welcome to the album that got me banned from the Vinyl Junkies group on Facebook! Haha! There was some spat happening on there over the use of the nude female form as album artwork. The usual pros and cons were discussed, where the line between pornography and art lies etc. etc., and I argued (quite sensibly, I would like to think) that no matter what the image may be, if the band or artist has…

Two grind legends head to head on one split – that’s all it takes for me! I’m sold! Rotten Sound’s polished uber-super-grind has gotten more and more streamlined and refined as albums have come and gone, so it’s refreshing to hear some old stuff from them now and then and remember what sounds they used to make ‘back in the day’. Mixing Napalm Death-brand grindcore ferocity with tinges of death metal, Rotten Sound plough through…

If you’ve been following this site since the beginning then you’re probably somewhat aware that I have had mostly nothing but praise for all the Embalming Theatre stuff that I’ve reviewed. This 2005 full-length record is going to be no exception, as it showcases everything that I love about these Swiss grindcore maniacs. What I have here the 2007 pressing on vinyl by Power It Up from Germany (the original 2005 release was just on…

This is one of my all time favourite albums. In fact, there’s a few Streets records in my all time favourites, but this one has got to be the best, IMO. In my youth I found The Streets’ quirky raps about everyday life rather amusing, and in my maturity (err… LOL) I have discovered whole new deeper social commentaries within them, as well as a greater, more profound love for the instrumentation itself. Mike Skinner…

Now here’s a band I don’t listen to enough. Lord Gore are (or were) (2020 edit: are) a goregrind-tinged death metal band from the US of A. I can never remember where I got this album from but it’s a corker. The first thing you’ll most likely notice about Lord Gore is the extremely watery and disgusting vocals; a welcome break from the endless cookie monsterisms of the death metal genre. Despite their bowel-churning watery…

AUN are another band that I picked up on thanks to Roadburn Festival. I missed them on the day (2012 edition I believe) but in a ritual that my friends call Pre-Roadburn Listening I got listening to their Black Pyramid record. Multigone is an earlier recording of theirs, and is a bit harshier than the meandering ambience present on Black Pyramid. AUN’s approach to noise is droning, unfolding soundscapes that almost have some tangible tune…

This album should be called In Disgust We Crust! I’ve never been into Mistress really; I always got my superfast metal fix in Anaal Nathrakh and my crusty d-beat headbangery fix in Fukpig, both projects relating to members of this band. For these reasons I always tended to look over Mistress’ existence – that was until I caught their farewell show at Damnation Festival a few years ago, and bloody shitting heck, son – that…

I dunno the last time I listened to a Gwar record all the way through. In fact, I dunno the last time I even attempted to listen to a Gwar record in the first place! Ever since Oderus’ untimely death last year I’ve been meaning to check out more Gwar stuff – simply because they are one of my favourite live bands ever, and I feel like I haven’t given them a proper chance. Dave…

Weedeater’s Sixteen Tons is a beer and whiskey soaked southern-tinged romp in sludgey doom metal. The guitar tone is literally the audible equivalent of a Louisiana swamp; a thick bog of rumbling riffs and plodding rhythms. I first got into Weedeater when I saw them at Hellfest nearly five years ago (bloody heck) and they were so heavy that I fell asleep. Granted, it was probably the monumental amount of people within the tent who…

Sunn O))) are a bunch of folks who love their arsty fartsy, hipster-baiting collaborations. The split with Ulver, the featuring of Julian Cope on earlier drones, the covering of “Che” on a 10″ shared with Alan Vega, that art installation thingy that Oracle was based around, and I’m sure there’s more but those are the ones that spring to mind. So I’m not surprised then, to see this collab with Scott Walker come along at…

I’ve really been digging Esham recently. Well, I’ve always loved this guy (one of the few positive things to come out of my teenage obsession with ICP) but I discovered that a whole bunch of his albums are streaming on Spotify, which is absolutely great news because a ton of his early works contained a pile of uncleared sampling and are therefore seemingly forever confined to the “out of print” section of music industry hell….

‘Scuse the lack of posting guys and gals – it’s that time of year again where I fall off. Just had to drop in to share this post though; one of the most positive and uplifting records I’ve heard in a while. I’ve been craving fresh, new musical experiences lately in amongst flying about being mental-busy, and I’ve been journeying to musical realms that I’ve rarely touched up in the past. I heard of Emeralds…

Gangliocytoma is a drum machine grindcore project that mixes razor sharp guitar work with the muddy blurs of gorenoise and goregrind. Expect relentless drum machine barrages, endless guitar explosions and then on top of it all the signature goregrind watery bowels explusion. Despite the mile-a-second goregrind relentlessness, riffs are actually present and audible. Fancy that! It’s not a very long release, yet it’s only a demo so I wouldn’t expect hours of material. But hey,…

When I first heard of this reissue I was all like – Fuuuuuuuu-u-u-u-u-uck that shit. The price being charged for a copy of this remastered old demo was nothing short of total fucking extortion (kek). I think the fact that it took the almighty unit-shifting Cradle of Filth a month or two to sell the 666 vinyl copies of this album shows that I was not alone in this way of thinking. If a band…

What part of this release constitutes as ‘rock’ I’m not entirely sure, but Bong have got the ‘stoner’ part of the title 100% correct. Well, with a name like Bong would more would you expect? Such a simple yet fathomless name can only lend itself to a simple (in theory) yet fathomless (in practice) sound. Bong is music for those who aren’t afraid to sit tight and experience the long haul; the great build up,…

Well, this is… different. I’m aware of the influential impact that Suicide and Mr. Alan Vega have had on some of my favourite artists, so it was only fair that in time I go back even further and plumb those original depths. After a bit of research, and conversing among friends, I came to rest on Suicide’s debut album; a puzzling affair of cheap synths, almost early Lou Reed-like vocals and linear narrative and repetition…

Main is a band that was formed by two members of Loop, including Robert Hampson who was also in Godflesh for a little bit (he played on the Pure album). Main, to me, appears to be some sort of experimental industrial-tinged ambient project that places heavily effected guitar work into a world of noises and other creepy atmospheres. (2021 edit: G C Green of Godflesh also plays on this particular album) And that, essentially, is what…

Look, Sphere is one of my favourite Merzbow releases. Granted, I have in no way shape or form heard them all, but of the ones that I have heard, Sphere is high up there among the best. The three Sphere tracks are pulsing, blooping, bleeping harsh displays of spherical madness. I’m not entirely sure why the tracks were even broken up in the first place, but hey – what do I know. My favourite though…

Ah, good ol’ PLF. Is that Palestine Liberation Front? Pretty Little Flower? Princess Louise Fusiliers? Penguin Liberation Front? Parachute Landing Fall? Pulverizing Lethal Force? Phillip Lewis Fowler? Ha! According to an actual expert that I saw posting in the Youtube comments section (oh, ye exalted one!) the official story is that the band began as Pretty Little Flower, but are now known as Pulverizing Lethal Force. To be honest, they’ve always been known as PLF…

A call on a grindcore group on Facebook for female-front grindcore bands returned the usual list of suspects for someone too lazy to use a search engine, but nestled in that list were two bands I’d never heard of previously, so I guess I’m a bit of a twat for just knocking the Facebook post, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, one of those bands is Sockweb (I’ll get to the other in another…

This is the first time I’ve actually successfully sat through an entire Nadja album. They definitely made delivering kebabs and pizza an ethereal experience, I can say that much. Numbness is like many other releases in the sizeable Nadja catalogue; ridiculously fuzzy, enormously slow, miserable yet hopeful and just a little bit pretentious. Numbness offers (to me) nothing new; it is simply Nadja for Nadja’s sake. Depending on how much you like Nadja, you may…

This is probably one of the more bizarre things that I have bought recently. Cintecele Diavolui is an old alias / side project that was used by Mortiis in the mid/late 90s when he was deep into making mainly dark ambient synth and keyboard based music, or as he called it – Dark Dungeon Music. Cintecele Diavolui is a pretty cool name in my opinion. The phrase means “The Devil’s Songs” in Romanian, which is…

Lull is another Mick Harris project, one I believe that he worked on between Scorn releases back in the day. Lull takes pages from the book of Lustmord; extremely minimal yet puzzlingly fulfilling compositions of sound, often devoid of any noticeable instrumentation, pummelling you instead with lulling ambience (no pun intended) and claustrophobic barrages of atmosphere. Moments then, is the stifling ambient soundscape of choice for those with a short attention span. Instead of the…

I like Killing Joke and I like dub (be that dub reggae or the same remixing technique applied to other genres) but I’ve got to be in the mood for both, so there’s no surprise that I aurally inhaled this gargantuan release in one entire sitting. It took some doing as In Dub is 3 hours long, and contains several remixes of the same few songs. I’m not sure when I’ll actually ever come back…

The hype for hhis record has been unstoppable for the last few months, and rightly so, due to the solid consistency of quality albums that The Aphex Twin has churned out over his long and unusual career. On top of that, Syro is the first Aphex Twin release in 13 years, so to say this album had a lot to live up to would be a bit of an understatement. Luckily, Richard D. James has…

I’ve never really been into Voïvod. I even tried to witness the band play all of Dimension Hatröss at Roadburn Festival 2012, which is hosted in Tilburg’s 013, a venue with arguably the best sound in the world, and I still couldn’t get into it. I just don’t get it – is it thrash? Is it prog wankery? Is it a tired display of both? Phobos though, blew my fucking head off. It works better…

So I finally took the plunge and came around to dealing with this record. *Deep breath* After the absolute stink-fest of Savior Sorrow and the suicide-inducing snooze-fest of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, I had all but given up hope on Mushroomhead. Then I heard J Mann would be guesting on the latest record. And then I heard that the plan to collaborate had been scrapped and J Mann had returned permanently. Fuck! And then,…

It sometimes seems a bit detrimental to do reviews on albums that are really old, but as I trawl through covering a little bit about every piece of music in my collection (yes, that’s still an aim of Lines In Wax, despite the recent abolition of reviewing individual formats) it becomes an inevitability. A lot of people can take or leave Korn. In fact, I know tons of people who absolutely hate Korn. But, this…

Out of all the early Mortiis ambient keyboard pieces, The Song Of A Long Forgotten Ghost is probably the one that I am least familiar with, which is a crying shame because it’s a truly beautiful piece of music. Sometimes I wish I had the patience to put something like this together but I have to accept that I just can’t play the piano, organ, synth or what-have-you without any practice or training haha Early…

Archagathus are currently one of my favourite things at the moment, especially as I gear up for catching them on their European tour with the equally fucking amazing Six Brew Bantha. You could say that Archagathus came up on this whole mince-gore crossover trend that’s going on, but if Dehumanizer shows us anything, it’s that the band have converged these two genres from opposite ends of the spectrum (as far as grind is concerned, at…

The boys in Magrudergrind seem to always catch an awful lot of flak for “selling out”, perhaps more so than any band that’s done this Scion A/V shit. I’m not gonna go into the bands dodgy appearance on a crappy TV show, I’m focussing entirely on the Scion thing here. I don’t understand why I never hear anybody slagging off Wormrot for doing the same thing? Wormrot’s Noise EP is up on some revered grind-pedestal,…

Akercocke’s fourth album was by far their most experimental. Following up the absolutely monstrous and enormous epic that was Leviathan could have been no easy task for these distinguished English gentlemen. In my opinion, Words that go unspoken… is nowhere near as brutal as the exquisite aural punishment of Leviathan, but the band definitely followed through by evolving in incredible leaps into something far more sprawling, technical and genre-bending. Where Leviathan had that the “oomph”…

20 songs on a 5″ record? That’s exactly what I’m talking about, ladies and gentlemen! Hummingbird of Death have always been known to bring the high-powered, super-fast grindcore (or powerviolence, if you’re a hardcore kid), but this shy-of-4-minutes monster is just something else. Discounting the last track, which takes up the entirety of side B, each song is a microburst of super-thrashy speedy goodness. This isn’t as polished as more familiar material (like the classic…

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…

Donno what the fuck is going on here…wow! It’s like Aborym decided to do cybergrind and then do a collab with 7MON and Merzbow. When the longest track is 25 seconds long, and the entire EP a mere 10 songs in length, you know that what Incest has in store for you has just got to be painful. And it is. Sample-heavy drum machine grindcore mashes devastatingly with chunks of harsh noise and power electronics….

Now this is really nice – imagine combining the sounds of gabba techno drum programming (but slowed down a touch) with the random ambience of early Warp Records electronic music like The Aphex Twin. It’s kinda like a drum’n’bassy Venetian Snares making sweet, sweet love to Optimus Prime, at varying BPM. “Time Is A Disease” is a beast of an opener, with moody synths and epic piano lines, before it bursts this EP open with…

For me, Shpongle is the perfect music for the expansion of mind, body and soul; the perfect background noise for the ingestion of opiates, fungal hallucinogenics and dimethyltryptamine. However, even though I don’t sit around fires chugging bowls of ayahuasca that often, I do feel that sometimes I am halfway there, thanks to Shpongle’s ethereal “psytrance” (yes, that’s a real genre) and its ability to take me other worlds. Museum Of Consciousness is apparently the…

It’s ridiculous to expect originality in a genre as limiting as slam. The name ‘slam’ itself is daft, but it signifies a slightly more slower, groovier approach to the death metal template. I personally welcome a ‘slam’ record now and then because it really breaks it up for me as far as death metal is concerned; sometimes I can just get really tired of super-super-fast death metal, and it’s always nice to slow down and…

“Fight Music” is probably one of my favourite singles off the D12 album Devil’s Night, as it incorporates a much harder edge to it. When I was a wee lad the rockier guitar parts of this track helped me get into D12, and whilst it turned out that a majority of their songs don’t actually sound like this, it helped plant the seed, and after the strength of the “Purple Pills” (or “Hills”, as I…

Boy am I glad I bought this cheeky little 10″ when I did (edit: I’ve now traded it for a copy of Swans’ Filth). Due to Blues Pills’ ever-blossoming popularity this original 4-track EP is now worth a bloody fortune (for a 10″). The difference between Blues Pills and a gazillion other “revival”, “retro” or (dare I say it) “occult rock” acts (that phrase makes me physically sick) is that when Blues Pills first showed…

RazorRape are a Swedish groovy goregrind band that have been going since 2004. This 2013 EP is a short but sweet journey through some twisted tunes of gory love. Boasting a chunky but honest production job, SSS is a heavy-hitting record, mixing chugging slams and beatdowns with polka-style rhythms and blasting goregrind. The track “Drillbit Defloration” (what a title) is pure CBT-worship through and through, with an absolute massive riff and grooving mid-section. My only…

Reekorrhoea is a project of Hyperemesis’ Andy Ringdahl, focussing more on old-school horror movie themes as subject matter rather than all-out gore. It’s still mincecore-infused goregrind goodness, however, so I love it! Imagine LDOH meets Agathocles at a Tumour gig and you’re along the right lines here. The five tracks aren’t particularly long but they don’t need to be, this shit gets in, fucking gets on with it, and then fucks off. The guitars are…

Nice! What a fucking nihilistic recording this is! I believe Urine Cop was originally a collaboration between members of Winters In Osaka and ex-LDOH vocalist Erwin De Groot, but there’s no trademark De Groot pitchshifter howls on this nine and a half minute window into hell. All that can be heard is noise, and drums. Well, some semblance of drums. It just sounds like a flurry of cymbals, as if a drum track has been…

I would probably have never listened to Portishead if it wasn’t for the fact that their first two albums were already on my old computer when I bought it, back in 2009. They always seemed like something my mother would listen to, what with their shit band name and music video circulations on the Sky ClassicFM music channel. It wasn’t until my appreciation for electronic music developed to such a degree that I could hear…

I keep forgetting how much I love this album. Waking The Cadaver seems to be a household name in terrible music, and mentioning to almost any metalhead that you like them usually results in laughs, but for anyone who actually listened a bit further than that Shredded Wheat song (“Chased Through The Woods By A Rapist” is the correct title, which is much more grim) would have discovered an absolute gem of a metal record….

Led By Lions are a band that are fairly local to me, with members hailing from several areas of South Wales. This band was born from the ashes of long-running metal-meets-pop-punk group Man Of The Hour, who have been flogging the local circuit in various guises since 2007, so A Long Time Coming has been, well…a long time coming, really. Led By Lions is essentially the final incarnation of Man Of The Hour, with the…

The recent (edit: a year and a half ago! Fuuuuuck) Bongripper and Conan UK tour lived up to all my expectations in total sonic annihilation, and this tie-in Split 12″ is a great little reminder of the cacophony the duo made together. On the 12″ we get more of the same from Bongripper, which isn’t a bad thing I assure you. I simply cannot think of anything more to say other than it really is awesome as…

Holy shit this is some chilled out stuff. I’m not talking dubby or ambient or anything, just nice and laid back rock’n’roll with easy, soft vocals and a purring bassline. I would never have bought this myself, mainly because I have never heard of Dave Stewart before; it was a gift from my old man (as the Americans say), who sometimes randomly sends a record my way, which is awfully kind of him. Apparently on…

To me, mid-to-late 2000s Napalm Death releases seem to follow a certain pattern. Each of the records share a similar cover art style, perpetuated by a specific colourising which is different on each record. Order Of The Leech was yellow, this record was red, and Smear Campaign was blue. Leaders Not Followers 2 and Time Waits For No Slave also shared similar artwork to the three mentioned above and even had similar traits in production….

To me, We Are Him is the “heaviest” of all the Angels Of Light material, for lack of a better way of describing it. In hindsight, their final album was a precursor to the reformation of Swans in 2010. It mashes together the usual artsy, folky vibes of earlier Angels stuff with heavy bass lines and thumping percussion attacks. Listening to the first ten seconds of “Goodbye Mary Lou” is enough to cement that We…

This is a classic of the Myspace days, recently revisited by myself as it’s now been uploaded to Torn Flesh Records’ first Bandcamp page (they have four Bandcamps (is that a word? lol) loaded to the gills with all sorts of crazy shit). The world of Crowbar Abortion is a strange one: dancable beats and random electronics mash somewhat excellently with flat-out drum machine grindcore, raspy, distorted vocals and shredding guitar solos (yes!). Don’t let…

I’ve had this album for years, and I can’t remember where I got it from. Anyways, I got it and was expecting some nasty goregrind but instead was met with some metallic punk sound so I fucked it off and forgot that I had it. It wasn’t until I saw Malignant Tumour live in Obscene Extreme Festival 2013 that I remembered I had this 12″; Gumpy said something about really enjoying them and wanting to…

Ah…harsh noise; if there was ever a genre of ‘music’ where it is hard to remain original. I love watching noise artists perform live, but listening to harsh noise in the home (asides from the ‘big’ names) isn’t something that I do very often. This is primarily because 1.) if you have a torrent for every single Merzbow release, you’re pretty much set for life in the noise game and 2.) the internet has caused…

I’ve heard the name Tom Waits tossed around for absolutely yonks, but I never got around to actually hearing the guy properly until I really got into HBO’s The Wire, where his song “Way Down In The Hole” was used as the theme song for every single season. The song appeared in five different guises by five different artists, one for each season, with the Waits version itself oddly appearing second on season two. Logically,…

(2021 Edit: did anyone notice in my re-upload of this post from Blogger I’ve now used the South Korea digipak cover where the title is spelt wrong? LOL) I love absolutely any band that can keep death metal especially fresh and vibrant, without becoming too gimmicky. Nile have a hit and miss discography, in my opinion, but 2005’s Annihilation of the Wicked on Relapse Records is a monolithically heavy recording of blasting ancient Egyptian brutality….

Wow! Now isn’t the name of this band a mouthful? It’s almost as thick and penetrating (that’s what she said!) as their ultra-chunky death metal / goregrind crossover sound. Austria’s VxPxOxAxAxWxAxMxC pack one hell of a groovy punch, something that is completely evident on this sick little split CD. Boasting one of the nastiest programmed snare sounds ever, the band chug and groove through 4 apotemnophiliac hymns of gargling gore destruction, my favourites being “Baptized…

This is a sticky-labelled 12″ that I bought 2nd hand when I was experimenting with scratching back in the day (lol). I’d gotten a Ministry of Sound deck for Christmas and I needed some 90s-to-the-max shit to scratch and test pitch correction / matching on. As expected, I failed triumphantly at this shit and gave it up pretty quickly, although I did find it fun to scratch random records now and then, something which I…

Whilst this is entirely on the other end of the industrial metal spectrum that I prefer not to get too close to, The Grudge was one of favourite records as a teenager. Over the last few years I have learned that there is a lot more to industrial than crappy guitars layered with crappy dance music and ripping off old Nine Inch Nails tracks, but that’s another story. Mortiis’ first Era 3 release was a…

This is one of the more ‘brutal’ Misfits releases. If anything, it is the fastest, grimiest (studio) recording the band have done. Even the cover art alone is something more crust/grind-looking, although it was released a while before those genres really came into their own. This spins at 33rpm, which is surprising considering how short it is, I was expecting it to be a 45. Still though, Earth A.D. / Wolfs Blood is a short…