Riot Season Serious noise rock from Belgium, the third album from Ultraphallus and their UK début on Riot Season. Where do I start? With a name like Ultraphallus am I serious? And what a name it is! Its the mother of all names to trip up spam filters. Sowberry Hagan was recorded over four days in a farm in Liege, but you wouldn’t guess at such folkish origins. […]
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Ipecac The Bride Screamed Murder is superb. Not at all what I expected, but sees the Melvins in fine form. A Senile Animal (2006) and Nude With Boots (2008) saw the Melvins gelling as a tight four piece unit, with Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover playing alongside Big Business’ Coady Willis and Jared Warren. Now I love both these albums, and I would have welcomed a third helping. […]
Thrill Jockey Wow, this is a really different kind of Trans Am album. But wow in general, too, it’s also a pretty fucking great album. The first thing that struck me about Thing was its soundtrack-like quality. At points it is more like a vision of Blade Runner rather than the electro rock we know and love from Trans Am. Thing began life as project for a sci-fi […]
Thrill Jockey Lazer Crystal come from Chicago and this is their first full release. The title MCMLXXX is a real declaration of intent, or at least a real advert to the albums contents. And it is, but at the same time it isn’t. I’ve heard many bands that are really stuck in the 70s or 80s to the point of sounding like a stale copy. Lazer Crystal aren’t […]
Earache Canadian speed merchants Annihilator have really gone back to their roots for this outing, and it is going back a fair bit. Annihilator is their thirteenth studio album since 1989’s début Alice in Hell. They’ve undergone numerous line up changes over the years with guitarist, and these days also vocalist, Jeff Waters remaining the sole original member of the band. For all the years and changing line […]
Earache Wow, they don’t make em like this any more. What am I talking about, this is how they make em these days. Its like Nirvana and grunge never happened. White Wizzard, along with fellow Earache stable mates [post=cauldron-chained-nite text=”Cauldron”], are part of what sounds like a NWOBHM/hair metal revival. White Wizzard give us speedy riffs, powerful melodic vocals, and big anthemic sing along choruses … if you […]
Thrill Jockey Trans Am‘s blend of rock/electro comes to the stage with live album What Day Is It Tonight? Many lesser bands wouldn’t be able to pull this kind of fusion off. Synthpop and hard driving rock are seemingly chalk and cheese. Lesser bands might have troubles, but this is what Trans Am do and they do it like fucking champs (and indeed sometimes alongside The Fucking Champs). […]
Fysisk Format There’s a lot to like about Necropsalms, Obliteration‘s second album, unless you don’t like doomy death metal that is. But, of course, everyone likes death metal. Obliteration hail from Kolbotn in Norway, that’s the home of Darkthrone amongst other bands. Their first album was released on Tyrant Syndicate, the sub-label of Peaceville run by Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto. So you’d be forgiven for thinking Necropsalms was a […]
Thrill Jockey I wasn’t expecting Super Roots 10 to sound like this, which is what I have come to expect from the Boredoms and the Super Roots series. Super Roots 10 contains “Ant 10” and three remixes of it, and lives up to the impressive legacy Super Roots lays down. “Ant 10” itself continues the Boredoms’ recent love of tribal druming. Beginning with chanting, it then moves into […]
Earache This takes me back. Sometimes innovations can be pinned down to very specific musical moments. In the same way that Eddie Van Halen‘s tapping on “Eruption” spawned a legion of followers, Mick Harris‘ death blasts on “Scum” set the pace and tone of metal drumming for decades to follow. Its hard to overstate the impact of “Scum” and late 80s UK hardcore. Suddenly everyone was listening to […]
Earache This isn’t what I’d expect from Earache at all. Cauldron are a “traditional” metal outfit from Canada. Not a hint of Grind Madness here. Maybe Cauldron are a sound of things to come. Growling and evil has dominated metal for quite some time now. Yeah it can be great fun, but its a little one dimensional isn’t it? And hey making devil horns and growls is quite […]
Ipecac Unlike a lot of remix albums where an artist gets a song to work with, the artists on Chicken Switch were given whole Melvins albums to work with. So each track is a remix of a whole album. The Melvins chose experimental electronic artists for Chicken Switch, with such names as Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Kawabata Makoto and Speedranch getting involved. The result is a pretty extreme […]
Label: Sonic360 Format: CD;CDS/12″/Digital Download Mockery is the breathtaking début album from Littl Shyning Man, a.k.a. Christopher Haworth, which was originally released in 2005. To me it struck a chord with Mothlite‘s The Flax of Reverie – a huge symphonic sweeping spectrum of style: a mixture of electronics and instruments, frantic modernist string pieces, vocal harmonies, spoken word, raw buzzing noise, drum and bass joins folk in a […]
Label: Rise Above Format: CD,LP Flute-tinged witch rock debut from Toronto’s Blood Ceremony. These days a lot of metal bands head straight for the big Black Sabbath riff, slow it down, and just stay there. However, I don’t think Blood Ceremony are too interested in what lots of metal bands are doing these days. They look back to the era of bands such as Coven, Affinity, and Black […]
Label: TeePee Format: CD,2LP Earthless rock. Earthless know that rock isn’t found in the middle of the verse or tucked away politely in the corner of a chorus. Earthless know that rock is huge tube driven distorted excess. And that’s exactly what they did at Roadburn. One and a half hours of primal solo and riff on the main stage of the Roadburn festival. It wasn’t a gig they […]
The End Skin Turns to Glass is epic stuff, I love it. Huge shoegazer doom from Toronto-based duo Nadja, who began as a solo project of Aidan Baker. In 2005 Leah Buckareff joined him allowing them to leave the studio and go live, though this album was originally released in 2003 in a slightly different version with Buckareff on bass and vocals. Between them they make a sound […]
Label: Southern Lord Format: CD,2LP Boris love to surprise, and the opener “Flower Sun Rain” does just that. They go straight for Jpop in the form of a cover of a PYG song. My surprise came at All Tomorrow’s Parties seeing Earth, Boris, then SunnO))) and, reasonably enough, expecting a good wall to wall evening of drone and just not getting it: country doom, ballads, and on stage […]
Southern Lord The progression from early Earth to modern Earth makes perfect sense, to me at least. Behind the change from dirty droning guitars to country doom, Earth retain a distinctive quality. The sound has changed, and the lineup has changed around Dylan Carlson, but the quality remains: a slow slow moving riff looping round and round, seemingly going nowhere, and catching you out when you start to […]