Thrill Jockey Back in March of this year, Sumac unleashed “Rigid Man” on to YouTube as a taster of what was to come from their new album What One Becomes. Personally, I was very excited indeed, so excited in fact that while listening to the song on headphones on a packed train pulling out of London, I didn’t realise that this utter racket was also being played full […]
James Barry
11 posts
Cold Spring Right, it seems there must be two Andy Swans. There’s the Andy Swan who heads up Iroha, one of the UK’s most underrated “massive hooks with massive riffs” bands. Then there’s the Andy Swan in Khost – an outfit where melody isn’t part of the deal and crushing slabs of claustrophobia are the order of the day here. Copper Lock Hell is a brutal, brutal record. […]
Corsica Studios, London 9 August 2012 As I walk in, a crazy man is on stage, pumping out some lovely squelchy bass sounds from a laptop which are instantly recognisable, thanks in part to his wonderfully overwrought vocals, as Black Sabbath‘s “Black Sabbath” (from the album Black Sabbath). And then it gets stranger and sillier from there, for this crazy man, it transpires, is Glatze, self-styled “musician and […]
Earache A-side – “You suffer…” FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute. This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better […]
Southern Lord Oh, Balaclava…can you come into the study for a minute? How are you? Seems like we never talk any more these days! Look…ahem…well. Your mother and I are worried about you. No, look, hear me out. You’re not in trouble, I just wanted to chat, y’know…man to man. And, you really are growing into a man now. It seems long since you were running around the […]
Neurot Do you know where’s an interesting place to listen to this record? A chain coffee shop, in London’s Square Mile, at 8:15 on a Wednesday morning. , off to do important and responsible things. I suspect none of them are listening to Neurosis as they dodge buses on their Boris Bikes – Neurosis don’t lend themselves to this sort of urban drudgery. Not that there isn’t an […]
Southern Lord It’s time someone finally said it; Ben Koller is quite possibly the Dave Lombardo of his generation. Now, Lombardo’s technicality may be outclassed by modern day metal standards, but what few drummers can match still is his propulsive feel. Koller is one of the special few. When he flies into an up-tempo 4/4 beat, you know it’s going down. And he absolutely tears it up on […]
Ipecac This is an odd record. The Book Of Knots is an invitation-only collective based in New York around a core quartet and supplemented by peripheral musicians in various capacities. On this, their third LP, they explore everything from enormous metallic pounding to expansive forays into the gentle and sublime. They also manage to dig up a few top-notch guests along the way. Opener “Microgravity” brings a female-fronted […]
Southern Lord Xibalba are unhappy. You have invaded their space and their response is twelve tracks of letting you know just how much this has aggrieved them. This is music for pissed off, heavy-set men in their late thirties. . They make bands of a similar ilk, such as Hatebreed (to pick a name entirely at random), look like pansies. Xibalba would not have a video that features […]
Southern Lord This album marks German three-piece Planks’ first CD release and brings together their two previous 12” records; last year’s The Darkest of Grays full-length and 2011’s Solicit To Fall EP. The two were recorded so close to each other that they join rather seamlessly into an epic hour of darkness and, occasionally, light. Planks cover so much ground it’s almost pointless trying to classify them. Yes […]
Further The latest album from Neil Mortimer is pretty ambitious. It’s a single track ‘concerned with cyclic patterns in nature while charting the movement of a weather system across southwest England’. Make of that what you will, but through the combination of guitars, synths, drums and field recordings he’s managed to get pretty close to his subject matter. Drums represent thunder and cymbals lightning. . And why stop […]