Eight years on from You Will Never Be One of Us, Californian Powerviolence four-piece Nails return with their fourth full-length, Every Bridge Burning (Nuclear Blast Records), evidently intent on doing some damage.
17 minutes across 10 tracks might seem like a short run time for an album, but when the music is born out of the 100mph of Hardcore intensity, you don’t really need 30 tracks to get a full meal. And here, whether it takes three minutes, two minutes, or 38 seconds, Nails will use each track to come steaming at you full tilt, with one blast of malevolent aggression after another.
Guitarist and vocalist Todd Jones describes the band’s intention to give the listener the feeling of being smacked in the face. How apt. Recorded with Kurt Ballou (of Converge), this safe pair of hands helps the band to deliver a level of sonic intensity that does justice to these rabid tracks.
Musically the album is a relentless battery of all the extreme drumming you could reasonably wish for (infusing elements like Thrash, D-beat, Hardcore, and Grindcore). The bass sits as a massive, thick mass. The guitars rail away furiously as though fighting their way to the front of the mix, while Jones froths at the mouth like a demon with a red-hot poker in his eye.
Impressive is how the band can take their briefest tracks, like opener “Imposing Will”, “Punishment Map” and “Trapped” and jam so much into them — not just energy and fury, but riffs, drum rolls, breaks, and often 20 seconds or so of a slamming headbanging riff right at the end.
There is no messing about here with unnecessary interludes or buildup. Every second of Every Bridge Burning is used for the function of delivering those sonic slaps to the face. For the uninitiated in Hardcore or Extreme Metal, this would probably all sound like a hellish noise. For fans of extreme and aggressive music, however, you can feast on the variety contained within precise explosions of madness.
“Give Me The Painkiller” has a kind of eighties Metallica feel, with a galloping rhythm and even some guitar soloing thrown in. “I Can’t Turn It Off” could almost make you wonder if you’re listening to Motörhead for a moment before the deranged vocal tones of Jones kick in.
The biggest shift though comes right at the end with “No More Rivers to Cross”, where the band slows things down, with a kind of Sludge Metal feel and a demonic guitar line that sounds as though it could be out of the Slayer playbook.
All of these different elements and apparent influences are fused together though in a way that feels very much like one, coherent beast. That beast is Nails and they’ve just punched a hole through your wall.
Buy the album here:
https://shop.nuclearblast.com/products/nails-every-bridge-burning-pre-order
8 / 10
TOM OSMAN
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