Despite having released a host of material since its 2012 inception, Glamorgan trio Tides Of Sulfur has issued just one album, the coruscating Extinction Curse (Self-Released) in 2016. New EP Paralysis Of Reason (Sludgelord Records / APF Records / Astral Noize) is the first thing to come from the band since that album, and in that time the ripping hostility has become even more twisted.

There’s a squally Punk element to opener ‘Worms’, but skillful changes of pace from all three members displays inventiveness. The darker ‘Humourless Cunt’, whilst verbally more trivial, lends a Blackened Death edge to that muscular template which strengthens the expected weight.

It’s a rhythm-heavy carcass which almost hides the puerile thuggery of the lyrics, but sadly not enough. The gratuitous insults, which the track’s title alludes to, are the kind of things you’d expect to hear during a coming together of West Ham and Millwall football fans, and it has a hugely negative effect on any quality the music possesses. The elasticity of the riff and bass firing through the ensuing ‘DLMM’ is accompanied by frenetic drumming and lead squeals, descending into a crushing groove-laden monstrosity that the trio would do well to focus on.

The Hardcore intensity of ‘Pariah’ is a banging frolic through isolation and shows a fire which displays experience of the subject matter: while the closing title track is a levelling mass of anarchic hatred featuring Margaret Thatcher’s acceptance speech of 1979, the sound twisting it to display a Socialist solidarity. Political and furious, this EP should nevertheless exhibit much more intrinsic maturity than it does and, despite sporadically entertaining with its resonant power, Tides Of Sulfur are worth more than this occasionally childish and derivative diatribe.

5 / 10

PAUL QUINN