Getting their name from a character in an 1880 Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov, Stinking Lizaveta formed in 1994 in Philadelphia and are comprised of Yanni Papadopoulos – guitar, Alexi Papadopoulos – upright electric bass, and drummer Cheshire Agusta.
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Canadian Folk-Punks Truck Violence built a great deal of buzz with their 2024 debut, and their sophomore release, The Weathervane is my body (The Flenser), finds them scaling back some of the backwoods folk that colored their first album and digging deeper into the Noise Rock side of the equation. This brings a more angular dissonance to the songs. The vocals are a mix of moans and howls over the boozy attack of guitar with a precise ugliness to create something beautiful. Some of these moments might not be as overtly metal as a band like Chat Pile, though this album would appeal to the less metal-minded members of their fan base. It is a different shade of the dark corners of an unsettled mind through a more pastoral lens. Continue reading
Converge worked overtime on their last trip to the studio, resulting in two albums. The first was released back in February, and now the second of those, The Hum Of Hurt (Epitaph Records), is dropping. The buzz going into this album was that it was their Noise Rock album. And even Jacob Bannon admits that it is not a mark they hit. The opening track finds their feral speed dialed down a bit, but it is pretty metallic otherwise, just more deliberate and not as chaotic. Bannon’s vocals are not as snarled on “Doom In Bloom,” which is where the biggest change on this album lies in his more Punk-like vocal approach, replacing a great deal of his normal larynx-shredding approach.