Respect where it is due. Heavy metal titan, political activist hero and System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian has yet to offer up a project or product unworthy of the intense and continued attention of those who love music, love the world around them and care deeply about the overt inadequacies of those entrusted with its protection and future.
Remixes and collaborations, and the concept that the growth and life and mutations and splices and impositions to a song don’t stop once it has been committed to a released format, have become so ingrained and integral to HEALTH that their reworkings of songs are as patiently awaited as the origin pieces.Continue reading
GosT has, since 2013, been the vehicle for producer and singer James Lollar. Loosely fitting into the synthwave bracket, GosT’s music in fact takes influence from many areas including post-punk, industrial and black metal. Moreover, Lollar has regularly shared stages with metal bands including Pig Destroyer, The Black Dahlia Murder and Mayhem, as well as fellow synthwave acts such as Perturbator and Carpenter Brut.
Viking Metal started out by combining the epic energy of Black Metal with the mystical grace of Folk music. Enslaved is a band at the pinnacle of this heavy, Nordic sound. Starting out as teenagers, this Norweigian act has successively enhanced the Scandinavian metal scene for nearly thirty years. Their beginnings were more in the realm of the extreme, but over time Enslaved has not been afraid to dip into other genres like Prog Rock and Jazz. It’s encouraging to witness their ability to be undaunted by their explorations while still being true to their Viking roots. Their new fifteenth full-length album, Utgard (Nuclear Blast) verifies their astute ambition of experimentmentation and expression.
Wraith sees London-based post-electronic pioneers Teeth Of The Sea taking a step away from the noise inflected menace of their earlier work following the departure of Mat Colegate after 2015’s Highly Deadly Black Tarantula (both Rocket Records). Yet their latest outing feels like the answer to a challenge, of sorts. In its absence, the progressive, playfully experimental composition style (paired with an often unapologetically wry approach to theme) brings to the fore the bands inherently theatrical bent. The result is something akin to the lost soundtrack to a late 90s Indie, cyber-Punk thriller.Continue reading
Supergroup is a term bandied about too much these days, including here at this very website. It’s hard to help it in the streaming music age, which coincidently has also fostered a new openness and freedom for artists to come together as never before. Perhaps we need another terminology to describe these collectives. How about “artistic hive-mind”? That’s one that definitely suits The Black Queen, who is more than a mere musical group, but carry these sensibilities in everything they do from songs and lyrics to album art, videos, t-shirts, and visual performances live. The sum of their recorded output is but one facet of what can be possible when they get together.
There comes a point, it seems, for a lot of bands where they decide to go in a direction that would seem directly opposed to their core sound, or sound with which they are most associated with. Now, and this will not turn into a witch hunt or anything, but these creative directions often split fan bases and in turn lead to a lot of anger, comment, though in balance, often also acclaim. At one such crossroads are Aussie metalcore band The Amity Affliction, and their sixth album Misery (Roadrunner).Continue reading
It’s a cruel irony that, for music which is such a personal and unrestrained expression, so much Noise sounds interchangeable. By forcing the player to respond to orthodox patterns, traditional instruments make it much easier to develop a singular “voice” – by making and manipulating their own sounds out of nothing, Noise artists ironically often end up sounding the same as each other.Continue reading
A collaborative effort between two or more bands is not an unheard of concept, especially within our world’s more avant garde entities, from the sublime – Scott Walker and Sunn O))) – to the not so good (Metallica and Lou Reed just to open a can of worms). Experimental extremists The Body are certainly no strangers to such work, with their previous collaborations with the likes of Thou and this release with black metallers Krieg (At A Loss).
The first thing to note is how dissonant and visceral this release is. As with their previous joint works, The Body choose to bolster the white rage intensity of Krieg, building on a distinctly metal record with their dark traits. Rather than the more distinctive black metal blast beats however, this is much more electronic based, programmed beats, high pitched frequencies and feedback and a bulldozing pace, albeit with Neill Jameson’s piercing growls and shrieks on top.
This clash of raw black metal and the mechanized and programmed beats match up so well in what is an equally horrifying, dizzying and hypnotic effort, while Jameson’s vocals add an even weightier punch of pure terror as this conveys the absolute epitome of dismay and filth.
This is extreme metal crawling to its warped and perverse limits, dragging it kicking and screaming to the future.
8.0/10
CHRIS TIPPELL
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I’m going to do something that bugs the crap out of me in music writing and break one of my own unwritten rules. I’m going to talk about myself. I hope by the time you get to the end of the review you’ll see why.
I fucking hate remix albums. Can’t be fucking arsed, and I’ve only properly ever bothered with three of them, of which two I actually like (go figure) – Linkin Park’s ‘Reanimation’ and Die Krupps’ II – The Final Remixes, though the third, Remanufacture can bog right off. I don’t particularly “do” or care for dancey or electronic music, and I don’t really have the frame of references, so I’m not going to patronise you, or myself, by guessing or pretending to have more than a superficial understanding of the styles of music these tunes have been adapted to.
OK, stepping back behind the fourth wall and sitting back down… One of the (other) unwritten rules some smart arses love to pedal is that it truly shows that a song is a genuinely good one if you can rip it from its original trappings and endowments and present it in a different, usually barer format and it still stand true. So, all that bollocks said, and it comes down to this; The Mindsweep: Hospitalised don’t ‘alf prove them smart arses right. While The Mindsweep¸ a cracking album, is the better version, the new presentations, for the most part stripping the vitriol of the origin and refracting the tunes, do showcase the quality songwriters Enter Shikari have developed into.
Following the original tracklist, first track ‘The Appeal and The Mindsweep I’ (Metrik), with guitars replaced, and with beats tricky, works superbly to ease the mind into accepting the styles incoming. Other highlights include, ‘The Anaesthetist’, the original albums’ tribute to The Prodigy, is spread out by Reso, now running through treacle, and becomes a warped spiral of a jogging on a treadmill tinnitus breakout, ‘Never Let Go Of The Microscope’ (Etherwood) grimes and judders and Hugh Hardie’s remix of ‘Torn Apart’ plays with the pop-epica of the original, nodding its way through to the end with an understated smile. ‘The Bank of England’ (Lynx) and ‘There’s A Price On Your Head’ (Danny Byrd) casually saunter, teaming up with a subtle ‘Dear Future Historians’ (London Elektricity) as a reflective, effective trio late on in the album, though perhaps the Erised remix of ‘Interlude’ is the best reinterpretation, bringing in a cool female vocal and working the basics into a whole new song.
The Mindsweep: Hospitalised sees artists from Shikari’s label, Hospital Records, rework their newest album, and while the quality and allure vary, it is actually a probing and stimulating release that further enhances the reputation of its originators as a group that has grown into a set of songwriters par excellence, and sees this curio as a valid sister release to the original.
So… guess that makes it three I can be bothered with, then.
7.5/10
STEVE TOVEY