Tool’s bassist Justin Chancellor and Polish Alt-Metal outfit Sweet Noise’s frontman Peter Mohamed first met at a European music festival. A shared desire to collaborate in some way or another finally came to fruition in 2013 with MTVoid’s first album, Nothing’s Matter. Now ten years on the pair release their follow up, Matter’s Knot, Pt.1 (Lobal Orning).
Normally I defend how anger is not the only emotion found in heavy music, but the new Harm’s Way album, Common Suffering (Metal Blade) is full-force rage, so strap on a helmet and get ready to fall into madness. Through the years, the Chicago-based band has really hit their stride with an even mixture of death metal and hardcore punk, bonded together by industrial blasts.Continue reading
The hope for a band to “return to their roots” is a phrase that has been thrown around so much in modern music, it has begun to lose its meaning. As with the roots of a tree, a band’s roots are always there, securing the foundation of their sound, no matter how many different directions it may branch out into.
Disharmonium – Nahal (Debemur Morti Productions) is the sixteenth full-length release from Blut Aus Nord, the enigmatic French avant-garde black metal band that have now existed for thirty years. Following on from last year’s Disharmonium – Undreamable Abysses, this new record also draws inspiration from H.P Lovecraft and is claimed by its accompanying press release to be “womb-like, detail-rich, disturbed and transformative”.
When an album features Al Di Meola, Trevor Rabin, Vernon Reid, Joe Satriani, and Marty Friedman you know it’s going to be a corker. To make this reviewer squeeze with joy is that Outlanders is actually Tarja Turunen. Tarja is accompanied by Torsten Stenzel.
Over the last few years, we have been lucky to see so many collaboration albums between two bands/artists that absolutely knock it out of the park. The latest mashup comes in the form of Boris and Uniform putting together what they call, Bright New Disease (Sacred Bones). Through nine tracks at just over thirty-two minutes, each track has its own footprint for the greater collection. Punk, industrial, thrash, doom, and noise pop up throughout the record but not one influence really ever takes the spotlight more than another.
Pupil Slicer announced themselves in style with a sea of aggression, when their debut album Mirrors landed in 2021, and they immediately found themselves at home in the UKs thriving post-pandemic underground Metal scene, which saw them hitting the road the following year on a salivating and high-profile tour with Rolo Tomassi and Heriot. Mirrors was an accomplished debut performance of relentless raw energy and anger, with Pupil Slicer hinting at their full potential on the album’s final song ‘Collective Unconscious’, which was deeper and slower in pace, showing a maturity in their song-writing that extended beyond the abrasive math/deathcore on the rest of the record.
For reasons well documented that we are not going to touch on here, notverynicecream (Hassle Records) the sophomore record from Bristolian avant-garde noise merchants Phoxjaw, finally sees the light of day some six months after first scheduled. And focusing solely on the music, is this a record that was worth the wait? In a nutshell … Yes!
When I was young and brash and had two working knees, I used to visit the high street in Camden, London. Me and my mates would dance ourselves into oblivion at the Electric Ballroom, take the night bus home, hit a Tescos for sausage rolls, and eat them right out the package – cold, before returning to Surrey Quays just before the sun rose.
Those were the times!
Sometimes as a metalhead or underground fan it is easy to forget that not everyone knows what you mean when you describe things in ever smaller concentric circles of references, sub-genres or in-jokes. It seems totally clear to me what I mean when I say that Elvenking‘s ‘Silence de Mort’ sounds like if Megadeth had colorful power melodic hooks and a singer who wasn’t such a born-again know it all douche, but some folks might stare blankly at that description and blink at oncoming traffic.
