Obituary recently announced that they would be releasing a special two-song single containing a pair of brand new studio tracks, plus a bonus live set of twelve classics and fan favorites from the band’s storied catalog. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Loathe
Loathe – Prepare Consume Proceed
Prepare Consume Proceed (SharpTone Records) is the latest EP from Liverpool UK’s Loathe. But it’s not really the latest as it’s a reissue of an EP of the same name that was released, brace yourselves, October of last year. Better yet, if you lose all the filler interlude bullshit and intro track you’re only really left with four songs or just shy of 16 minutes of music.
I’m assuming the decision to reissue Prepare Consume Proceed so hastily was because it would function as SharpTone Record’s coming out party. Yes, this EP serves as the tip of the spear for a label that was officially launched less than a month ago. The brainchild of Nuclear Blast CEO Markus Staiger and former Sumerian Records vice-president Shawn Keith, SharpTone was rolled out to the motto of: “A new era of music begins…” With a roster including such luminaries as Attila, We Came as Romans, and World War Me all SharpTone looks and sounds like to me is Sumerian Lite. It’s what crawled out of the Van’s Warped Tour primordial ooze.
But label confusion aside, I am tasked with reviewing this EP. It’s worth mentioning that I walked in totally cold as Loathe’s website and social media pages are more devoid of useful information than a Fox News broadcast. But if you must know the band is comprised of members with names such as, I shit you not, DRT, SNK, MWL, NIL and frontman DRK.
So we didn’t start on the right foot, but hey, I’ve still got the music. The artwork and logos recall Unsane and Godflesh’s astethic rather than anything else on their label, but push play and what you get is an amalgamation of Structures djent and Suicide Silence grade deathcore. Competent enough, but less than memorable extreme metal. ‘In Death’ and ‘Solace; in Soil’ have pummeling groove and decent rhythm changes, but everything else is straight out of the djent playbook. You still get your cold electronics to spruce up the palm-muted slabs of sound and the occasional sung hook.
It’s just hard to get excited for music this by-the-numbers when you have acts like Textures and Periphery exploring lots of interesting areas within the genre. And do me a favor, drop the stage costumes and pseudonyms, its less edgy and more infantilizing than you think.
4.0/10
HANSEL LOPEZ
Nightslug – Loathe
Metal, especially Extreme Metal, can be somewhat… single-minded. It doesn’t need to be a bad thing – this unsubtle devotion to conjuring a particular mood or emotion has led to some of the most beloved classics of the genre – but sometimes a can be so focussed on their goal that they forget to include anything else.
Nightslug are horrible. Being horrible is what they do. It’s all they do. Sewage thick guitars, crude, ugly riffs, tortured vocals and bursts of feedback-laden noise create a genuinely unpleasant atmosphere, but it’s not clear what they really want to do with that atmosphere once they have it. Riffs churn endlessly with no clear aim in sight, tension is built and not effectively released, and tracks run into another with no real sense of purpose. One of the biggest traps in playing this kind of Sludge or slow Doom is the very fine line between hypnotic and boring – and it’s a trap that Nightslug never really release themselves from.
Part of the problem with Loathe (Broken Limbs/Dry Cough/Lost Pilgrims) is that in the last few years a number of bands – Keeper, Primitive Man and Indian amongst them – have been pushing the envelope on music which is both disgusting and interesting. Abstract compositions and elements of psychedelia and Electronic Noise have taken sludge metal into disturbing, engaging new territories – but Nightslug just want to keep playing big horrible riffs all day and croaking. I can imagine them going down well live in the right context, but on record there’s just not enough to distinguish them from a large number of other bands who’ve done the same thing.
If you’ve been reading this and wondering what I’m complaining about, then it’s probably worth giving Loathe a shot. Nightslug achieve exactly what they set out to, and they’re certainly garnering positive reviews elsewhere for doing so, but if your expectations of disgusting, slow music have been raised by recent releases from more adventurous bands, you’re likely to find Loathe disappointing in its lack of ambition.
5.0/10
RICHIE HR