Tag Archives: Richie H-R

The King Is Blind – The Deficiencies Of Man

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TKIB The Deficiencies Of Man Cover

As Extreme Metal enters its middle-age as gracefully as you’d expect, an odd phenomenon can be observed. Bands and musicians who had previously “grown up” and abandoned extreme or brutal musical elements now grow up even further and discover that, actually, they rather miss blast-beats and growled vocals after all. My Dying Bride predated the trend by at least a decade with 1999’s The Light At The End World (Peaceville) but have since been joined by Paradise Lost, Bloodbath and Vallenfyre amongst others. England’s The King Is Blind, fresh from a successful slot at this year’s Bloodstock, are the latest addition to the ranks of Mid-Life Crisis Metal (featuring ex members of Entwined, The Blood Divine and Cradle Of Filth). They are also one of the most savage.

TKIB play chunky, aggressive Death Metal  that wears its Celtic Frost and early-90’s-Peaceville influences openly, but isn’t afraid to shake them around a little bit either.  The core of their sound is thick, crusty riffing that calls to mind Bolt Thrower as often as it does Frost or early My Dying Bride, backed by the insistent pummelling beats you’d expect from the drummer of Extreme Noise Terror.

Commanding, powerful barked vocals and the occasional melodic lead fill out the sound effectively, and the pace alternates from slow Doom drudge to hungry Entombed-style lurching to tight, controlled blasting.  Song-writing is taut and confident, if (understandably, at this point) lacking in variety, and each track expands on TKIB’s manifesto of powerful, aggressive Death Metal that embraces its heritage without wallowing in empty nostalgia.

At only four tracks and around twenty minutes, The Deficiencies Of Man (Mordgrimm) never has time to get boring, but also doesn’t have the chance to show us how much depth TKIB are capable of – keeping their material both interesting and savage over the course of a full album will be the next big challenge for them.  Until then, this is a short but potent demonstration of a band who realise that truly “growing up” means not having to pretend that you prefer Morrissey to Morbid Angel.

 

 

The King Is Blind on Facebook

8.0/10.0

 

 

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Dragonforce – Maximum Overload

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Let’s be honest here, you already know whether you’re willing or able to like a Dragonforce album or not. It is fine if you’re not, musical taste is subjective and blahblahblah, but you might as well save yourself (and everyone else) a lot of trouble and just pretend that Maximum Overload (earMUSIC) doesn’t exist, rather than explaining again how shit you think they are.

If you are one of the ten people reading this who actually likes them, chances are that you either think 2012’s The Power Within (Essential/Roadrunner) was a glorious return to form and a reclaiming of their song-writing and catchiness after two albums of pointless indulgence, or a generic Pop Metal album that saw the band leaving behind everything that made them special. If you’re in the latter camp, I’m afraid you might as well go and join the others – it seems that their seventy-three-riffs-a-second Guitar Hero days are firmly behind them.

Maximum Overload takes its cues from the chorus-heavy Pop Metal approach of The Power Within, but expands its musical vocabulary to give each song its own “flavour”. Some of these flavours can be quite superficial – ‘The Game’ has chunky riffing and growled backing vocals (courtesy of Matt Heafy from Trivium) and ‘Extraction Zone’ has Nintendo noises – but fun, though elsewhere they do succeed in taking their shimmering, high-adrenaline Pop Metal into different territories. ‘Three Hammers’ continues the epic diet Blind Guardian Fantasy Metal of ‘Cry Thunder’, ‘Symphony Of The Night’ adds operatic flourishes and anime-gothic romanticism and ‘The Sun Is Dead’ offers a surprisingly effective blend of sugary melancholy.  A cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’ rounds it off, achieving the impressive feat of being the silliest thing they’ve ever recorded.

Maximum Overload is a catchy collection of high-energy Pop Metal songs with ambition, a sharp ear for melody and an absolute refusal to feel any shame. Fans who want them to return to the ten minute guitar solos and unstoppable riff-salad of Inhuman Rampage (Noise/Sanctuary) and Ultra Beatdown (Spinefarm) will be disappointed. While it perhaps outstays its’ welcome a little in the second half, it will put an enormous grin on your face if you’ll let it.

 

8.0/10.0

Dragonforce on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R


Rippikoulu – Musta Seremonia

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rippikoulu-musta_seremonia1 album cover

Does the “underground” really exist anymore? Most Metal fans over thirty will remember some albums being difficult – in some cases nearly impossible – to track down, but these days the most obscure and veiled albums can be heard online without any real issues. Even the arcane releases of the past are being dragged out of the underground and hauled into the light – a case in point being this ’93 demo from a Finnish Black Metal band so fourth-tier that if you’ve heard of them before you were probably in the band.   Finnish Death Metal is often characterised by a crushing Doom-flavoured approach and a preference for suffocating atmospheres over catchy riffs. Rippikoulu (apparently the first DM band to sing in Finnish, which is interesting if not terribly useful for pub quizzes) certainly didn’t buck this trend, the six tracks of Musta Seremonia (Svart Records) consisting of crushing slow-motion riffing, drawn out song structures and an atmosphere of utter bleakness.

 

For a near-unknown demo one year off its twentieth birthday, Musta Seremonia holds together surprisingly well, with a thick sound and merciless song-structures that at times creates a genuinely stifling feel. This is ugly music, as far as one could get from the thrashy-riffing and audible growled choruses that often pass for “old school Death Metal”. Some of the songs are longer than they need to be, but that’s entirely consistent with the atmosphere of prolonged suffering they build up. The same could be said for the lack of variety and generally one-note nature of the composition.

 

No, the biggest issue is, of course, the question of what it has to offer for a new listener now. A lot of bands have played this style of crushing Doom/Death in the twenty years since Musta Seremonia was recorded, and some of them have developed and progressed it further. There’s nothing on here that will be new people who are already familiar with the style, and the overbearing bleakness may not make it the best introduction for the curious, but for what it is Musta Seremonia is pretty hard to find flaw with. Rippi Koulu, Motherfuckers! I’m sorry.   7.0/10.0 Rippikoulu on Facebook   RICHIE H-R


Common Eider, King Eider – Taaleg Uksur

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ceke album cover

 

The link between Metal and Dark Ambient music, though by this point undeniable, is rather a strange one. The point of commonality presumably lies in both genres’ fascination with “darkness” and negativity, but in terms of musical approach there’s very little common ground – Metal’s aggression and energy contrasted with music which is passive and languid by design.

 

California’s oddly-named Common Eider, King Eider seem like the personification of this contrast, with artwork and aesthetics designed to catch the attention of any Grimly Frost-Bitten Cryptic Winter Panda in the area, and music that couldn’t be further from Metal’s “more is definitely more” approach.

 

The four tracks that comprise Taaleg Uksur (Pesanta Urfolk) are built of sparse, minimalist drones, echoing silences and vocals that range from ghostly whispers to desolate shrieks. Whereas more Metal-friendly acts like Gnaw Their Tongues create dense walls of howling noise, Common Eider… keep it simple – there are several moments which consist of a single, unaccompanied drone that hovers on the verge of silence. 


It would be easy for a listener more comfortable with the conventions of Rock and Metal to declare that “nothing happens” on Taaleg Uksur, and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong. This is an album where things are suggested rather than heard – where atmosphere takes precedence over event – but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting here. They have a surprising grasp of dynamics, switching from quiet to loud (or comparatively loud) drones to positive effect, and the use of vocals (comparable to last year’s Lustmord album, but much more stripped down and minimalist) adds a lot. The final track, ‘Caribou People’, introduces acoustic guitar and electric-guitar drones that create a sense of climax, and allow something to finally “happen”.

Taaleg Uksur is a rich, surprisingly engaging album of minimalist ambiance that uses emptiness as a potent tool, but if you’re the kind of person who reads that as a pretentious way of saying “someone goes ‘whooo’ and then nothing happens”, then you’d be advised to stay away. Metal fans seeking more ambient territories may find the new Wolves In The Throne Room an easier starting point.

 

7.0/10.0

Common Eider, King Eider on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Belphegor – Conjuring The Dead

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Belphegor - Conjouring The Dead

 

Belphegor are one of those sorts of bands – you know the type. Settling early on for a familiar combination of established styles, they achieve a degree of success for doing what they do well and without pretension. The inevitable backlash kicks off after the album which is widely regarded as being their best and they’re accused of “selling out” when they sign to a comparatively big label. The rest of their career is then spent putting out variations on the same basic formula while the fans argue about whether they’ve truly regained their early quality. It’s a dance we see a little too often in a genre that would like to see itself as beyond fashion, and Belphegor seem to be following the established pattern well.

 

Conjuring The Dead (Nuclear Blast) picks up where they let off from with the supposed “return to form” (according to some fans, anyway) Blood Magick Necromance, with the same combination of catchy Death Metal and atmospheric Black Metal that the band have firmly established as their own. There is a sharp focus on song-writing here, most songs being based around a catchy riff or verse structure, and Erik Rutan’s production gives the band a punch they haven’t always had. Opener ‘Gasmask Terror’ is exactly the slap in the face they need, a neck-snapping catchy assault that allows them to release the throttle on some later tracks without losing too much steam. Calling this music “accessible” sounds like some elitist slur, but within the conventions of Black/Death Metal Conjuring The Dead very much errs on the side of catchiness and safety, being enjoyable, but not in any way threatening or challenging.

 

Conclusion – it’s a Belphegor album! If you care enough to actually hear it, the chances are that you know what it’s going to sound like already. To an impartial ear it sounds like a pretty decent one, but no doubt hardcore fans will take up large chunks of Metal Archives’ bandwidth arguing its exact place in the canon. The rest of us will probably enjoy it while it’s playing and then promptly forget about it.

 

6.0/10.0

Belphegor on Facebook 

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Ministry – Last Tangle In Paris (DVD)

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In some circles, Ministry are spoken of in tones reserved elsewhere for Slayer. Reverence for their classic material combined with dissatisfaction over their current direction marks them as one of the “Untouchable Greats” in their field. This live DVD shows them touring their 2012 comeback album Relapse shortly before the death of guitarist Mike Scaccia, and is dedicated to his memory.

 

Having not paid serious attention to the band since 96’s Filthpig, my first observation about Last Tangle In Paris (UDR Music) was how the band have changed. Focussing heavily on tracks written without Paul Barker, we see a band operating comfortably somewhere between generic Groove Metal and mid-period Sepultura – crunchy, thrashy Metal built around repetitive grooves and simple choruses. Where Al Jourgensen once adopted a different vocal style for each song, he now employs the same angry sneer throughout, and their genre-defining “industrial” elements are now largely restricted to the use of samples and effects.

 

No band with their reputation can completely ignore the past, of course, and a barrage of four tracks finishes the set. Certainly crowd-pleasing, this section unfortunately raises its own problems; not only the contrast with the newer tracks, but also the authenticity of Jourgensen’s vocals. Put simply, the vocal performances on the classics are absolutely note-perfect imitations of the versions recorded two decades ago, and sometimes visibly out of synch with what Jourgensen appears to be singing.

 

A live DVD is about more than just the music, of course, and Last Tangle… aims to show us a band struggling to come to terms with their grief. Rehearsal footage featuring Scaccia is interesting for fans, but the poor sound quality reduces the value of these sections. Interviews with most of the current line-up cast light on their grieving process, and Jourgensen in particular speaks humbly and openly about the impact that Scaccia’s loss has had upon the band and his own life. Laudable and occasionally genuinely touching, but overall Last Tangle… is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone other than serious fans of their recent material.

Al Jourgensen, Ministry - 2013

 

5.0/10.0

Ministry on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R

 

 


The Drip – A Presentation Of Gruesome Poetics

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The Drip album cover

 

Making fun of a band’s name is the kind of lazy, empty journalism that I’d normally try to avoid, but sometimes the temptation is just too strong. I mean, seriously… Before a note of their music has been played, The Drip earn their place amongst Gloomy Grim, Mournful Gust and Imposer as the elite of Metal bands with names that are a lot less threatening than they’re probably meant to be – with the exception that I can at least understand how those names are meant to be scary.

 

So yeah, that’s out of the way… leaving, it has to be said, not that much to talk about. The Drip make their intentions clear with vicious opener ‘Catalyst’, at two minutes and twenty-six seconds, the single longest track on the record, and then don’t do anything to change. A Presentation Of Gruesome Poetics (Relapse) is six tracks, twelve minutes and a near-constant onslaught of blasting, scything riffs and angry shrieks.

 

If all Grindcore is about controlled chaos, The Drip definitely lean on the side of control. The frenzied, staggering lurches made famous by Napalm Death or Terrorizer are entirely absent here, their place taken by the kind of muscular, look-at-my-neck-muscles Metalcore breakdowns you’d expect from Hatebreed or Terror. They’re deployed well, and probably get a huge response live, but for those who prefer their Grind wilder, more destructive and untamed, it sounds a little cheap, and perhaps a little posed. This is music for flexing your muscles and ninja-kicking your mates in a circle, not raging against the injustice of a system that doesn’t work.

 

A perfectly solid release, then, and one that delivers exactly what it promises, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting too excited about this. One imagines that it was released primarily to give them something to do while ripping up tiny squats and club venues – a task for which it is well suited.

 

6.0 / 10.0

The Drip on Facebook

 

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Venowl – Patterns Of Failure

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Venowl album cover

 

Venowl must hate journalists. It’s the only explanation – why else would they put out music simultaneously this compelling and this hard to positively describe, if not to frustrate the people whose job it is to do exactly that. I really want you to know how great Patterns Of Failure (self-released) is, but I have no idea how to put it across in words. Those devious bastards.

 

Starting with the crudest genre-labels then, the three long tracks on Patterns Of Failure essay an abstract, deconstructed form of Sludge/Doom which borders on outright Noise. Feedback-drenched guitars, drums and piercing shrieked vocals are the core musical building blocks, but how they are deployed is unusual even within their niche genre. Rather than mashed together into a sprawling whole as you might expect, each track follows its own discrete journey from beginning to end, moving through often very intricate shapes while retaining the same punishing tempo and pitch-black tone.

Time, then, for Lazy Journalism trick #2 – comparisons. There are a fair few bands that can be meaningfully name-dropped here, but none are a perfect match; Wormphlegm playing Ehnahre songs, or Grave Upheaval watching snuff movies at Khanate’s house with a crate of ketamine? Sabazius if they squeezed all eleven hours of Descent Of Man into fifty-five minutes?

 

The very best Noise music, I was told once by a fan of the genre, is that which sounds entirely structured in its chaos – creating the impression not of pure randomness but of an order which is too arcane for the listener to easily engage with, but yet is clearly there. That’s perhaps the greatest quality of Patterns Of Failure, along with the fact that something is always “happening” in the music. It would be too easy for an album like this to sit on its hands recycling empty feedback and looking smug, but there’s a real depth to what Venowl achieve here – a depth which captivates even as it frustrates the ability to describe it.

 

Quite simply – every other tactic having failed – Patterns Of Failure is one of the most distinctively horrible things you’ll hear all year.

Venowl band

9.0/10.0

 

Venowl on Facebook

 

 

RICHIE H-R

 

 


Teitanblood – Death

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It may not always seem the most sophisticated or progressive of genres, but horrible old Death Metal has been undergoing something of a late renaissance of late. With bands like Portal, Ulcerate and Gorguts (finally no longer alone in a field they’ve ploughed since the mid 90’s) bending the genre into new shapes while old heroes like Autopsy remind us of the strengths of playing it straight. Growling over a blast-beat hasn’t been this exciting in years.

 

Teitanblood’s latest contribution to this is more subtle and developed than it may initially seem, and opens up over the course of several listens into an album of surprising depth. Mashing old-school Death Metal with touches of Crust, Grind and Black Metal they create a noxious mess that lurches from Blasphemy-style chaos to blackened sludge, referencing classic Carcass and the occasional d-beat on the way.

 

The most glaring issue with Death (Norma Evangelium Diaboli) – initially a big one – is the sheer length. Weighing in at over 60 minutes, with songs averaging around 10minutes, this seems far too overblown for such an unambitious, chaotic sound. Persevere, though, and it starts to become clear that Teitanblood have got more going on than they initially seem to. Firstly, their sense of dynamics; songs catapult explosively through genuinely well-crafted structures, riffs and beats shifting effortlessly into shapes that prevent them from getting mired in the repetition that one might expect. Secondly, there is their use of ambient noises and samples in the background of many songs, comparable to that of AEvangelist, but deployed with a much lighter hand. Many listeners may not even hear them at first, but they add a depth and atmosphere to Teitanblood’s dense, organic music that genuinely helps the album justify its running time.

 

Not instantly the easiest of listens, then, and will likely be dismissed by many as too long or too chaotic, but an album of surprising depth which fans of the noisier end of Death Metal should find rewards repeated listens.

 

8.0 / 10.0

Teitanblood on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Waxen – Agios Holokauston

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Lo-fi Black Metal is not a genre often associated with especially accomplished playing. Apologists for the style will often talk about how “atmosphere” or “emotion” is more important than technicality, and many artists embrace the DIY values of Punk (if not always the politics) to show that the power to create art is not just in the hands of the skilled or educated. The idea of a one-man bedroom BM project created by Godless Rising and (live) Darkane shredder Toby Knapp, then is an intriguing one – and for once, the end result is pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

 

Knapp makes no attempt to disguise the fact that Agios Holokauston (Moribund) is all about the guitars, and gives a performance that utterly transcends what this sub-genre is usually capable of. At times melodic, grandiose, savage and mournful, Knapp’s playing leads us through a well-crafted and dynamic selection of songs. Catchier than one might expect from lo-fi Black Metal, but none of the aggression or power is sacrificed, and Knapp demonstrates well just how engaging this music can be with a touch more skill behind it.

 

If the strength of Agios Holokauston is the guitar performance, then the weakness is… well, everything else. The programmed drums, in fairness, are perfectly adequate and rather less clicky than is normally the case. However, they are by nature quite characterless, and certainly flat next to the guitar heroics. The vocals, too, fall far short of what’s required; emotionless, monotone shrieking so thoroughly processed that they might as well be electronic noises that fail to add any character or feeling to the songs. This is especially apparent when Waxen explore more contemplative material on ‘Hollow Eyes’, and Knapp is still buzzing away like a robot wasp with no sense of rhythm.

 

An appealing and eminently listenable album, then, but any pleasure you take from listening will inevitably be off-set by the disappointment of imagining how good Agios Holokauston could have been if Knapp had found himself some friends who were as proficient and expressive on drums and vocals as he is on guitar.

 

7.0/10

Toby Knapp on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R