From the ashes of the Bones Brigade and the fabled Haunted Castle and out of the beardmetaled pits of north Brooklyn comes CONCUSSION with their 1st EP. Right, now with all the stupid blogwritingbullshit out of the way, this is Brooklyn's very own, homegrown thrash legion... made up almost entirely of dudes from boston. Bones, Blake, Matt, and Hugo are doing something very few people these days even dare to attempt. Playing badass, balls to the fucking wall thrash, without any retarded, kitschy, neo-thrasher, throwback idiocy. In this band you will find no Gama Bomb patches, you will find no perfectly scuffed white Reebok hitops, you will find no acid-washed spermannihilating nuthugging jeans, and you will find absolutely no bullshit when it comes to raw metal talent. Yes that's right, I just admitted my asshole friends' band is one of the best metal bands player for player in Brooklyn. That's embarassing but fuck it, it's true.
The Dried Blood EP, recorded by Will from Orchid up in Massachusetts is 5 massive chunks of unapologetic, unrelenting thrash. While you can tell these hesher assholes have done their due time sitting around drinking heavily, playing ookiecookie to a soundtrack of Mandatory Suicide and Bonded by Blood, there is something distinctively non-throwback about this shit. The production is 100% modern (but not overproduced or fucking sterile like many these days), the riffing/writing definitely shows notable hardcore influence (especially in the strained vocals) with some heavy pantera jams thrown in just for shits and giggles.
Anyways, I'm sick of tooting these retards' horn for them, they're all too busy tooting each others horns most of the time anyways. Just get the fucking album.
A few years ago I saw a band made up of dudes probably not even in their 20s yet from Lousiana in some tiny venue that's escaping my name somewhere in the city or Brooklyn. The venue wasn't completely packed but there was definitely a crowd. The dude at the merch table before the show was a wiry not too tall, not too short friendly guy with a Lousiana accent. Seemed nice/normal enough. Then the band started and that guy walked to the ground in front of the stage and grabbed the microphone. He announced that they were Thou from Baton Rouge and the shit hit the fan. The singer turned around, hunched over into this bizarre fucking Smeagol contortion facing the stage and the band dropped a fucking nuclear note. About an hour later I had one of my new favorite bands.
Thou's brand of completely fucked, crawling punk bayou sludge, drenched in raw crude oil and growing from the destruction of a world slammed by the most brutal storms on earth multiple times every year is definitely one of the most interesting, heavy, relentless flavors of doom around. In a genre plagued by repetition (not just of the same chord over and over again) and me-too bands, Thou is a glowing fucking beacon of rad. They're one of the few that manages to not just incorporate, but expand upon their many and varied influences (Can you say Minor Threat, Mayhem, and Sabbath) as opposed to so many other bands that just re-hash, the result being something that's never boring and always heavy.
This new album shows a constantly maturing Thou with fucking blastbeats, acoustic breakdowns (not cheesedick lame shit, promise) and even a "tasteful" (if that's fucking possible) incorporation of some of the less annoying traits of Black Metal. Frankly, this ain't yer average Vitus coverband wannabes.
Thou is so fucking good that even the dudes at NPR got soggytrowed when they heard their new album "Summit". This band is definitely one of the best doom/sludge bands currently performing.
If you've never seen this band live, stop what you're fucking doing and go find a show.
Unholy fucking hell, Black Breath just might be the best new band around. This is the best goddamn first full-length I've heard in fucking ages. If they're not the new Entombed then I'll be straight damned. Hints of Motörhead, Crusty D-beat, and good old fashioned old-school hardcore all floating on top of a Swedish Death Metal sound.
A couple of days ago I got a comment on an old post about Tafkata - Worker & Parasite from a dude named Eddie. Turns out he's in a new band called Seven Sisters of Sleep with some former members of Tafkata. If you know me (or Bones or just about anyone else who knows Tafkata), you know that as soon as I discovered that band I sunk into a bottomless pit of not listening to anything else but W&P. SSOS is about to do the same fucking thing to me. I can feel it...
Copped from Mishka again. Bones, this album is for you motherfucker.
I'm a fairly recent convert to Death Metal. Wasn't ever really into a lot of it and most of the fans are still douchebags. After I found that Entombed and Dismember were basically D-beat bands with skills and that Possessed was basically a thrash band with evil vocals, my downward spiral began. I'm still iffy on a lot of it, especially (most...) newer, uber-technical shit that feels more like 6 minute grind with too many solos. After listening to Vasaeleth's "Crypt Born & Tethered to Ruin" I now have major faith that not all death/grind made in the last few years is tech-dork shit.
Right off the fucking bat, the album starts with crushing Death/Grind with no fucking remorse. This has got to be downtuned a full 4 steps. Shortly after, it evolves into riffy doom/death shit with coffins-esque über-cookiemonster vocals. Not much changes throughout the album and yet it works. Like a charm.
I was going to get all "reviewery" here but fuck it, this is the listening note from the 3rd song:
Fuck me running this is heavy. Normally I'd find shit like this pretty boring but it's so fucking awesomely riff driven and rich that I'm loving it. Though their page claims them to be Death/Black Metal, I really hear very little to do with Black Metal. Maybe their lyrics have something to do with trees or blackened abyssal peaks of infernally doomed goatraping or something. Pretty much to me, the only black metal part about this shit is sometimes they use the drum beat. That's a damn good thing in this case
Basically, Vasaeleth is and heavy and fully adept, but not annoying or trying too hard. That's the key to this album. Also, the production fucking rules for their sound. It feels like the whole thing was recorded in a fucking endless cave of despair. Funny enough, in such a "metal" album, I think it's the hints of punk seeping through that really draw me in and hold my attention. Every song is based on fairly simple structures, solidly defined riffs, and feature a surprising lack of solos and general wankery. Shit, the album even comes in at 30minutes pretty much on the dot. A refreshing change from the seemingly eternal length of most thrash albums of late.
Basically Vasaeleth is in the business of unadulterated heaviness, and business on CB&TtR is fucking great. If you're into Portal and Coffins you'll love this shit.
Every once in a while someone passes me a band that just gets it fucking right. Last week Blake from Rats in the Walls told me to check out this Sardonis EP from a while back. Knowing that basically whatever Blake is listening to is probably better than whatever I'm listening to at the moment, I grabbed it and put it on the shelf all weekend. Man was that shit the right choice. Starting your week on this album is so the right decision.
I've said it a million fucking times before and I'll say it a million times more. Not everything needs to be new, complex, progressive, difficult, or whatever the fuck adjective describing wankery you wanna use. Sometimes, just going down the path of the simple, the easy, or the plain works fucking wonders. Fortunately for all of us, it seems like Sardonis understands this intrinsically and doesn't fuck with it.
This 4 song EP is nothing but an awesome chunk of fucking doom. Just guitars, drums, bass, and supreme heavyness. No vocals, just riffs. No stupid, drawn out, overly psychedelic spacey delay parts. No overly referential copping from one specific band. Just thick, meaty guitar tone, crushing drums, slow tempos, and endless bass grit.
Best of all, the next band in my itunes is Sarke...
This review is identical to the one I did for the Mishka Bloglin. I reposted it here because this album is so fucking good it deserves to be posted twice.
I've only seen Harvey Milk live in concert once. It was during All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead, England in May of 2009. They sucked. Granted this was back to back to back to back with Sleep, Electric Wizard, the Jesus Lizard, and Devo and shit so the caliber of rockin' was pretty fucking high. But Harvey Milk totally let me down that one gig. I'd been listening to a lot of "My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be" at the time and that album was blowing my fucking mind, but for that one hour or so they were on stage all I could think was "What the fuck? Who put this Skynrd 45 on 33? Bogus."
This album, has not a fucking thing in common with that live performance. Apparently, this album was meant to be their debut, recorded in '94 and pieced together from old bootleg copies, this shit will blow your weak fucking mind out of your gaping, newly bored out eardrums. If you're familiar with HM's catalogue, think "My Love" 'cept way more sludgy rock. Frankly it's just evil, menacing, grinding, plodding shit that you can't help but nod along to. Creston Spiers sounds like he's either being strangled or strangling someone the entire album. I heard someone describe them as "Swans covering the Melvins... or maybe the Melvins covering Swans...?" once. That is way fucking accurate in this case. The songs are long, evil, and constantly shifting. Production is significantly thinner than their later albums, you know, prolly cause it was pieced together from cassette tapes and shit. For some reason, where most thin production on doom stuff comes across as shitty and unbefitting of the music, it really adds a great punkish vibe to a pretty metal album.
This shit is definitely on my repeat listening list for many moons to come.
During my break from NGNV I did something I've never done before, hope to do many times in the future, and recommend that everyone do at some point in their lives. A few weeks ago a crew of 7 and I headed down to the pacific coast of Nicaragua to surf for a week. We stayed in a town called San Juan del Sur and surfed/hung all over the SDJS area. I've never been to Central America or even a Spanish speaking country before in my entire life so it was a welcome change to get the fuck outta Dodge and into the good shit. For those of you who don't know, Nica is one of the poorest countries in Central America and has been involved in a slow burning civil war for a while now (don't know dates, bust out wikipedia if you're that concerned) so it tends to be a little off the beaten path for most travelers. We landed in Managua and got the fuck outta there as fast as we could in order to spend the rest of the week in one of the chillest, most gorgeous, gnarliest places I've ever set foot. Long story short, the waves were solid but small, we didn't get shot up by bandidos, it's mad poor down there, San Juan del Sur is full of gringos and tourists, and Nica has some of the most awesome country I've ever seen.
Now you're probably saying to yourself, "Nice story dipshit, get to the fucking part where I give a shit." My answer, "Fuck you, I'll do as I damn well please and if you don't like it you can choke." Moving right along, before I went on the trip, a friend of mine sent me an EP that is now in my official "crucial" file. Thanks to surfing, Sacred Reich is now a staple of my shred jams diet and should be for you.
Not getting in to too much detail, Sacred Reich was definitely one of the underrated gems of the 80's thrash movement. Fast as shit, kinda sloppy at times, political, aggro shit. "Surf Nicaragua" was released a little after their 1st album and "The American Way" is considered by many to be their finest hour. I can definitely say that fucking neo-thrasher owe these sick fucks a great debt. Now if only they could keep it real like SR did.
If you read the last post, you'll noticed I mentioned that I had TWO heavy hitters to put up today as tribute for my lack of posting albums recently (Kinda like the Yom Kippur of metal or something). Thus, I now follow through with my most awaited album of the year. By far.
Shrinebuilder, as every metal website in the world has said, is a supergroup made up of Scott Michael Kelly (of Neurosis) Al Cisneros (of AsbestosDeath, Sleep, and OM), Scott "Wino" Weinrich (of basically every classic doom band ever including The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, and most recently Wino), and Dale Crover (Drummer of the Melvins). Basically, a legendary doom gathering of the tribes/minds/spirits/whatever.
When it comes to supergroups, I will almost always be the first one to set my expectations super, super fucking low. Hype through the roof + the reality of them being side-projects of other already amazing bands + my usual completely over the top ridiculous hyperbolic tendencies = total fucking let down with the end product most of the time. Shrinebuilder completely blows that shit away.
If I were to sum up my first couple of listens in middle school science terms, Shrinebuilder is a beautiful heterogeneous compound. In other words, when you put sugar in water it becomes the homogenous "sugar water," but when you put sand in water, it's still water and still sand. You can see both of the component parts. In Shrinebuilder, you can definitely pull out each player's contribution to the group. Not just like, "Hmmm... this song sounds a lot like Neurosis..." or whatever, but even parts of songs. I guess the most visible example of this is in "Pyramid of the Moon." You can definitely feel the Wino and SMK lead in the beginning of the song and as it progresses, the whole song pulls a slow shift towards Al Cisneros's lead until he kicks it full gear in to a Sleep/OM style drone for the 2nd half of the song. Each riff shows the fingerprint of the person who wrote it. Most riffs gotta lotta fucking fingerprints though.
Usually when a band sounds so strongly like it's components, it almost always fails at sounding like a comprehensive whole. Somehow, probably because every person involved in this project is a fucking genius when it comes to doom, Shrinebuilder feels whole. No song feels out of place, no section feels jarring or confused, no tone or note doesn't belong. That's what really makes this album interesting to me. How unbelievable the balance between the parts and the whole is from start to finish. Just listen and tell me I'm wrong.
All of this being said, Shrinebuilder is surprisingly different than what I expected, but not different than what I hoped for. I was kind of expecting Dale's tribal, crushing, war drums to be driving a Dopesmoker bassline with Neurosis uber delayed guitars and Wino singing. What I got was a whole shit ton of Wino/SMK guitars and atmosphere mixed with some OM droning and driving, Dale acting as an anchor for the band to swirl around, and everyone takes turns on the mic. It's fucking cool.
Fuck this, I've said too much. Listen to the album and tell me I'm wrong. I could talk about this band for another fucking decade man. I am so stoked to see them next month at Poisson rouge with Rwake.
To atone for my lack of new jam postage, today I will not only provide you with Vitus/Saviours goodness, but I will also, for no additional fees or agreements, give to you two of NGNV's most awaited heavy hitters of the last year. The first is none other than Skeletonwitch's Breathing the Fire. Although I haven't really written much about them since Scion in like March or something, long time readers know that I fall under the "I stand for thrashing black sorcery" camp. Skeletonwitch are, first and foremost, fucking awesome musicians. The dudes have mercilessly sledgehammered out their own niche in the metalworld by throwing classic thrash with modern black metal in a way that doesn't come off as fucking cheesy camp crap (...well not all the time...) and it doesn't come off as lame, underchopped not-quite-thrash-not-quite-black-not-quite-good garbage. Secondly, these dudes put on one of the most killer live shows around. It's like a wall of be-haired thrashing meat, relentlessly bearing down upon you with the fury of over a combined century of life lived in Ohio. Pretty fucking heavy man.
Anyways, "Beyond the Permafrost" was on pretty heavy rotation when I first found it, but after a while the thin production kinda fell out of favor. It wasn't for lack of killer songs or anything, just the album didn't really translate just how fucking heavy these guys get on stage. Thankfully, Breathing the Fire takes care of that shit with... uh... aplomb. I guess... Basically, it sounds fucking great, the songs thrash like a motherfucker, Chance's vox have that great 90's black wail, the guitar riffs have me fiending like Rush for oxy, and the songs never really lose their balls. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely stand out's among the crowd but as a whole, this album makes for a great listen. Grab this shit and feel the demonic black shredpocalypse.
A few weeks ago I reviewed OM's new album, "God Is Good." As you might have figured out, I wasn't overly stoked with it as a follow up to Pilgrimage/Innerant Rays of the Sun. As a follow up to Gebel Berkel it was definitely an improvement but on a whole, I like the earlier shit better. Despite the lukewarm reception to the new album, I still love that band live so I got tix to see them at Europa with Brooklyn favorites Naam. Lichens and 6 Organs of Admittance also opened for them. Naam, as always fucking killed it and are sounding tighter and tighter every day. Robert, aka: Lichens played the delay pedals in a chair. Probably cool on album, definitely good for high people live. Somewhat boring as he just sat still with a microphone and a loop box throat singing into feedback loops for 30minutes. Pass the pipe please.
As for 6 Organs of Admittance... wrong bill. Stick to coffeehouses. If members of the audience are shushing other members so they can hear the band, you're at the wrong club, with the wrong crowd, and definitely on the wrong lineup. Go elsewhere. Probably would have been good if they were playing through a shit load of amps at a crushing volume with some sort of a rhythm section. On two acoustic guitars it sounded like the shit I used to hear the less retarded hippies try (significantly less well) to play at college. No thanks.
OM on the other hand. On fucking point from minute one. Started with To the Shrinebuilder and crushed songs from each one of their albums. Could have used a little more volume on Al's bass but other than that I'd say it was pretty fucking spot on.
Om with Emil is definitely a different beast all together. I meant to ask Al and Emil about this and the new album but never really got around to it. Busy times man. Anyways, for lack of a better term, I'd say Emil is a way more extroverted drummer than Chris Hakius. Where Chris really focuses on relentlessly hammering down the groove with no regard for fills or frills, Emil is all over the kit. Fills, rolls, beat changes, whatever. Unfortunately, it tends to be really distracting from the overall vibe that Chris was so heavy on setting up and holding down. Also, hombre really needs to remember the value of a change in dynamics.
Long and short: Dude kinda drums like an adorable yet overenthusiastic puppy. You know man, you like him, it makes you happy, he's a friendly little guy with a good heart that's in the right place but too noisy for the hunt. But, for this job, old yeller kicking around on the porch just chilling is the mutt for the job in this case.
Oh yeah, almost forgot one minor detail. OM now has three members. Robert of Lichens was doing all sorts of crazy shit like PLAYING FUCKING GUITAR! Yes, OM now has a guitar, a keyboard, some tambourine percussiony stuff, and a shit ton of delay effects. It's cool I guess. Again, somewhat distracting but really not too bad. I'm more of a minimalist though when it comes to my post-Sleep stoner drone doom.
Ok, now that I've gotten all the nitpicky annoying shit out of the way, this show layed it the fuck on. Thick. In the best way possible. It fucking ruled.
Al and Emil and Rob fucking barreled into the set and did what they do best. Play music to headbang slowly to. The audience and the band were totally on the same page, Al didn't miss a note, the new effects dude added some interesting new sections on to old songs that I wasn't expecting and definitely wasn't disappointed with. At one point between the last 2 songs of the set before the encore I actually heard Emil say to Al, "Man let's play more, the vibe is perfect in here." or something to that effect. All the songs were a little heavier and just barely faster than I remember them and it felt fucking good. Yesssss.
Next time though, Emil, dude, leave your pants on and stay behind the drumkit, you're harshing my mellow brah.
Good motherfucking goddamn. Last night gave me that "I wonder what would happen if I started doing massive amounts of drugs and then ritually sacrificed my neighbors puppy to Zuul..." feelings all over the body. Weedeater is a massive, disgusting, unstoppable, menacing, snarling, unhinged runaway riff steam engine piloted by a fucking murderous lunatic. Fuck yeah.
I don't know what the fuck's up with me recently but it's seriously like Bayonne NJ 1987 up in my fucking head for the last couple of weeks. I think the hot weather combined with the not sleeping well and the way too busy at work are turning my brain in to a fucking 80's thrash-slurry. Why is this shit so addictive? What in the world makes the palm-muting, screaming, headbangingness so hard to stop listening to? Why on earth have I had Razor on repeat for 2 days?
