Sardonis - Self Titled E.P.

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...

Click the pic for the link.

Harvey Milk - Harvey Milk

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.

Detestation - Detestation

Speaking of PDX and crust, let's get a little more gender balanced here. Detestation has possibly the gnarliest vocals in all of crust/d-beat. Oh yeah, the bands pretty fuckin' on point too. Tell me I'm wrong fucker. I dare you.

Detestation - Detestation

Tragedy - Tragedy

The great thing about crust is that, like your disgusting psoriasis, it can pop up anywhere, anytime and often flourishes in nice little pockets. Texas, Portland, England in the 80's, etc. Sometimes, a band is able to connect a few of these pockets. Tragedy is one of these bands and are pretty fucking stellar when it comes to making amazing hardcore. Coming out of the south and currently living in Portland, their breed of crusty/d-beaty/hardcore lays down all the best parts of the individuals that make up the band. His Hero is Gone, Warcry, Deaththreat, From Ashes Rise, etc. It's like a fucking crustpunk supergroup. The self titled album says it all.

Click pic for DL