Skin Like Iron & Nails

Another free release here, this one I missed from back in January. Skin Like Iron from San Francisco and Oxnard, California’s infamous Nails unleash two scathing hardcore tracks each that can be streamed over at Decibel magazine. This split was released as a limited only wax pressing of one thousand copies (900 on black and 100 on blue) available only from the band. Skin Like Iron feed angry hardcore modernism off of old school punk melodies, combining new and old to successfully rock out. Nails are basically the most metal hardcore band out there these days, so much so in fact that I’m dubious as to whether Nails should be classified more as a metal or hardcore band (though realistically percentages are drawn somewhere close to the middle). Not that it really matters. Nails mean business - big, bad, pissed off business, and if you have any ounce of real rock in your soul, you’d be a fool not to thrash your neck and pump your fist to this. This split upholds the wicked quality of all their previous releases, so you all have three more minutes of adrenaline-charged, punked-out metal madness to muck about to. If you’re remotely interested in any hardcore/metal groups and you don’t know Nails, educate yourself immediately. Even if you’re not into hardcore (yet), there can be no harm done in giving this a listen as it’s free and only nine minutes long. I believe the 7"s are still available for purchase too. So get on it.

In short: Free split. Four songs. Sick hardcore.

Standout tracks: Nails kill it with “Annihilation”

Score: 9.0

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Radio Moscow & Earthless & Premonition 13

Volcom are known for their surf/skate/snowboard gear, but they also have a record label! Every year Volcom Entertainment Vinyl Club releases six limited edition records from various artists, usually stoner, psychedelic or punk rock. One from this year’s vinyls features Scott “Wino” Weinrich of Saint Vitus fame on it, as well as the awe-inspiring Earthless, so I decided to review it.

Earthless is not frigid black metal or punishing grindcore or swamp beast sludge, it’s not even metal at all – in short it’s are not the kind of music this blog is dedicated to. But damn! does this band gets me, and damn are they heavy. Although I’ve been known to love it, psych jamming is something in my opinion that is often done wrong, sometimes based on misguided heroic ideals, or more often than not falling into the ether of dudes getting high and playing together in the drummer’s mother’s garage, dreaming of money and fans, imagining the groupies and the outstretched arms, lost in a world of fantasy and love, one of the fatal consequences of reality that can happen when beauty and stupidity meet. But Earthless, no. Earthless does not fall victim to these pathetic weaknesses. Earthless think about one thing: How to rock the fuck out. This epic twenty-minute track is on the run, and it gets faster and faster. From the beginning the lead is improvising solos, and man, this guy (Isaiah Mitchell) is totally ripping it. Build up and break down and rock solidly til the very end. This is the concept here – deadly, as you can see. Epic fucking psych jams that hit home – BLAM!

Wino is a legend, as any true metalhead knows, and one of his newest projects, Premonition 13, contributes a fourteen-minute instrumental to the split. Quality psyched-out stoner jams roll along smoothly and solos glide calm and cool over the surface. Split into two segments each is satisfying, and falls closer to psychedelic rock than Wino’s trademark doom or stoner sound (though both are certainly integrated). This man has been rocking for years and it shows through in everything he does these days. “Noche Oscura”, the featured song, is yet another piece of evidence of his quality songwriting and musicianship, a fine piece of light metal to chill back to.

Radio Moscow finish it with the most retro vibes on the album, playing two tracks of Jimmy-esque psychedelic rock. This is not a band I’m familiar with, and personally it’s not my style, but these tracks are still pretty cool ‘70s emulations with on-the-mark musicianship. The first track is the only song on here with vocals, and apart from the production it could be straight off of a Zeppelin or Cream album. The second track is instrumental and I prefer this one as it finishes with some pretty trippy Middle Eastern sounding string instrument accompanied by lots of crazy drumming and wacky effects. However, it still sounds like music the music of an era gone stagnant and is my least favorite of the bunch.

In short: Psychedelic fans will love this. Although there’s really only a morsel of metal in here, it is truly a rocking collaboration. The vinyl is limited to only 1500 copies, so get it while you can!

Standout tracks: Earthless take the medal here hands down!

Score: 8.0

Kownloon Walled City & Thou

This split is the first in a series that is the first project from new record label Hell Comes Home. The series is called Hell Comes Home Volume 1 and it will feature twelve splits, twenty-four songs and twenty-four sludge/doom bands from all over the world, including Thou, Fistula, and Rabbits. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Check out the website at www.hellcomeshome.com. So it all kicks off with a pair of covers, Kowloon Walled City take on Low’s “July”, and Thou’s efforts into Soundgarden’s “4^th of July”. Songs coincidentally chosen? I think not – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, as this is a tasty little morsel of alternative rock-tinged sludge metal.

Kowloon Walled City is a sludge, or post-sludge, band from San Francisco named after one of the seediest triad districts Hong Kong ever saw, now demolished almost twenty years ago. The band released a pretty damn sweet little debut three years ago, Gambling on the Richter Scale, music that can only be called crushing and dense. This cover shows the band’s softer side, being slower, simpler and also having exchanged the aggressive hardcore-esque vocals of the band members for some nice indie-esque vocals from Big Sir singer and songwriter Lisa Papineau. The original song is a beautiful piece of slowcore with amazing harmonies, and this is the basically the distorted version. KWC have done a pretty good job here, although I personally would’ve done it differently. Although it was definitely a good idea to get Papineau in on vocals, it feels like little of the original KWC remains. Some harsh vocals layered over the clean female vocals near the end perhaps would’ve been the cream on the cake? But this is still enjoyable listening.

Thou have become legends of doom metal in recent years, putting out release after release of quality sludged-out doom. It is a pure pleasure to hear them cover Soundgarden, and turn “4^th of July’s” classic riff into a dragging doom beast. Thou have achieved what Kowloon Walled City didn’t quite, in that they have successfully kept true to the spirit of the original track whilst injecting their own flavor into it. The guitar tone and pace is just what you want to hear from Thou and the dual clean/harsh vocals really bring some proper metal into the track. Wicked.

In short: A great little split that I highly recommend buying on vinyl, or even better subscribing to the whole Hell Comes Home boxset, as I suspect it’s going to be a wonderful collection. Also each “7 comes with truly stunning artwork from Kuba Sukolski.

Standout tracks: I like the Thou song best

Score: 8.5

Pyramids & Horseback - A Throne Without a King

Pyramids and Horseback have been at the forefront of the whole experimental metal-infused post rock scene for the last few years. Both bands are known for creating records that sound very different to their previous material and also for flirting with ambience. Earlier this year Relapse released a collaboration of these two bands called A Throne Without a King, and it mostly takes the Pyramid side of things, there being far more ambient noise here than rock music. The album follows the structure of having one song done by each group individually and then a very long four-part song made by the bands collaboratively.

Despite obvious black metal influences on Pyramids self-titled debut, they have since notably set themselves even further outside the conventional metal scene, often times outside the scene altogether. They’re music is something that will be shunned by your more typical (or even slightly explorative) metalheads, so if you are one and you made it this far through the review already, know that you can safely spend your money and time elsewhere. In fact, if you’re looking for metal at all, this is not really the place to find it. The Pyramids track that begins the album, “Phaedra’s Love”, starts off with a really crazy off-kilter drumbeat, and the effects hint at Pyramids previous dabbling in blissfully noisy soft-edged black metal, but this is immediately taken away from us. In less than thirty seconds it just fades right out into nowhere (ambience) leaving you feeling a bit robbed. It returns again around the two minute mark and is once again stolen from us in less than half a minute. We then have two minutes of quiet ambient buildups and lonesome piano notes before we are given a taste of the chaotic drums and thick wall of noise that, let’s be honest, is probably what most of us want to hear. Pyramids are really not treading water here, although they are taking risks. Make no mistake, this is for fans of avant-garde and experimental noise. The sounds are lush in typical Pyramids style though, and on repeated listens once you know what to expect from the song, it is actually very interesting. So if you are open to this kind of music, it is quite enjoyable, although not on par with the group’s earlier music.

Horseback display their lo-fi side again here, and the first half of their track “Thee Cult of Henry Flynt” is rocking black metal. Horseback have always distorted the hell out of their high-pitched vocal shrieks, and they’ve always had great anthemic rhythms too, and I’ve always loved it, and this song is no exception. Horseback’s music has for some reason got a very positive, exciting atmosphere, despite their harsher elements.  Keeping in tune with the album, however, it dwindles into long minutes of ambience before giving a few solemn guitar chords and shrieks near the end. A stronger song than Pyramids, but once again not the best that this band has ever released.

Now we enter the focal point of the album, the epic ambient piece named after the album’s title. The first part wastes itself at the beginning with pointless ambience eventually interrupted by some outbursts of harsh noise, and then it gets into some dark, very distorted vocals. They sound very inhuman and quite atmospheric, bit of an Event Horizon quality to them. I would’ve had these throughout the whole length of the track. Six and a half minutes of crackling noise begin part two, then we are gladly given some beautiful vocals before the song breaks down into even more abrasive static. This track is long and difficult to sit through. The drones continue throughout the second two parts of the album, and we are given more static in all sorts of different forms and some very slow melodies on the third part, which I can safely call beautiful. This is a difficult piece of work to get into, but it does have its merits if you make the effort, as there is a lot of variation in the noises concocted here, some of them ugly, some of them lovely. It is nothing short of a noise epic.

Overall, ATWaK is a pretty good slice of experimental metal/post/ambient/noise, but for some reason I suspect I will not be giving it relistens in later years. I think the main problem with the album is that it frequently switches from rich sounds, whether they are noisy, metallic or blissful, to more elusive, abstract ones. This allows for continuity problems to arise and means that many listeners may have concentration problems, as it causes one to be unsure at any one point in time what they are actually listening to. This, along with the quality production, also happens to be one of the strong points of the album, as more inquisitive listeners will take interest in the unconventional emissions heard here from beginning to end. I get the impression the album was made for people with a bit of patience about them anyway.

In short: Difficult to become immersed in on the first listen, but ultimately rewarding, this is a genre-defying epic way out on the experimental side of things.

Standout tracks:  ”Thee Cult of Henry Flynt”, “A Throne Without a Kind pt 3”

Score: 7.5

Plague Widow - Plague Widow EP

Plague Widow are a brand new band out of Sacramento, California, playing a particularly brutal and dark style of deathgrind. Their first EP is self-titled and I have to say well titled, as the first thing I noticed about Plague Widow was their awesome name. Plague Widow runs for fifteen minutes, comprising of nine songs. It is fast and technical, loaded with morbidly frantic unconventional death metal riffs which bring to mind the likes of Gorguts, Portal and even Cryptopsy. With these bands as influences it should be clear that PW’s approach is no thoughtless bombardment, but a carefully coiled whip unleashed with competency and intelligence. Of these fifteen short minutes, five belong to the intro and outro and are nothing but bleak, minimal noise buildups. Also there are two tracks interspersed between the metal both named “Abyss”, which provide some very creepy speech samples. These run for about another minute or so. The samples are well chosen and effective, but all together this brings the actual metal time down to a mere nine minutes. Now, a lot of the time I might say that the ambient intro/outro thing is boring these days, but I feel they work well on this EP because they seems to compress and condense the short but sharp intensity of the vicious deathgrind between them. The last two tracks before the outro are definitely the highlight here, featuring demented death metal breakdowns and black metal blasting. At first I thought the band were nothing really too special, and to be truthful it’s sometimes difficult for me to appreciate death metal these days because of the steadfast repetition it is usually confined to, but after giving PW a few shots I discovered a very effective little record with a bit more than just a callous exterior.

In short: Hear ye! Hear ye all lovers of death metal: Plague Widow is here.

Standout tracks: “Assimilated Subconscious”, “Operating the Segmental Apparatus”

Score: 8.0

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

For those of you who don’t know, the new Earth is a two part album that was recorded in the same session during 2011, but the second half was released at the beginning of 2012. This time, Carlson’s guitar work is supported by Davies on drums who has been with him since Hex, but now he has a new bassist (Karl Blau) and a cellist (Lori Goldston) on his side as well. Most people who are interested in this have probably heard it by now, but if you’ve been stuck on a desert island for a while, know that there is no direct metal approach made on the Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light. A drone metal legend has firmly shifted ground to drone blues/country. Not a hint of distortion can be heard on these two albums, and yet somehow (surely not just through mental connotation) the metal is there, rising to the surface in bubbles that never quite burst, a palpable yet hidden presence.

The two parts of Angels… definitely form a whole, but one wonders how it is meant to be listened to, as altogether the album would run for one hour and forty-five minutes (part II being the shorter, forty-five minute segment), which is a lengthy haul even for a hardened drone fan. Or we can listen to them separately, which seems strange as the two albums are clearly parts of a whole. More than likely it’s meant to be listened to any way the listener wants, and my preferable choice would probably be to listen only to part I, as this second offering seems meandering and less-than-profound some of the time, especially on the first two tracks. After that weak beginning, Davies hits the drums again and it returns to the same style of repetitive blues motifs that were so lovely on the first half. The last three tracks are nice. Earth is really, really chilled out these days. This is music to splay yourself out on the beanbag to with a small bottle of whiskey and a ponderous mind. And it is good. But unfortunately, I felt it was an unnecessary continuation of part I that does not have the same level of epic melodic quality. This is probably because the album loses its momentum on “His Teeth Old Brightly Shine”, a track on which the guitar noodling frankly irritated me (but not in the way of the whinging cheese solos that were the only downfall of ‘08’s The Bees Made Honey…). As the album is essentially comparative to its first half, this pitfall pretty much sends it into the limbo of albums you kind of like but will never listen to again. Carlson and Davies play brilliantly, and Goldston’s cello subtly supports the band with a velvet undercurrent, but in my opinion they should have crammed this all down into a single album which could have run for an hour and ten minutes easily.

In summary: Not as good as its first half, and so similar that there is no real reason to put this in your stereo a second time, but viewed in its own light it’s a pretty decent little piece of country drone.

Standout tracks: "Rakehell"

Score: 6.5

High on Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis

For once, High on Fire do not mince around with buildup at the start of an album. De Vermis Mysteriis (literally “book of worms”, was Bloch’s ficitonal Mythos tome of spells used to summon unworldly beings) gets straight into it on “Serums of Liao” and from there on out it’s smooth sailing. High on Fire are one of the most legendary bands kicking in the metal scene today, and the new album is here to solidly confirm that. The great thing about HoF is that they have been uncompromising in their style, and yet still always manage to show us a different facet of it with every release. Those of you who were disappointed by the increased accessibility of Snakes for the Divine will be glad to hear that HoF’s rough edge has fully returned and possibly in its most accomplished form yet. Certainly there are some of the group’s most blazing riffs of all time displayed, just check the second half of “Fertile Green” or “Romulus and Remus”. In fact, what we see here is an incredibly impressive stringing of great riffs, one after the next consecutively with very little letdown. Even many of the albums we love the most hold moments of tedium, or even wasteful filler, but not here. DVM ploughs on with the quality riffs until the end and almost never loses momentum. Another great thing about these guys is the way their breakneck pace somehow manages to perfectly conjure the great galloping of horses from your (my?) subconscious, an element that I believe gives it a more warlike character.

If you don’t know what to expect, you should - High on Fire are HUGE! Expect muddy stoner thrash with an epic vibe. For others, expect the same great song-writing and musicianship and expect more totally classic material. DVM fits snugly in with Blessed Black Wings and Death is this Communion as three of the best thrash or stoner metal albums of the millennium, but what we really see here is another chapter in a string of really great albums, all of which any true man wedded to metal must unequivocally own.

In short: In truth, an unnecessary review as this band is so awesome that everyone has either already bought the record or is currently saving pennies for it.

Standout tracks: “Serums of Liao”, “Madness of an Architect”, “King of Days”, “Romulus and Remus”

Score: 9.5