Mogwai and the apocalypse make perfect sense. Since 1995 the Scottish instrumental outfit have traded in both compression-wave power and post-destruction almost-silence with consistently praiseworthy results. Only now can we be sure that the end of world is really the mood they were going for though. ‘Atomic’, you see, started life as the soundtrack to Mark Cousins’ BBC documentary Atomic: […]
Read moreIt’s no secret that Greg Puciato has a genuine fondness for music that’s pretty far removed from his day job as the frontman for metal firebrands The Dillinger Escape Plan. Check any interview- you can read it in the way he talks glowingly about the invention and experimentation of Trent Reznor and hear it in the way he sings his […]
Read moreOh, so close. That cover art really could have been special- the photography, style and design is great and goes a long way to setting up the moody, instrumental metal behind it. But then French four-piece Abysse had to go and use that font combination and it’s like finding a bug in your favourite meal. You can’t judge a book […]
Read moreBe very very quiet, we’re hunting ‘Animals’. If you listen carefully there’s a chance you can still hear the distant, discordant echo of Red Heat’s first two EPs but this is a different beast altogether. Opener ‘Liquor Store’ is a confrontational, coiled spring of a song. A wall of noise thins just enough to reveal the first spiky, lurching riff […]
Read moreThis is great. No, like really great. When Frank Carter left Gallows and pursed less aggressive, more, ahem, palatable sounds, it seemed as if his taste for the power and violence of punk rock had gone too. ‘Blossom’ undeniably proves otherwise. This record finds Carter roaring white-hot rage over barreling metallic riffs (‘Juggernaut’), magnetic, melodic punk (‘Trouble’, ‘Fangs’), and brutal, […]
Read moreNew Will Haven is like a warm blanket. I want it to be more, I really do, the dudes in this band deserve such high praise for their consistency and staying power, but ‘Open the Mind to Discomfort’ is more of the same shifting sheet metal they’ve always done. That’s not to say they don’t do it well, not at […]
Read moreWell damn, there’s nothing minor about the opening track here. After a beat of almost-silence just long enough to have people foolishly slide up their volume bar, the third album from Melbourne six-piece Fourteen Nights at Sea explodes into life. Like being hit by a tidal wave, ‘Teeth Marks’ packs a ferocious first punch and then rolls on and on […]
Read moreIt’s difficult to talk about this record without talking about the circumstances behind it. Perhaps ‘Purple’, the fourth Baroness album, is borne from the Georgia band’s usual creative places. There’s a chance, of course. Or maybe, just maybe, this is a record indelibly marked by the bus crash that nearly killed them. The 2012 accident violently broke bones, some so […]
Read moreLet’s get something out of the way quickly. No Devotion is the new band from old members of Lostprophets. Based on the ad campaign and the artwork here, that’s not something they want you to focus on though. And to be fair, you almost certainly wouldn’t guess it simply by listening to ‘Permanence’. Just as the boys in the band […]
Read morePerhaps the post-rock scene is softening in its old age, the purists less vocal, or maybe, just maybe, the internet now dissipates rather than focuses group disappointment, but there has been way lass harrumphing about this record than I predicted. Toe, see, aren’t supposed to do things this way. ‘Hear You’ is the Japanese five-piece’s first album on the American […]
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