REVIEW: JUNIOR BRUCE - THE BURDEN EP

I just received a beautiful neon green vinyl copy of Junior Bruce’s LP The Headless King this past week and sought out their newest material, the recently released EP The Burden. In an old interview, vocalist Scott Angelacos explained the idea of their LP’s title, saying, “Other than a general feeling of unrest, we wanted the album to feel like an uprising. A headless king has nowhere to place his crown.” That same sense of defiance surfaces in The Burden, though there’s also a streak of melancholia in both songs. But Junior Bruce’s sound doesn’t wallow in solemnity, it uses the somber platform as a launching pad to meaner, heavier riffs that pound at the gates of each song, threatening to burst through.

The EP’s title track commences with haunting guitar work teamed with Tom Crowther’s growling bass that stomps into morose hardcore before building a groove layer by layer that feels like the song is regenerating rhino skin. Angelacos’ voice has extra grit on this effort, like he’s been gargling with bathtub whiskey and alligator teeth since The Headless King’s recording sessions. It’s a great song executed with confidence and powerfully projected emotion.

“The Ocean’s Daughter” opens with a creeping riff that feels like vintage Candlemass before abandoning the dirge in favor of melodic ruminations over a backbone of mid-tempo distortion. Jeff McAlear sounds like Bill Ward on this song, with frantic fills injecting energy into the slower moments while kicking the song forward with a persistent bass drum pulse. Three quarters of the way through the song a guitar lead soars over the droning main riff and leads the song to its downtrodden conclusion.

Junior Bruce (named after a character from the original Death Race 2000) is a great band on the fantastic A389 Recordings label and these new songs verify that they’re headed in an exciting direction that develops melody without sacrificing aggression. These two songs are a great teaser of what’s to come from this Floridian outfit and definitely promises that there is more quality heaviness waiting to obliterate us in the future. It may not be the brutal soundtrack a Death Race driver would listen to in his car while tallying a high body count on the blood-slick roads, but it certainly fits the soundtrack of a post-Death Race wrestle with colossal guilt and shattered morality. And hey, that’s brutal in its own way.

The Burden is currently available as a FREE download over at Bandcamp, with links to Junior Bruce’s Facebook page as well: http://juniorbrucefl.bandcamp.com/

This is also the band’s first release since the unfortunate passing of drummer Brett Tanner. If you’d like to donate to cancer research in his name it would be a great gesture.

REVIEW: FULL OF HELL - RUDIMENTS OF MUTILATION

Don’t be afraid, be very afraid. Full of Hell’s new album, Rudiments of Mutilation, is what all those fairy tales were warning you about. All the ugly, cruel, dangerous elements of the world have packed their bindles and trekked across broken glass and glowing embers to join the sonic fray in this release. While quotes from the band suggest that the album is simply about “meaningless suffering” I created an entire narrative of a tortured soul recounting violent deeds and troubling experiences post-mortem, waiting for the revelation of what exists when our pulse ceases, and finding nothing. In the street-wise words of Blood for Blood, “What have we got? We got nihilism.”

Full of Hell blast pitch-black, grinding crust’n’doom at their audiences like they have a lifelong grudge against anyone in shouting distance. After “Dichotomy” lures the listener in with howls from a bottomless pit and eerie scattershot drumming, “Vessel Deserted” taps into the hardest core of crust punk before slipping into the abyss for one of several funeral sludge passages, where Dylan Walker’s vocals trail away like smoke from bodies burnt to destroy evidence. Full of Hell rip through a few grinders before pounding out “Indigence and Guilt,” a vicious hardcore song with stop-and-start riffage over a grimy wall of tremolo noise. When Full of Hell muscle up and aim to maim there is no place safe to hide. You don’t want to have an arm wrestling contest with Rudiments of Mutilation. Remember Jeff Goldblum in The Fly? Compound fracture just waiting for you, son.

The middle of the album opens up into a gaping pit of despair as “Embrace” features lifeless, droning musing over feedback and a swampy, groovy bass line. The song bleeds over into the doom track “The Lord Is My Light,” whose dissonant opening chords dive cranium-first into a pool of coagulated blood. This portion of the album is the harshest, scraping along on its belly like a dying snake trying to swallow its last rat-meal before it stops breathing. Then it’s back to the daily grind, with “Bone Coral and Brine” and the title track cranking out crusty, savage hardcore punk with barbed-wire texture. The album closes with “In Contempt of Life” marching bleakly to a halt, with barked vocals reverberating restlessly through a purgatory of ash and bone dust that I assume looks frighteningly like Wyoming. In Full of Hell’s nasty reality there’s never a moment of silence, just the shrill ringing in your ears after a speaker explodes or a gun goes off.

This release is exactly what makes A389 Recordings one of the most important labels in aggressive music. Full of Hell has a versatile and downright scary sound that needs to be celebrated and appreciated by fans of sonic extremity. The Dude was totally accurate, even in jest, when he suggested being a nihilist is exhausting. So even the most dedicated nihilists should take a break and seek out Rudiments of Mutilation, because this album will make you believe in nothing except the lasting power of a musician with a bad mood. Full of Hell are also touring extensively through June, so support these bad mofos on the road. Can’t wait to catch them in Brooklyn with Trap Them and Seven Sisters of Sleep, that sounds like the best excuse for a concussion I’ve ever heard.

Check out the album streaming NOW at:  http://www.terrorizer.com/2013/04/23/full-of-hell-rudiments-of-mutilation-stream/

And though vinyl pre-orders are sold out, get a CD/Shirt combo over at A389:

http://www.a389records.com/site/