REVIEW: SERPENT EATER - HYENA

Every once in a while I come across an album/movie/book that I feel was made specifically with me in mind, like the artist(s) crawled into my psyche, observed my absolute favorite things, and crafted something to transform my day from totally mediocre to fist-pumpingly awesome. Hyena, the newest album from Cologne, Germany’s Serpent Eater, is one of those albums that I consider a personal gift.

With an inspired mixture of wasteland sludge and icy, dizzying black metal, Hyena feels like Howl’s excellent Full of Hell LP if it spent its childhood scavenging rancid meat from sewer tunnels in an abandoned factory town. Released from Alerta Antifascista Records, this album is a mean, muscular, metallic beast that somehow sidesteps predictability while still featuring conservatively structured, contagious songs that would watch you for hours from the shadows, just to bite your throat out the moment you start dreaming.

Album opener “Ebola” introduces a mixture of bluesy groove and swirling, psychedelic black metal with demonic dual-vocals. “Last Cold Word” features more snarling, scorched riffs that bathe in the muck dividing Immortal and Dragged Into Sunlight, like black swamp water frozen during the first frost. The guitars capture a sense of gothic dread and still achieve nearly impossible catchiness. “In the Wall” invokes Slayer’s thrashing anger over a rumbling beat that builds to vicious grind, maintaining punk intensity even when injecting some dopesmoking harmonized guitars into the mix. Hyena closes with the dynamic track “Trepanation Nation,” featuring a blizzard of blastbeats and At the Gates riffage with a grimy underbelly of sludgy groove and lumbering explosions of hardcore.

Largely due to their cackling sounds and comedic-relief roles in The Lion King, most people don’t realize hyenas are surprisingly savage animals, and unexpectedly fierce foes that lions battle on a constant basis. It’s not unusual for a pack of hyenas to lure a mother lion away from her young, only to have another sneak in and feast on the babies. Not that Serpent Eater encourage the fervent murder of lion cubs, but it’s a reminder of the necessary cruelty of nature’s order, and right now Serpent Eater can quit relying on snakes for nourishment, because this album proves they’re a formidable predator quickly eating their way up the food chain. Despite some similarities to recent work by I Exist and Vaporizer, Hyena absolutely feels fresh and unique, and shows us what’s possible in extreme music when contrast, tone, mood, texture, and the art of a killer riff are all fully explored.

Check out Hyena, streaming on Bandcamp now, and available for a modest 4 EUR: http://alertaantifascistarecords.bandcamp.com/album/aa95-serpent-eater-hyena-lp

And follow them on Facebook to stay current with all their news:  https://www.facebook.com/SerpentEater

REVIEW: CONFINE - SETTING FIRE TO THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

Take a breath before you listen to Setting Fire to the Western Hemisphere, because it’s the last time you’ll taste air for almost eight minutes. Depending on where you live, that could be a good thing. Here in Brooklyn the air tastes like old deli meat, diesel fumes, and sun-baked dog shit.

Written and recorded in a span of four days (that probably saw black clouds raining rusty nails and suicidal stock market traders onto the roof of their UK recording compound), Confine assault listeners with a relentless blast of grinding powerviolence that strips extreme music down to the bare essentials: Loud and heavy. I’ve never seen a picture of drummer Rich Speakman, but with his gatling gun fills I’m guessing his arms and legs have bionic components. The riffs may share DNA with the dirtiest strands of punk, but Confine are to punk what salamanders are to Komodo Dragons. If this music bit you the bacteria would kill you within the hour.

While most of the album feels like the blur of a hollow-tipped bullet racing towards its target, there’s also the drum’n’vox breakdown transitioning into murky hardcore of “Perception,” the filthy sludge intro of “Abstraction,” and the queasy roar of “Formation and Transformation,” my personal favorite track that feels like it’s high on white phosphorus. But the band excels at grind, and cuts the oxygen supply while Chris Reese siphons just enough air to peel the skin from inside his throat with possessed shrieks that bring to mind Todd Jones of Nails. The only song that didn’t work for me was “Legacy,” with its jarring stop-and-start rhythm. This is still a vicious release from Witch Hunter Records, and would be perfect for a grindcore picnic with a portable stereo, accompanied by Napalm Death and Full of Hell LPs in the picnic basket. It’s officially summer here in the states now, so I hope I’m not the only one having grindcore picnics.

Listen to Setting Fire to the Western Hemisphere over on Bandcamp here:  http://confine.bandcamp.com/

And follow Confine on Facebook for news and merch:  https://www.facebook.com/confinegrind

REVIEW: OKUS - S/T

I don’t know what Okus means, but the first acronym my brain came up with was Only Kill Ugly Saints. The problem is, that omits all the photogenic saints that Okus could behead just with the sharp blade of their music. This Irish four-piece hails from Drogheda, a city that publically displays the severed head of Saint Oliver Plunkett. History says he was executed in London in 1681, but I think he dreamed of Okus’ music centuries before and it incinerated his faith so quickly that he decapitated himself. Their seven song self-titled long EP/short album is mean as hell and feels like it’s putting cigarettes out on your eardrums.

The album is built around a foundation of death-doom but often blasts into ferocious d-beat punk and noisy hardcore. While their bursts of blackened crust remind me of Young And In The Way, they’re more similar to bands like The Secret or Full of Hell who change tempos more drastically song to song, avoiding easy characterization. Okus’ music is so ugly (HOW UGLY IS IT?) I wouldn’t kiss it with my worst enemy’s bloody asshole. If you read this blog you know right now this is pretty much my way of writing a love poem to a band: Bloody assholes. And I typed that up before even noticing one of the members was in a band once called Bleeding Rectum. This really could be love.

My favorite moments on the album were the gut-churning and intimidating as fuck-all “Bodies” and the rabid grinder “Burn It To the Ground,” though “Light Obscene” also features a tasty metallic groove. Every sound on this album feels blackened, like the songs are heretics splashed with tar, covered in asp scales and ash, then burned alive in front of an audience of cheering children. My only concern is that a couple of the songs linger a bit long, like the two minute intro to “Light Obscene” that delays us from getting to the bone marrow of the song, and “Born In Chains” which seems to lumber forward after the third minute. Apart from these choices this is still a focused, vicious release that treats brutality like the art form it truly is. Also, just to save you a weird visit to eBay, you don’t need to live within spitting distance of a severed saint head to appreciate this music. Those heads are dumb expensive, spend the money on this album instead.

Listen to Okus over on Bandcamp, where this album is available as a “name your price” download:  http://okus.bandcamp.com/album/okus

And check them out on Facebook over here:  https://www.facebook.com/Okusband

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/

ART: HOWL PATCH UPGRADE

I was recently able to catch Howl on tour and watch them play with Pilgrim and Samothrace over at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn and they absolutely owned the night, playing some favorites from Full of Hell while also sharing cuts from the upcoming album, Bloodlines. I’m eagerly awaiting the album’s North American release on April 30th and expect to review it here with all the passion of Nosferatu finally touching a sleeping lady’s boob. Not that I’m pro-sleep molestation, but that dude put in his lonely castle-dwelling time. There's a link to some early information on it so you can geek out at the beautiful album art and anticipate this record as rabidly as I am.

Anyway, at the show I spotted Howl patches at the merch table and decided that my vest was in need of an upgrade. I’m usually a passionate advocate for the DIY aesthetic but I think this is one helluva good upgrade:

My homemade patch, which was just Sharpie marker and some cheap-ass red pen that miserable middle school teachers use to crush dreams on student essays:

They’re currently slaying at SXSW. Follow the links below to some goodies and support this awesome band, even if it’s just with a $4 patch.

Find info on Howl and Bloodlines here:  http://www.relapse.com/label/howl.html

And pre-order the album while listening to their amazing discography over at Bandcamp:  http://howl.bandcamp.com/