REVIEW: SEALCLUBBER - STOICAL

Starting with a song titled “Tales of a Romanian Horse Whisperer,” UK mood-ruiners Sealclubber immediately bludgeon the listener with noisy sludge. Based on the prevailing sense of dread and hostility in the scabrous songs on Stoical, I’m guessing this horse whisperer has more in common with the deranged theatrics and animal mutilation of Equus than that Robert Redford snooze-fest.

Speaking of animal mutilation, you might have frowned at that band name already. If it’s any solace, the violent intentions of these songs don’t stop at aquatic mammals, and humans are very much in danger once pressing play. With their barbed riffs and the pitch-black ugliness of Drunk Dad and Trap Them, Sealclubber feel like Deadguy if they lasted long enough to have an experimental sludge phase. Like the bands mentioned, Sealclubber’s songs aren’t just sutured opiate-abusing crusty gutterpunk riffs tuned to the brown note. Even in a furious barnburner like “Haima,” the song scavenges elements of hardcore and stoner metal to create a richly textured soundtrack for giving and receiving shit news.

Despite a three-plus minute atmospheric interlude frustratingly murdering momentum, the album quickly regains its footing with “Vows of Silence.” Between suckerpunches of distortion, the reverb of callused fingers scraping over guitar strings leads to a foreboding bass tone that floats above the song like a storm cloud ready to empty apocalyptic rainfall.

It’s a fitting prelude to the disarmingly pensive epic “I Only Desire the Things That Will Destroy Me in the End.” That title likely applies to most fans of heavy music, whether it be regarding their bad habits, currently undiscovered crimes, or the headbanging riffs that will eventually snap their necks. The song proceeds patiently, feeling its way along desolate corridors. Two-thirds of the way through its almost twelve-minute runtime, the song confronts the bloody aftermath it was seeimngly trying to avoid. While the climax isn’t as destructive as hinted by the album’s first half, it still feels like the inevitable victory of baser instincts, where volume rules and subtlety burns away like bong resin. It’s a nuanced track that lingers in the listener’s mind long after it gently fades out.

While their two-song EP Sticky River was impressive, this is a definite leap forward for Sealclubber. While retaining their nihilistic bite, they also build soundscapes that reflect a rotting metropolis in a puddle of mud, blood, and petrol. Looking out my window right now, the view sure as hell sounds familiar.

Follow Sealclubber over on Facebook and check for news on a Stoical pre-order, available from Medusa Crush Recordings on February 5th.

TOP 50 HEAVY ALBUMS OF 2015

 

Google search result for "metal 2015"

With 2016 quickly approaching, it’s time to celebrate the end of the year the way journalists and critics know best: LISTS.

It’s impossible to account for all of the solid music I listened to this year. Even as this list bloated to 50 albums, I had to wrestle with my final choices. I have no doubt that if I look at this list in another year, decade, hell, even another week, the rankings could shift and shuffle depending on my mood, how crowded the subway is that morning, etc. Feel free to inform me of my lousy my taste, how overrated band A is, how album B is obviously the top selection of the year, and how I’ve terribly underrepresented genre C.

2015 Top 50 Heavy Albums of the Year

1.    Desolate Shrine – The Heart of the Netherworld

2.    Horrendous – Anareta

3.    Tribulation – The Children of the Night

4.    SUMAC – The Deal

5.    Behold! The Monolith – Architects of the Void

6.    VHÖL – Deeper Than Sky

7.    Khemmis – Absolution

8.    Cruciamentum – Charnel Passages

9.    Immortal Bird – Empress/Abscess

10.  Dragged Into Sunlight/Gnaw Their Tongues – N.V.

11.  Elder – Lore

12.  Gruesome – Savage Lands

13.  False – Untitled

14.  Deafheaven – New Bermuda

15.  Panopticon – Autumn Eternal

16.  Ramming Speed – No Epitaphs

17.  Baroness – Purple

18.  Wailin Storms – One Foot in the Flesh Grave

19.  High on Fire – Luminiferous

20.  Adversarial – Death, Endless Nothing and the Black Knife of Nihilism

21.  Napalm Death – Apex Predator/Easy Meat

22.  Paradise Lost – The Plague Within

23.  Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats – The Night Creeper

24.  Bell Witch – Four Phantoms

25.  Bosse-de-Nage – All Fours

26.  Abyss – Heretical Anatomy

27.  Meatwound – Addio

28.  Black Breath – Slaves Beyond Death

29.  Satan – Atom by Atom

30.  Ur Draugr – With Hunger Undying

31.  Shroud of the Heretic – Unorthodox Equilibrium

32.  Burrows – Mar

33.  Vastum – Hole Below

34.  Chapel of Disease – Mysterious Ways of Repetitive Art

35.  Tsjuder – Antiliv

36.  Scythian – Hubris in Excelsis

37.  Vattnet Viskar – Settler

38.  Sathanas – Worship the Devil

39.  Clutch – Psychic Warfare

40.  Ahab – The Boats of the Glen Carrig

41.  Noisem – Blossoming Decay

42.  Metz – II

43.  Lord Dying – Poisoned Altars

44.  With the Dead – With the Dead

45.  The Kill – Kill Them...All

46.  We Dream Alone – Weightless, But Still Sinking

47.  Spacebeast – Spacebeast

48.  Plaguewielder – Succumb to the Ash

49.  Iced Out – Man’s Ruin

50.  Pissgrave – Suicide Euphoria

If you haven’t checked it out yet, go buy issue #135 of Decibel Magazine, where the whole staff selects the Top 40 Extreme Albums of the Year.

Check out all the other lists popping up around this time, and feel free to send Tweets about my shitty taste over to @MisterGrowl

REVIEW: HOLLOW LEG - ABYSMAL

Sometimes I forget I’m considered a music critic, because I’m really just a fan boy lucky enough to occasionally be paid for my opinions. But critics LOVE when an album/movie/book title can be used as a simple headline; let’s say, for example, the Seymour Hoffman/DeNiro film Flawless (Not quite Flawless, LOLOLOLOL!). Here we have an album named Abysmal, from Hollow Leg, a band from northern Florida that has an “affinity for the roots of American blues music and English metal,” so says their promo material. ‘Abysmal’ just happens to be one of those beautiful words that can be used to both praise and reprimand a piece of art; abysmal most often refers to something of poor quality, but can also describe something that is limitless and deeply profound. Boasting powerful performances from each musician, and offering eight tracks of zero-horseshit, Sabbath-informed sludge (is there any other kind?), Abysmal is built on a solid blues rock foundation with hardcore intensity and addresses themes that may not reach profundity, but are absolutely universal.

I first need to mention that in the second song, “8 Dead (in a Mobile Home),” I heard Scott Angelacos’ howl and immediately thought, “Oh shit, how did it take me a full song to realize this is the Junior Bruce vocalist?” He has one of those instantly recognizable voices that can’t be unheard. I say this more as a warning for non-metalheads: You will be haunted by the voice of Angelacos, which is strong enough to tattoo pentagrams in your ear canal. For metal fans: Rejoice, because his delivery is singularly awesome.

Most of the album feels like Iron Monkey accidentally stumbled into slightly gentler melodies. “Ride to Ruin” introduces a fuzzy higher-register lead to join Tom Crowther’s burly bass tones, and will be my motorcycle soundtrack when I’m eventually an outlaw biker with an eight-foot long beard. Brent Lynch provides some memorable riffs here, with “Blissful Nothing” syphoning Eyehategod’s groove and capturing the slow-motion sense of a day passing sluggishly on hashish, and “Cry Havoc” trapping the listener in an alligator death-roll as drummer Tim Creter goes in for the kill after some Big Black-era Orange Goblin goodness.

While the mixing on both “The Dog” and “Lord Annihilation” feels a little flat, lacking contrast and punch despite some great hooks and well-built tension, Abysmal is an album that’s the middle sprinter in a relay race, taking the baton from the UK’s best doom bands and handing it off to the crusty, lice-scalped troublemakers of the sludge scene. Though the song structures are closely related to 90s hardcore, this album will lead riff-worshipping fanatics of the slow and heavy into the exceptionally loud, wolf-infested abyss. And that, right there, is as close to a title-related catchphrase as I get.

Check out Abysmal over on bandcamp and get yourself the album on vinyl, or by instant download:  http://hollowleg666.bandcamp.com/

And check out Hollow Leg over on Facebook, and maybe some day they will answer what they would hide in a prosthetic limb:  https://www.facebook.com/hollowlegfl

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: NO FEALTY / KOLLAPSE - SPLIT 7"

Hello, growlers. It’s Decibel Magazine deadline week, so my attention has been (happily) kidnapped to focus on a few fun pieces for issue #112, but I was alerted that a band previously featured on Mister Growl is coming out with a new split 7” record.

If you recall, I reviewed No Fealty’s debut In the Shadow of the Monolith back in August, and said “there’s enough fury here to inspire god to eat his cherubs.” The Copenhagen band’s newest song, Side A’s “Ravished,” combines rabid noise and a crusty D-beat to create a chaotic take on hardcore punk that’s meaner than a retired executioner and heavier than his crippling guilt. They’re a socially conscious band that actually sounds dangerous.

Kollapse are from Aalborg, Denmark, and offer a bleak track called “Father,” which feels like sludgy post-hardcore covered in scabs, scars, and thorns. With tortured, throaty vocals and deliberate momentum, it feels like a march towards the edge of a cliff.

It’s about a 5 hour drive between these two Danish cities, and there’s also distance between their approaches to heavy music: Kollapse offer mood and atmosphere and structure, while No Fealty endeavors to tear every structure down into a pile of rubble. It’s worth your time, and acts as a solid introduction to both bands.

Check out Kollapse’s track for the split over here on Bandcamp: http://kollapse.bandcamp.com/

And while you’re at it, check out No Fealty’s In the Shadow of the Monolith over here. I expect it to be on my list of “Top 50 Albums of the 2013” and it’s still offered as a “Name Your Price” download: http://nofealty.bandcamp.com/

REVIEW: SERVANTS OF THE MIST - SUICIDE SEX PACT

Tampa, FL may not seem like the doom capital of the world, with their sunshine and delicious oranges and all that, but then a band like Servants of the Mist comes along with Suicide Sex Pact, an EP so bleak and filthy that it blocks the light traveling from dying stars and rots fruit from the trees.

From the opening uneasy clean singing of a passage from “Jesus Loves Me,” which captures the same creepy melancholia as Harvey Milk’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Servants of the Mist create a world where light is long-extinct and hope’s been violently snuffed. Album opener “Absence” introduces their scorched funeral doom, which sounds like the aural equivalent of finger painting with urn ash on a canvas of stretched skin torn from a dead priest’s back. This sort of pitch-black doom inspires thoughts of Bongripper and Cough, mixed with the drama of early My Dying Bride.

“Behind the Curtain” continues the band’s glacial determination with uncompromising heaviness. I wasn’t able to truly conceive of canyons being carved by icy structures until I heard the riff in this song. It feels a little like Evoken, if their songs were trapped in endless hallucinogen-fueled night terrors. The lead guitar in this song and album closer “Suicide Sex Pact” didn’t feel totally committed, with wavering hints of bluesy groove that fizzle instead of sizzle. This is the only aspect of the latter two songs that make me question if they totally earn the song length (none of the songs are briefer than 9 minutes). Fortunately, I’m willing to forgive 2 minutes among 30 when the rest of the album features guitar fuzz thicker than a blanket used to smother plague victims in their sleep. Richard Smyth Jr.’s vocals could scrape muscle from bone like an autopsy instrument, with curdling shrieks and meaty growls that give way to a no-wave gothic chant about 25 minutes into the album for a brief reprieve from ferocity. The breakdown of slow motion death rock slams back into relentless tomb-smashing doom before the feedback lifts like smoke and dust, revealing a pile of lifeless nude bodies.

With audio collage work reminiscent of Eyehategod’s more experimental passages and a muscular, bass-heavy attack that invokes Primitive Man and Conan, Suicide Sex Pact should interest fans of the loud, mean, and ugly. Maybe those aren’t adjectives I’d use on a dating profile, but when it comes to extreme metal, that’s love at first sight.

Go check out Servants of the Mist on Facebook and follow their updates as release information surfaces for Suicide Sex Pact:  https://www.facebook.com/servantsofthemist

Check out a preview of the title track over here: https://soundcloud.com/hbnbm/servants-of-the-mist-suicide

REVIEW: GURT / LIMB - SPLIT ROAST

I don’t always review albums song by song, but when I do, it’s usually a Witch Hunter Records release. The newest album from the DIY label based in the UK is a truly collaborative effort from two filthy sludge bands with varying approaches to the subgenre. On this split EP, both bands include, in order, one new original song, a cover of their choosing, and a cover of a song by the other band sharing the split. I absolutely love this approach, as it invites some playful competition and camaraderie as well. Here are my thoughts on each song:

GURT

1) Sophisticate - Gurt start the hunting party with a throbbing rhythm and a thick, mucky sound that invokes Slabdragger and the bluesy flourishes and brawny chugging of late-career Pantera. Take old Chicago electric blues, channel it through an Orange amp, then dip it in hot tar and vulture feathers. The vocals from Growth/Gareth Kelly sound like the crusty howls of a swampland degenerate from a Cormac McCarthy novel.

2) Psycho Killer - Yep, a Talking Heads cover. There’s the initial, beard-growing bass tone from Spice/David Blakemore, then the novelty of hearing David Byrne’s voice replaced by the caustic roar of a gutter demon. Parts of the song feel a bit rigid (the fa-fa-fas don’t work quite as well as the ay-ay-ays, for those  familiar with the moments of non-lyrical vocals), but the last minute of sprawling, trippy rock is totally inspired, and Gurt own this song and make it their own monster.

3) Gift of the Sun - Covering the title track of the last Limb EP, Gurt extend the psychedelic rock with shades of Church of Misery’s quietest moments, and then rips a hole in the earth’s crust with a riff that could summon Cthulhu for its turn at the hookah. This song is seriously, supernaturally heavy.

LIMB

1) Plaguedoctor - Groovy sludge that’s closer to stoner metal with its hallucinogenic bounce, like Electric Wizard without the occult, just a perpetually loaded bong and a bathtub full of homemade swill. Great song, catchy as hell is hot. Rob Hoey’s vocals remind me of LG Petrov from Entombed, if his throat was shredded from acid tab paper cuts.

2) Son and Daughter - Covering a supremely heavy Queen song from their debut album, Limb explore gender roles with a strong, Sabbath stomp. I was expecting some harmonica to join the fray, as this song feels like it’s dressed up in a denim jacket with fringe. They cut the hacky synth effects that plague the original and trim it down to basics, resulting in awesome throwback heavy rock with raw-doggin’ attitude.

3) Soapfeast - Choosing a Gurt song from another split, the shared EP with Dopefight, Limb soak in the joys of profanity and all its unexpected combinations, as the vocals are the most diseased on the EP as they chant the mantra “you really don’t give a cunting fuck.” The song itself has a surprisingly low-key, smoke-a-spliff-in-the-van’s-back-seat energy, apart from one dangerously bombastic release of fury.

In summary, I had a blast with this entire release. Sludge is often considered one of the more misanthropic genres, riddled with tales of addiction and hatred and self-loathing. But on Split Roast, Gurt and Limb both scoop their sloppy, delicious gruel onto the listener’s plate and growl with a grin, “Eat up, you cunting fuck.” And that’s music to my ears.

Listen to Gurt and Limb over here, where Witch Hunter Records always makes the albums available as a “Name your price” download. Then buy the CD, which is made with a completely DIY mentality, and features artwork from the bands:  http://witchhunterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/split-roast

Add Gurt here on Facebook, and follow their swampy reign:  https://www.facebook.com/GURTsludge

And do the same for Limb, while convincing them to record the Queen epic “The Prophet’s Song” in the future:  https://www.facebook.com/LimbTheBand