THE CHISEL – ‘DECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY’ EP

The Chisel’s first 7″, released on wax by the inestimable La Vida Es Un Mus. Gnarled, spiteful bootboy Hardcore Punk for the dark times. Come friendly bombs! Toe-cutter slashing guitar licks, lithe power bass and storming, stomping drums, angry bastard vocal, wickedly catchy and brutal UK ’82 influenced Hardcore Punk ragers whipped up in an Oi Boy lather, storming the streets, hunting for turncoats! Venomous lyrics conjure images of class crime outrage, economic famine and violent clashes in the streets, hardcase cunts and Blackpool lights, deprivation and desperation. Miserably angry but with a no-good smile plastered on it’s face. An absolutely savage 7″ – once it tastes blood and locks it’s jaws, you’ll never get the fucking thing off! Total power.

La Vida Es Un Mus Disocs

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CAPTAIN THREE LEG – ‘THE BIRTH OF THE CREATURES TO CONQUER’

Some of the Captain’s girthiest, heaviest offerings can be found on ‘Birth of the Creatures to Conquer’, a grimoire of Gory, sludgy Grindcore culled from several recording sessions and featuring various C3L and Dismembered Fetus alum, with deliriously fat and sludgy Guitar/Grinding Bass sound and booming, blasting drumsound with a lot of variation into slow and mid paced tempos, crude and crud-flecked, gruesome and angry Grindcore with rehearsal room haze and excellent loud demo mix. Andy and Brian’s superlow un-shifted blood throat vocals are a thing of disgusting, headache-ripping beauty, and there’s some incredible riffing and lead work here, too, particularly amidst the slower atmospheric Death Metal-ish parts. The sound reminds me a little of German death pervs Dead but with a little less groove and sleaze amidst the deadly grinding. With not a great deal of time lapsed between each recording session, we get a fairly consistent-sounding record, hanging together well considering the disparity of tracks present. This is one the Captain Three Leg’s heaviest records, probably, and maybe their most approachable in terms of Grindcore or Gore. Fucken essential blasts within.

Mortville Noise

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TREX – ‘MIRROR’

Invariably with drum & bass, I gravitate less towards the hip than the trustworthy; artists and, perhaps more crucially, labels (Rupture LDN, Kalm & Spindall’s none-more-shady Nurtured Beatz, the venerable but reliably intrepid Metalheadz) whose unswerving commitment to blazing new trails stands in stark contrast to the trend-chasing aimlessness of fly-by-nights and also-rans too numerous to mention. An A-list imprint for more than two decades, Leeds-based Dispatch Recordings know the fundamentals of their craft like the backs of their bionic hands. Already in 2022 they’ve released three barnstorming EPs with two more in the pipeline, but as this truculent clutch of crunchers courtesy of Camden antagonist Trex proves, quantity never takes precedence over quality. In trademark fashion, bass supremacy is at the heart of what makes ‘Mirror’ tick, and it should go without saying that if you’re the sort of liquid-lapping lightweight who prefers bijou beats that splat like globs of blancmange on a coffee shop draining board, you’d be wise to find a different tree to bark up. Bar a solitary detour into more soulful territory, this is the hard stuff, IEDs of dancefloor-focused derangement primed to detonate the moment signal reaches subwoofer. The title track and ‘Crazy’, which feature the obstreperous hectoring of London MC Medic, both punch like prizefighters, but most eye-watering of all is ‘Duck Hunt’, a steel-reinforced stepper ripped asunder by the sort of atonal bass squall you’d get by attaching a foghorn to a gas compressor. You have been warned.

Dispatch Recordings

RESILIENCE – ‘UNDER AN ARYAN SUN’

Extremely unwieldy, grueling ardor of drugged one man midi Black Metal (?) from the end tymes of The End Commune. Bizarre and shamanic, enamored/obsessed with the ISIS conflicts – a dissonant, dissident and melodious uproar of devotional Avant Garde Black Metal violence rendered in awkward midi instrumentation, sure to appeal to those fans of the more esoteric and bizarre fringes of no audience raw Black Metal. A constricting, arresting, uniquely lo-fi instrumental Black Metal haram, far-sighted visions sculpted with bound and artless hands and in the throes of boundless imagination, rousing and dense, simple digital instruments with bleached raw presence working out weirdly complex and startling arrangements, very very mystic and low-rent. “i have so many riffs in me, they need to get out somehow… and i cant play the guitar.. so yeah…in honour of the martyrs and freedom fighters of the ISIS war”. This really has a feel of prison art to it. Fucking mental.

The End Commune

WADGE – ‘THE END OF ETHNOLOGY’

Wadge’s 2016 full length ‘The End Of Ethnology’ is a punishing, singular ordeal of Grindcore excellence. Ultra blasting, ultra dynamic, ultra unnatural sounding drum programming, wall of crushing Guitar with crossover thrashing heavy hardcore riff mania and infuriated vocal fury and insensitivity, a mastercraft of total riff feast breathless Grindcore. There’s an absence of Tiki interests here, thematically hewing closer to both Wadge’s earliest incarnations ala the self titled 10″, and more recent deviations of style in Paulo’s discography, like Barking Orders’ ‘Scionide’ EP. This record is a statement of ongoing intent from a master of the microgenre. Paul’s cryptic lyrical caustics (seriously, the lyrics on this thing are deadpan awesome – “Couldn’t pitch shift his way out of a paper bag – But from behind his drum machine he swears he murders fags” on the majestic ‘Pimple Popper Pornogrind’), and capacity to sharpen barbed jabs into ego withering literary Grind tirades matches his insistence on operating within a genre realm almost entirely of his own occupation, at this point. No one is making devotional Drum Machine Grindcore like this with anything like the sort of creativity, craft and total fucking intent that Wadge employs with masterly aplomb here. Drum machines fucking rule. Buy a disc. Instant classic.

“This album is for those who value the ability to freely speak your mind over the modern worry of tiptoeing through the misguided muck of feelings. The anti-fascists have become the fascists. Modern day witch hunters trampling through life with stakes in their eyes. Redefining language and soothsaying thought. No one is immune from their delusional social arson, but only you can decide whether or not you burn. Stop, drop and roll, motherfuckers.

This album is for our comrades around the world. Oceans and miles separate us, but the affinity for this wretched filth keeps us close.”

Mortville Noise

GOLDEN CAT PAGODA – ‘ENTROPY’

There’s a strange irony in the fact that as black metal hurtles towards middle age, it’s the genre’s least orthodox practitioners (Cloak Of Altering, Sleepwalker, the magnificently deranged Mamaleek, et al) who, in spirit if not sound, seem most to embody its founding principles of dissidence and extremity. Take – if your constitution can handle it – Vancouver-based Golden Cat Pagoda 金猫塔, a one-man(iac) fever dream generator who, rather than play footsie with the corpse-painted avatar of tradition, spikes its drink with adrenochrome then abandons it gibbering and paranoid in the mirror maze of a derelict funhouse. Warped and contorted into outlandish configurations, the black metal of ‘Entropy 熵’ (an apposite title if ever there was one) is a miasmic morass of paradox and incongruity where genre touchstones like blast beats and tremolo riffs are reduced to bit part status and chaos of an altogether more inscrutable kind reigns supreme. Lean in close (but not TOO close, mind) and the glistening innards of this nightmarish sinfonietta come fully into focus; sibilant vocals that percolate like gas bubbles through radioactive glycerine, acrid geysers of darkside vaporwave and jazz-mangled crypto-prog, and as if that wasn’t enough, a brief but utterly unhinged foray into no-fi surf rock that has more in common with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns than Gorgoroth. ‘Entropy’ may not be cvlt in the inflexible sense perpetuated by legions of identikit second wavers, but as an exemplar of black metal’s transgressive ideals, it’s as authentic as it gets. Essential.

Pest Productions

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MONRELLA / JK FLESH SPLIT – ‘SEE RED’

Excellently reductive heavy Techno split with plenty of manacling Funk to move your shackled feet to. A meeting of Napalm Death Side A alumni, here treading rather different yet no less alienated waters – scabrous ancient Techno beats and rugged Bass thuds, crushed production to turn inner-verse spaces into quantum realms, minimal melters to cleanse the bacteria. Mick Harris’ Monrella brings turbine thrust menace and grooving thud kick drive, maximalist and malformed Techno, gritted teeth and havin’ it all alone. Brutal and thuggish. Justin Broadrick’s JK Flesh churns the black aqueous liquor of his recent works into a fine elxir of Techno tar, scabby lo-fi and Industrial-heavy in inference but by way of hard-hitting old tek influence like Basic Channel. Furiously funky and fucking derelict stoned, murderous and diabolically driven. Fire this through an indecent sound system and further alienate yourself from your IRL peers and betters. This split is hard as fukk.

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MOЛЧAT ДOMA – ‘ЭTAЖИ’

Молчат Дома’s first full length ‘Этажи’ plies a miserable trade in vampiric Post Punk and catchy, melodious urban gothic Darkwave with spartan instrumentation, archaic electronics and mournful tones, cold and cryptic swing and stalking, sombre intensity… wobbly, wavering synthesizers, ancient drum machines click the rhythms beneath frigid strings and murky Bass working hook-laden arrangements, impassioned zombi danz vocal delivered over the airwaves from the bunker across achingly, dismally beautiful melody and consonance, enveloped in frozen angular production with a slight distance haze like vodka on the engineer’s breath. A perfectly kitsch/krushed crystalisation of brittle poppy Post Punk/Darkwave. Icy and grimy and kind of perfect. I hear their music all over the place now, amidst numerous television and internet advertisements and on decent radio, and I’m very pleased that Молчат Дома have managed a sideways ascension into mainstream interest. Cool.

Sacred Bones Records

ANATOMY OF THE HEADS – ‘A BANISHMENT OF BLOODSHED AND SUPERSTITION’

The newest full length from martian jesuit pineapple pyramid-schemers Anatomy Of The Heads. Spiritually insane lounge Jazz Fusion Rock Tropicana to amuse and disturb, possessive arrangements of languid phosphorescent Jazz & Soft Rock to stir vegetative states of inner exploration, deep voiced jungle cult leaders exalt a world of sweaty jazz hunter hazed psychedelia and lush Jurassic sound effluvia, constructed from all manner of musical and non-musical sources. I can barely even fathom the third mind that could imagine these songs, let alone conjure them so singularly. This is a precise Noise of exquisite design and rich in unfathomable concepts, bad vibes lounge man-lizards amidst their unknowable and dreadful tasks, dissonant and disconcerting yet tranquilizing and lulling, exceptionally exotic and quixotic. A very strange and unique project – let the Sgt. Psyops Lizard Hearts Club Band waltz you down the primrose path of your screaming reptilian subconscious. Sweltering Hell Jazz!

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GRANDMASTER MASESE SELF TITLED

Africa was the epicentre of a future-fracturing sonic earthquake in 2021. From Mali in the east to Tanzania in the west, its fissures propagated outwards at improbable speed, rupturing and rapturing everything in their path, and in the process laid permanent waste to the fatuous (not to mention ideologically suspect) notion that all the music produced by this vast continent could be shoehorned into a single genre. Brilliance bloomed everywhere, a case in point, the kaleidoscopic clamour of self-styled “urban griot” Grandmaster Masese, a Kenyan polymath with irons in numerous fires including teaching, writing and human rights advocacy, but who as a musician, is one of only a select few living practitioners of the obokano, an eight-stringed Gusii lyre with a sound like an ultra-resonant, steel-strung upright bass with a swarm of hornets in its soundbox. Veering about as far from the blandfest of commodified, colour supplement Afrobeat as it’s possible to get, Masese and his band of cavalier virtuosos zone in on a succession of propulsive, fissile grooves that teeter on the brink of arrhythmia, barnstorming their way to avant-funk nirvana with more shake, rattle and roll than an entire festival bill of homegrown rock bands could conceivably muster. Whipped into a frenzy by Masese’s shamanic rabble-rousing, these bombilating blasts of quasi-industrial psych-folk and refractory jazz-punk should be essential listening for anyone disenchanted with the sterile homogeneity of so much Western pop. Just don’t call it ‘world music’, or this pigshit-dipped cruise missile is heading straight for your conservatory.

Dagoretti Records

 

GODSTOMPER – ‘HELL’S GRIM TYRANT’

Sunnyvale’s finest sons Godstomper, with their 2001 full length follow up to the irascible ‘Heavy Metal Vomit Party’, 22 listed trax/99 coded trax of godlessly noisy-as-all-sin Bass & Drums barbaric Punk Noisecore violence. Godstomper’s periphery to OG proper West Coast Power Violence is ever present in their stop/start/slow/fast drawn out song structure style, riff slaw Bass nailbomb detonation, cyclical blasting drums chaos and simply furious fills styles, blown the fukk out tape recorded Bass string violence, dense as hell with flesh-ripping mid Bass sound and overwhelming peaked drums, all encrusted with fuzz and grime. ‘Hell’s Grim Tyrant’  has a South American Noisecore sound and vibe to it, like Attaque Sonico or Cacasonica, but with crustier Punk leanings. Fucken stoker!

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