RADIOACTIVITY SELF TITLED

Blistering, burgeoning Power Pop from the States, formed from the ashes of The Novice and featuring members of the excellent Marked Men. Saccharine and gloriously lo-fi, sweet as toothache Punk Rock bangers iridescent with glucose Pop earworm melody and clicking away on the Geiger counter of irradiated sincerity. Dude howlin’ vocal, slashing shimmering bright Guitar and pitch perfect Bass coils, precise energetic drumming from beneath the radiation. Catchy as hell, beautifully simple and poignant but totally beer-worthy, fun and sometimes-fast, too. Maudlin melancholia this aint! The album’s production perfectly envelops the sweet power pop larvae in a leaden sarcophagus of warm narco fuzz, sanding off edges but not sacrificing the noise. This record’s nearly 10 years old already, yet none of the radioactivity within has diminished in it’s corrupting power. Simply brilliant.

Dirtnap Records

BLACK FUCKING CANCER – ‘PROCREATE INVERSE’

Band names are nothing if not revealing. Coldplay, for example, is a Chaucerian synonym for ‘shite’, and Black Fucking Cancer … well let’s just say, if you’re at all unsure what path this conclave of crueltors is likely to lead you down, you’d be well advised to stop reading now. The follow-up to ‘Boundless Arcane Invokations’, 2019’s shockingly violent split with fellow Californians Gloam, ‘Procreate Inverse’ is black metal as its legendary progenitors originally envisaged; music so hateful, so extreme in its rejection of aestheticism that, to an outsider, it barely even qualifies as such. Not that we’d be here otherwise of course, but christ on a grim and frostbitten bike, this is SAVAGE. Like a pack of starving wolves, Black Fucking Cancer launch their ambush before you’ve even drawn breath, dragging you throat first back to their lair where a clique of black-cowled (psycho)pathologists stand unnervingly close to a dissection table brandishing hacksaws. Unrelenting in its viciousness, the hope-destroying onslaught of pure misanthropic fury BFC unleash may be kissing cousins with the work of their notorious forebears, but even Mayhem in their prime never surged this hard or with such malicious intent. A lightning-struck hypervortex of necrotising riff ravagement, tortured abyssal shrieks and skull-denting blast-beat fusillades, ‘Procreate Inverse’ is one of US black metal’s finest, Ed Sheeran-vaporising hours. The devil is most definitely in the detail.

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

MANGA SAINT HILAIRE – ‘ACTIVATED’ & ‘ACTIVATED REMIX FT ROACHEE, SNOWY & LOGAN OLM’

A blazing, brusque production here from Grime legend Manga Saint Hilaire, a rubber bullet deep impact triple bass pulse hitter replete with OG sampling with flavourful atmospheric haze, crisp production sounds with round fatass Bass shapes and bars of the total real/real grounded from Manga. Then come the remix with a re-arranged Bass and beats assembly bob-and-weave, fat as fuck rhythm cruise and masterful sample re-application, and guest bars from three unique voices, Roachee grandstands on imperious, stately form, Logan burns both sides of the toast with a blowtorch and Snowy slides across the beat like some charismatic ne’er-do-well. Manga then closes out the tune with two bars showing his complex flow, thoughtful expressions and deserving hype. Still releasing absolute dissolute fire and positive energy eruption. These things are infectious, sure to get your peers throwing mental shapes – fucking brilliant!

Bandcamp

EXPRESSION OF PAIN SELF TITLED

Expression Of Pain’s self titled full length record, a solid concrete fist of face pulping Grindcore excellence, taking the miserable baton from Excruciating Terror (dig that logo) and wielding it like a wrecking ball. 16 tracks of streamlined, lead lined pummeling blast beat laden Grindcore with dynamic as fuck wallcrusher drumming and gut wrenching, voluminous Guitar/Bass tone, ruthlessly violent and furiously incensed Crustcore cranked up to 12, extra-heavy crushing sides of crust-seared strings decimate eardrums over the supertight blast beats and quick transitions to beat-down, thrash out parts, and a vocal so seething you can feel the fucking spittle, all sealed in perfectly loud, dry, hulking production – this is a work of masterly balance, deftly crafted and precise, yet utterly deranged and imbued with the spirit of chaos, like it’s going to burst and fall apart at the joints at any moment. A drum performance for the ages. Fans of Insect Warfare and Internal Rot should not hesitate – his thing will punch all those teeth out of your fucken head. Grindfather here in the UK will be handling the cassette release, Headsplit in the States will release the CD. Rest well, master blaster.

Blast Addict

SISSY SPACEK – ‘FEATURELESS THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM’

One of Sissy Spacek’s most recent full length records, released in 2020. Weise/Randall/Mumma triple vocal low/high cut-up attack with no discernable human from whence they emanate, effects mutilation, total enmity of bulldozing Bass low end rumble and treble feedback mid-range hiss battery, Mumma brutalising the kit in abstruse blast beat patterns with lots of wry jazzy touches discernable within the maelstrom, seemingly summoned live in the grip of demented process improvisation and captured in gritty rehearsal room ambience tape, with edits at a minimum. Tracks just smash into one another at terminal velocity, with barely any count-ins. A fucking savage fugue of leaden psychedelic Noisecore, rendered in the corporeal outside aesthetic comfort or bargain, mercilessly tagging your ego with a stun gun. A senseless and post-human mind split. Proper cenobyte ‘music’. Fucking bananas. Bananas fucking?

Helicopter

Bandcamp

STINKIN SLUMROK – ‘STINK-O-VISION’

Hip-hop, particularly the by-numbers mainstream variant, is in the grip of a wholesomeness pandemic. Tune in to any chart-oriented radio station and it’s seldom long before some insufferably earnest gobshite called Lil or Yung starts wittering on about how their grandmother brought them up to fear the wrath of the Lord and abstain from impure thought. It’s enough to make Ol’ Dirty Bastard spin in his grave, but fortunately, succour is at hand in the shape of Blah’s premier filth junkie Stinkin Slumrok, the proudly unacceptable face of UK rap music who returns to the fray following an 18-month absence in fantastically disreputable form. By any standard, ‘Stink-O-Vision’ is a blast, but its sordid secrets don’t give themselves up without a fight. Even with the acres of breathing space afforded by Lee Scott and Jack Chard’s funk-flossed production, Slummy’s outlandish diction (you’ll be convinced he’s rapping with a mouthful of tarantulas) renders the gonzo psychobabble that constitutes his flow next to impenetrable. Retune your cochlear nerve though, and a depraved new world of squalor, sloppy sex and skunk abuse, centred on a wickedly funny subversion of Foreigner’s emetic power ballad ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, slowly begins to materialise. With irreverent guest verses from the lurid likes of Bisk, King Grubb and Black Josh, plus an uncredited but uproarious cameo courtesy of Blackburn’s answer to Ming The Merciless, Bill Shakes, ‘Stink-O-Vision’ is essential listening for anyone to whom hygiene is a dirty word. Get putrid.

Blah Records

KRYPTOGRAF – ‘THE ELDORADO SPELL’

Bell-bottoms at the ready, everybody. Revelling in the sound of the early 70s freak scene, Kryptograf’s sophomore LP has more to it than the average retro-rock shtick. Gloomily psychedelic and with just a hint of prog, there’s a stoned sense of murkiness that pervades the whole album without it ever lapsing into lethargy. Mostly, the music is delivered with a primal intensity which is well aided by dry, punchy production; the drum sound on here could batter your jaw clean off, and the distortion is rolled back just enough so it’s not full-on fuzz blasting, giving the guitar tones a rich, biting clarity. This mix of power instrumentation and brute force sits well with the roaring dude-vocal liberally doused in cavernous reverb – proper headband shit. They’ve got a real knack for melody too, most of these tracks have a juicy hook for your ear to chew on; I’ve had the chorus of “Cosmic Suicide” firmly lodged in my head for days. It could be argued that these fellas were “born too late”… but they’ve arrived at just the right time for me.

Bandcamp

HORNS & HOOVES – ‘MORBID LUST’

Perverted sacrosanct Speed/Black/Thrash Metal from New York, a side project of the band Spite. ‘Morbid Lust’ is a liturgical text of  ripping speed metal trill-heavy riffing, fat Bass underpinning the eerie ire of drumming, and uproariously demented cackling vocal emanations from the blackened soul dripping with STDs, hellhammering away in strange and vulgar forms with mid-paced motorcycle booted hard rocking, full throttle poserscything thrash and rollicking double bass passages, with crescendos of songs reaching catchy, invasive orgasmic peaks before descending into spent ruin. Dionysian indeed. A whole heap of drunken, sextanic debauchery, uproariously deliciously melodic Black/Speed/Thrash possessed with the Geist of evil!

Bandcamp

JUCIFER – ‘نظم’

The two-headed chameleon deity Jucifer transmutes beyond genre confines once again and mesmerizes with ‘نظم’ (‘NAZM’), a full length of rich, powerful, mystic desert Rock and Pop in modal arrangement, acoustic desert-walking shamanism music which matches Jucifer’s nomad lifestyle in artistic intent, indebted to the cultural and of course musical influences of the ME/NA regions. Bombastic Bedouin Rock formed on ancient foundation of acoustic Bass (surely not?) instrumental modal groove and dirge, adorned with enraptured, possessed  vocals in Arabic with sand swept melody, intensely heavy and mesmeric as Jucifer always is, but achieved through entirely unique, seemingly unamplified (for Jucifer, at least) means and methods, with an arresting mystique to the production, very loud and present, archaic ambience and sun-baked altitude… there’s a lot of layers of percussion and droning melodies, tablas resounding, stringed instruments wheezing and clamoring in folkish ecstasy… not only tangentially does this remind me of some of Muslimgauze’s live recordings, both in choice of samples and sounds within his work and the intended vibe it creates. Magnetic, mythological Desert power.

Bandcamp

SILVER RICHARDS – ‘VOLUME 128’

Shimmering grooves and anonymous styles from Silver Richards, originally released digitally by luxury elite’s legendary Fortune 500. ‘Volume 128′ covers a lot of ground across the various smaller sub-categories of Vaporwave, combining styles and vibez from track to track to create a kind of mix tape feel. Lots of sensuous/cheezy late-nite lo fi loops, vapid and wide-eyed vaporfunk refrains and super-screwed piano slow jams sway behind a thousand filters. Track 3 is a 2013 Cloud Rap type banger with leanin’ sample feed, spacious clap-drenched beats, and purple spittin’ on the right side of marble mouf from Gold Midas, an interesting addition to the track list which well exemplifies Silver Richards varied/scattered VHS mixtape approach. In here it’s always a simulated summer’s day, getting supremely baked and sunbaked at the edge of the pool, or is that just an ephemeral screensaver in the mind’s eye? An advertisement for the nostalgist’s impossible product.

Palm ’84

DIRTY NIPS – ‘CAN O’ DIRTY DEMO NIPPLES’

A foetid collection of raw ‘n’ nasty garage psych demos spewed forth from the gutters of Bristol. Looks like this is Dirty Nips’ first release, and god damn, they come swinging right out of the gate. “For a good ol’ nasty time”, reads the tagline on the front cover, and that’s exactly what is delivered. As with all good demo tapes, this one sounds like it was recorded on a shoestring budget and is all the better for it (just checked the credits – recorded in various basements. Perfect.) considering the material that lies within: dirty great swathes of blown-out fuzzrock, clad in harsh, buzzing guitar tones and crowned with similarly warped vocals. There’s a couple of lysergically soft “Barratt-plays-the-blues” type moments to dig too; but they’re over pretty quickly before you’re once again savouring the sensation of having your skull battered to pieces by a dozen pairs of sweaty, greasy tits. I recommend getting a cassette copy that can be bagged on their Bandcamp page; there’s five bonus jams on the flipside after the demos. A great burst of promise from some new kids on the stoner block. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Bandcamp