SCHAKALENS BROR – ‘HOCKEYPULVER’

Brash, fun, toothless Harsh Noise Guitar carnage from Schakalens Bror. Blood-drenched guitar strings wound into booming psychedelic feedback live improv, a mad axe man swings his terrible weapon in front of a huge steaming amp stack, notes bending and warping in rote primitivism, searing blasting unmixed (?) abandon, simple pedal effects stomped in and out, strangling high end spikes choked from the axe neck – little moments of fleet fucked flubbed fingered runs appear in the third track from within the haze, conjuring an abused, demented, inept virtuoso feel. Cheap, nasty and lo-fi. Total Guitar butchery. Grab some of their shit from Team Boro Tapes.

Bandcamp

FRET – ‘BECAUSE OF THE WEAK’

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a gutful and a half of the oleaginous flagshaggery that’s been clogging the arteries of this blighted nation since a certain overprivileged nonagenarian turned up her toes. Sanctuary from the forces of the fawning is urgently required and who better to provide it than ex-Napalm Death drummer and iron-fisted ringmaster of Circus Dubquake, Mick Harris. A timely reactivation of his fearsome Fret alias, ‘Because Of The Weak’ is industrial techno armed to the teeth and with mayhem in mind; a shockingly graphic illustration of man’s inhumanity to machine with little apparent purpose other than to destroy and be destroyed. Imagine the breakbeat-strewn arrhythmia of Skee Mask or the Zenker Brothers fermented and condensed to a toxic black magma and you’re in the vague vicinity of this mile-deep bomb crater, but the severity of the punishment Harris metes out here has precious few parallels. The menacing tone of track titles like ‘20oz Gripper’ and ‘Shut That Dog Up’ is reflected in the music’s withering hostility. Asteroid-sized kicks and breaks smash through ramparts of chest-crushing bass like boulders launched from a trebuchet, parabolas of ionised dub and hi-hat hiss glowing blood red in the fallout. Released via New York’s L.I.E.S. imprint whose roster of sickos and seditionists have long plied their trade at the seedier end of the hardcore continuum, ‘Because Of The Weak’ melts down techno’s hedonistic throne and recasts it into stun grenades. Obscenely wealthy monarchs, consider yourselves warned.

L.I.E.S. Records

ÄRID – ‘XII – FROM ANTHROPOPHAGIC WASTE BREEDS A WRITHING MUTAGENESIS’

Ärid is a one-man Black Metal project from the States, seemingly bent of reducing the current romanticism and Goth leanings of the Raw Black ‘scene’ to greasy cinders and returning the sound to something minimal, ugly, bleak and animal. Melted, necrotic Black Metal grounded in gnostic cadaver worship with extremely intense drumming and dead, thanatologist ambient atmosphere – grinding, rattling and gurgling in lunatic hyperblasting anti-human Black Metal putridity, scathing boiling extra-fill abstruse blasts forming the basis of hypnotising Raw Black Metal of rancorous, scabrous chords in minimal diving drone patterns, bending, warped noise guitar parts scaffolded to horrifically violent atavistic drumming, detailed with clattering fills, with some slower moments to let the pestilence breathe between rictus tom rolls, resplendent with subhuman croaking grotesque goblin vocal. Many of these songs register in a similar fashion to the best Grindcore, careening at inhuman speed through a dirge of chords in demented, frothing abandon before abruptly concluding. This album shimmers with black flames of irradiated necrotic energy and anti-human spite, truly fulfilling a descriptive remit as simple as ‘Raw Black Metal’ with supereon, fevered energy and filthy, phlegmy, necromantic abandon. A scowling masterpiece.

Eerie Silence Productions

RINUWAT – ‘DUA NAGA’

The glorious noise emanating from the Indonesian diaspora grows louder and more intoxicating with each passing day. A case in point, the eye-opening debut album from Melbourne-based ritualists Rinuwat, whose attritional fusion of grit, guitars and gamelan is crushing cousins with the far-flung furore of iconoclasts like BIG|BRAVE and Senyawa. Released late last year and given a vinyl reissue by that lightning rod for aural esoterica WV Sorcerer Productions, ‘Dua Naga’ is less an art-for-art’s-sake casting to the wind of drone metal’s touchstones than a fundamental reordering of its power structure. Heaviness just appointed a new cabinet. Drop the needle on opening track ‘Sewu’ and the nature of this chameleonic beast quickly becomes apparent. Less than one minute in, a colossal Krakatoan doom riff suddenly vaporises into choking ambient smog fitfully illuminated by the ominous clinking of metallophones and vocalist Karina Utomo’s hateful blackened rasp. It’s a dramatic yet seamless transposition that provides a template for the album as a whole, although ‘Dua Naga’’s breezeblock to the forehead powerplays are largely confined to its pitiless opening stretch. Venture deeper and as the darkness congeals around an eerie susurrus of gongs and flutes, Utomo’s extraordinary voice undergoes a paradigm shift, ascending from the abyssal to the astral plane like a seraph with its wings on fire. ‘Nagaloka’ brings the curtain down with one last burst from the apocalypse gun, but it’s impossible to resist an immediate rewind. A far cry from the humdrum holding patterns of so much contemporary metal, ‘Dua Naga’ employs the tools of tradition to build skyways to the future. Prepare to be ravaged.

WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片