God Is War’s ‘Prison Break’, released by Danvers State on cassette in 2021. Skittering, unwieldy, broken legged breaks forced through the fucking modular meatgrinder, smashing and pulverising amen breaks into hundreds of broken pieces and forming alien dynamics blood spatter patterns, beat sequences temporally warped and pressure coiled amidst a shuffle of intense atmospheres. Attention is paid to plummeting granular Bass surges that ride and soar across the cordite breakbeats like mercury, torment of modular shifting dynamics making for chest-seizing rapture experience, with detailed sampling to accent threat and pique the unsettling, nervous tone. Cold and caustic. At times these four tracks remind me of Curse of the Golden Vampire in their noisy amen break mangling and menacing as fuck, bad guy vibe. The threat continues!
Collaborative record between psychedelian Ryley Walker and recently departed psychonauts Kikagaku Moyo. Two long, portentious tracks of sweltering sandy Psychedelia, cosmic soft rocking, phosphorescent, dusky and ponderous. Eastern tinged Raganic melodies, opium atmospheres with coils of smoke swirling into the air currents… Acid caravan music, shambling percussion and drifting guitar reverberations conjure the dunesmen wandering beneath triple suns in kaleidoscopic attire, propulsion towards kraut rock passages, stumbling with gathering momentum to passionate upswell of afrocentric rhythm and pearling opalescent lead work, walking Bass lines heavy with the incence of improvisation. Modal melodies and rhythms ensorcel the mind and massage the body, guitar melodies emerge and express the sun-dance, stoned shimmer of pocketed purcussion, bright cymbals clatter through the crisp production. Miraculous and mercurial.
Pennsylvania’s Tartarus Horde with their second demo, a feast of scowling, grinding Death Metal with ancient dark fantasy themes. Imbued with extremely prominent barbarous low vocal death commands, savage sawbladed evil riffs with intense archaic Heavy Metal/Speed Metal style, and thrashing, blasting drumming, heavy on the dense slow movements and played with deranged verve and violence. Flaying dexterous solo work, perfectly pitched Bass twang conquest, and an unexpected and excellent track of brightly twilit dungeon dwelling synth bloop. Despotic and fucking warlike, nasty Death Metal/Deathgrind violence captured within a very old school separated right/left Bass/Guitar mix with dry atmosphere. Reminds of violent Death Metal ala Torture Rack, but with a hefty sludgy smear of Grindcore influences adorning it’s tattered standards. Blood drenched tyrannic savagery!
The use of jazz instrumentation for non-jazz purposes is scarcely a novel concept but ‘Kryo’, the astonishing debut collaborative album from trumpet virtuoso Pablo Gīw and experimental cellist Mariel Roberts, looks so far beyond existing horizons it’s almost completely devoid of reference points. Trips seldom come much stranger than this. Key to the record’s unearthly, decryption-resistant vibe is the battery of extended techniques and electronic processing employed by both musicians, each alchemically generated sound dubbed, dissolved and recrystallised until the relationship between it and its parent instrument is near impossible to deduce. 15-minute opener ‘Icicle / Carámbano’ is an exercise in meticulously curated instability that pairs flocculent vapour trails of over and underblown trumpet with a loop of deadened pizzicato that rumbles like the engine of an idling bulldozer. Gradually, the Sturm und Drang deliquesces into a watery expanse of drone, its muffled percussive undercurrent reminiscent of Hieroglyphic Being’s experiments in (a)rhythmic cubism, albeit slowed to a torturous crawl. ‘Japanese Creation Myth’ is uncannier still, a fragmentary collage of thuds and groans that comes within a hair’s breadth of ambient techno before collapsing in on itself, and although closing epic ‘When The Spell Actually Worked’ trades bump-in-the-night scare tactics for fusion reactor ambience, it remains strikingly baleful, dissonant tendrils of cello and trumpet intertwining ever tighter until their tones eventually coalesce and become indistinguishable. ‘Kryo’ is more than just un-jazz; it’s a gateway to unseen worlds. Stunning.
Slacking is a newer Harsh Noise project from the States, whose name I’ve heard mentioned on social media and podcasts as an up and comer to keep an eye on – this was the first of their releases I checked out, and it is immense. ‘Roundhouse a Bootlicker’ (what a fucking title that is) presents two tracks of crude, yet considered, befuddling sample Harsh Noise psychedelerium. Rolling brownout crush of roiling electronics and crumpled squashed sampling, frequency manipulation and sample mangling clutter and crash, battering frequencies rising and falling in drunken hypnosis, harsh and crisp as fukk, with apparent vocalisation samples appearing within the sound confusion. It’s dirty and massive, a take on the classic Americanoise sound, loops and layers shift in and out of focus in suffocating array, pinball sampling stitched within a tapestry of filth, low frequency rumble foundation with smeared, obfuscated sample loops. Track two is a cutting from a live session with Mallard Theory, junky pedal electronics pasting and pulping less-than-visible samples to mulch, overwhelmingly saturated and blown out waves of sound effluence wax and don’t wane, that ends on a total dead stop. Fucking exceptional.
Vile Horrendous Aerial Bombardment is a now-ceased Noisegrind project from members of Sissy Spacek, Oscillating Innards and others, producing ballistic bulldozing Noisecore with lightning drum changeups. This is their only full length, recorded in 2012 and posthumously released by Nerve Altar. VHAB apparently utilises a hand-made arsenal of ‘disinstruments’ in creating their decimating, callous blast of mid frequency phosphoric Noisegrind opprobrium, 1-2-3-4 count savage low/ strangulated high loud vocal exchange, dynamic caustic Noise bass slaw shockwave, politiking samples, deploying D Beats and leaden thrash parts in the mega heavy drumming to accent melody-less granite slab blasts of bass string contusion, bruising and brutal to the extreme. Noxious, violent, excellent. Aside from Arsedestroyer, this reminds me most of Knelt Rote (for whom C.Mumma also drums), particularly their record ‘Trespass’, but with all of the Black Metal context scorched away, leaving a waring, noisy alloy surface full of bullet holes. If you dig on Arsedestroyer, old Fear Of God or any of the projects that share members with VHAB, hesitate no further.
Vinyl Williams has been plugging away at the kaleidoscopic grindstone for several years now, both creating his own works of florid soft rocking psychedelia and producing other band’s works of a similar sunshine-dosed bent. His 2018 album ‘Opal’ displays a peacocking, unabashed reverence to Turkish Psychedelic Rock, early Tame Impala, Prog Rock and contemporaries Khruangbin. Intriguing, portentous hypnagogic Psyche Pop swirling with progressive momentum and infested with deep ear-worms. Smooth as funk smoky atmospheres with buttery bass and ghostly nostalgia psych Guitar, not without a noisiness to the layers of spacious, spacy Guitars & Synth interplay, weaving complicated melodies with deeply jazzy chords and masterful Pop hooks in resplendently melodic phrasing, preserved in slick gossamer production. Hypnotic sunsoaked Pop, dreamscape mercurial Psychedelic Rock. Introduced to me by my youngest brother, a man of exceptional discerning, on a hot drive down to the coast to drink stout and eat oysters on a hazy, stoned scorcher last summer. The record seems to encapsulate that experience perfectly for me. Glorious.
Nasty little split 7″ between Australian punks Hexx and Shitgrinder. Hexx features members of Territory and the excellent Warcycle (I think), playing some exceptionally aggro Crustcore that leans into Stenchcore Metallic riffermania sound but sacrifices no brevity of song length, making for some seriously rowdy Crust bangers. Dense metallic riffing and chugging, rumbling tank bass squashed into a suitcase of fast blasting/mid paced lumbering Crustcore, with warlike bellowing and foggy atmosphere, some killer sampling too. Furious and doomed, wicked shit. Shitgrinder is one of the best Grindcore bands in the current international crop. They belt out a lean and mean as FUKK Grind sound, streamlined to cruise at blasting or stampin’ speed, super minimal, concise blasters with leaden buzzing mids Guitar sound scaffolded to super snappy, detailed precision thrash’n’blast Drumming, kicked up the arse and sent flying propulsively skyward with old school grind vocal high/low tradeoffs. Crusty and bloody neckbreaking Grindcore with stomping breakdowns and tempo deviations to surprise and provoke immediate violence to peers. Grab a 7″ from Televised Suicide in Australia, or from Grindfather in the UK.
A highly anticipated debut project from one of drill’s most exciting upcoming artists this past year. Chinx has sort of acted as the main antagonist to Suspect, with Chinx rebutting claims from Suspects songs, re-using Suspect’s song titles as disses and by pointing out that actually, Suspects gang has suffered quite a few losses as well. The most well knownincident being Suspects friend known as Blitz getting shot in the head with a shotgun by Chinx himself several years ago.
It also certainly didn’t help that Suspect went to jail right after Chinx burst onto the scene in January of 2022. Since Suspect hastily released his (incredible) album after his arrest, Chinx has pretty much had a free shot at telling his side of the story now that his main rivals were either in jail (Suspect, Broadday) or relatively inactive in music (T.Scam, Strika). This on top of his obvious talent allowed him to quickly make his way to being an established name in the drill scene in 2022.
Which, after several hard-hitting singles this past year, brings us to his debut project, which in my opinion has his best qualities on display. At the same time, it also suffers from several pitfalls that are often observed on the debut projects of an artist who is highly praised for the quality on display on their singles.
By now, Chinx’ sound is pretty familiar to me and it just doesn’t have the versatility to keep things interesting for 47 minutes with only three features, which are all bundled up on one song. The bangers certainly bang, but the few introspective/romantic-ish cuts near the middle of the tracklist are not enough to keep things intriguing to me. The few slower songs, while lyrically they do show a bare-minimum level of variety to Chinx’ personality, musically they don’t quite hit the spot. The track Imaginary Girl, where he raps about the kind of girl he’d like to be with, loses a lot of its meaning when a few tracks later we hear him say he doesn’t need a girl.
I know it’s wrong to compare this project to Suspects debut from last year, since they’re very much each their own artist. However, one can’t help but appreciate the effort Suspect put into making his album sound like a cohesive project rather than a collection of songs. A handful of features also would have gone a long way when it comes to keeping things interesting, especially with how limiting the genre of drill can be in terms of variety.
That aside, the tracks that are on here are for the most part on par with the quality people have come to expect of Chinx. He absolutely delivers in terms of his bars, flows, delivery and beat selection. Most of the songs on here would work excellently as singles, which I think Chinx realized too since almost half of the tracks on here were released as singles before the project dropped. Secrets Not Safe, Mucky, Dinga, Levels, Fish O Filet, What I Mean stand out the most for being the bangers that they are. I must give a special shoutout to One Style, which to me is the absolute highlight in the tracklist. I can’t help but compare it to one of those group projects where everyone pulled their weight, including producers JJBeatz and Ron. The crushing bass along with the haunting vocal and piano melodies make for a perfect backdrop for the quartet of rappers RO, Chinx, Fiz and R1 to deliver cold blooded bars over.
While this project has a lot of great qualities on display, most of these do not include the ability to make for a consistently enjoyable project. I’m still however very much a Chinx fan and greatly enjoyed what he did on the vast majority of these songs. I hope this won’t be his last project, especially considering how rare full length projects are in the UK Drill scene. Chinx is a rapper far above average and album-making capabilities aside, he’s certainly shown his talent on One Sided Story and it deserves the attention.
GonzoKaraoke 