CDR – ‘NOVEMBER 21ST’

Breakcore Noise synesthetic collage from the hyperactive CDR. Demonic breaks ad infinitum and eccentric hardcore bangers fused together, swirling in and out of aggression and elation like surging serotonin deficiency, catastrophic sampling mutated and cut to ribbons, stacked into a canon and blasted across inky vacuum Bass burbling into bleeding-red audial overload, stream of consciousness divides clattering break-sodden eclecticism and audacious bubbling ambience, super stepper staircases up and down like MC Escher looney tunes, expressions of old breaks Hardcore enmeshed within, everything sealed in Harsh Noise production potentialities. A whole cavalcade of weirdo, sweaty, aggy fun. I was first made aware of CDR from his Harsh Noise heavy ‘Public Sick’ release (GK#169), and he’s still cranking out noise contaminated breakcore with Ritalin devotion. A real one. Also, scope out a killer CDR longsleeve with this release and peacock your superior tastes and styles to those inferior devotees of the algorithm.

Bandcamp

EFFLUENCE – ‘PSYCHOCEPHALIC SPAWNING’

The first full length offering from one-man monstroddity Effluence, a sacrificial mutating slaughter in the name of Death Metal’s boundless, fractal tomorrow. Fusion jazz ‘Free Death’ slam brutality and truculence melts down and spews cosmic space death tech metal abstraction through intense instrumentation and atypical grinding pounding percussive flagellation and battery, amid a nuclear fallout of mind-flaying absurdity. ‘Song’ structures unfurl inconceivably, guitars and bass wrench and vomit atonal chord wall collapse with skronking macro dissonance, immutably deft pinch harms and genetically warped shredder pealing prog death solos, lockjaw intense dexterous drumming veers and careens through exceptionally tight patterns impossible to discern, leading each track through vortex and vacuum with absolute disregard for form, synths, keys, sax and winds loom beneath in abstract deliquescence, appearing within the maelstrom as piques of perfect absurdism, seams bursting with moments of insanely longhaired thousand-eyed progressive tech death expulsion, super low intonated bdm vocalwall and cosmic death warcry vocal battle for host supremacy, piles of writhing blasting grinding viscera toxify and strangulate in surrealist ecstasy. Totality Star Death and horrendous unimaginable rebirth. Megametal.

Bandcamp

TOADLIQUOR – ‘BACK IN THE HOLE’

Toadliquor returns from total obscurity to unleash a colossal callous shitide of mean Sludge on the aptly titled ‘Back In the Hole’. Doling out metallic, hatefully stoned riffs like methadone cups in the predawn haze, unfurling with poisonous gain like Trouble meets Upsidedown Cross, claws caked in ketamine work delirious, defeated melody, obscure and forlorn, drugged and chugging, metronomic rhythms caustic and violent envenomed with tar black braided Bass, extreme dark vocal scrawl and debased declaration from the pit of ruin. Burdensome, pugilistic, soul destroying and enormous, a hefty toll of nasty Sludge afflicted upon a ruinous psyche unable to bear the strain, delighting in the irresistible pull of negativity. Observe the post-liminal swastika of technocratic banality so brazenly adorning the confrontational album art, the unbearable samsara of experiential abuse and toiling in the absurd, and despair. A real winner.

Southern Lord

WEEPING SORES – ‘FALSE CONFESSION’

Gloriously magisterial Death Doom from NY trio Weeping Sores. Theirs is a chasmic and funereal yet architecturally astonishing sound, a crushed velvet pall of biblically accurate angelic Doom Death Metal. Intricate riffs compounded and roused with Violin suites adorn the bier, stately percussion hammers a funerous drudge deep into the earth with eyes cast upwards in stargazing wonder, vocal a commanding melancholy bellow of extra low death exhalation. Moody and heavy, rousingly gloweringly pensive, graceful and despairing. The earliest (and best) works of the Peaceville three are good touchstones here, as is dISEMBOWELMENT’s forlorn masterpiece ‘Trancendence into the Peripheral’, but Weeping Sores also commands a majestic presence all their own, uniquely poised between beams of piercing light and swathes of vacuous, crushing darkness. Hyperion Death Doom.

Bandcamp

I,Voidhanger Records

DOPE PURPLE & BERSERK – ‘THIS IS THE HARSH TRIP FOR NEW PSYCHE’

A portentous cosmic collision between Dope Purple’s spaced out throwback Psychedelic Rock and Beserk’s fulminate alien Harsh Noise, released by the mercurial WV Sorcerer Productions label. Dope Purple ramps, stages and launches 5 tracks of motorik, tumbling Psychedelic Rock, crystalline brittle Guitars and longwinding louche Bass lines summit and plummet both gently and desperately, glistening with delay and reverb, beats treading a dusty caravan path of fulsome, feeling groove, echo-drenched dude vocal appears like the aural Sherpa up the mountain of the omnistoned. Bersek looms without like awesome cumulus cloud formation, allowing for Dope Purple’s spacious interplay and sonic oxygenations, gathering momentum and power before ejaculating his roiling, combustible Harsh Noise asunder, exploding in star destroying Guitar solo mimicry cascade of brutally loud audial magma, smothering the florid instrumentation beneath and sealing it’s essence within like the petrified humans of Pompeii. When Berserk truly lets rip to maul and malign Dope Purple’s intense, generative psychedelia their collaborative power is orgasmically revealed, rupturing the prone instrumentations at their seams and bursting their sweet juices and potent fluids all over the innerspace. This is an addictively harsh tapestry of delirious voluminous psychedelia. Heads & Hearts only.

WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片

CALCINATED – ‘MORGUE SERENITY’

Calcinated is a pathological Goregrind/Deathgrind project from Mexico, featuring members of a host of reprehensible Goregrind and Gorenoise bands including Putrefuck, Septic Autopsy and the reprehensibly disgusting Fetal Deformity to name just three.  Anatomical old school as fuck Goregrind pungent with the influence of very old death metal and early grindcore, replete with razor sharp metallic guitar elements and rife with ping snare and raw 00’s production, a diabolical combination of goregrind symptoms resultant in a truly cadaverous and memorable record. Rhythms veer from mid paced punk gore stomp to very fast and detailed deathgrinding blasting abandon, bizarre breakdowns and deathly double bass grooves abound, with complex lithe riffing besmirched by noisy production, howling pitch-shifted bleghs and creepy retching Carcass worshipping vocal, and flesh ripping sonorous lead guitars, littered with overwrought sampling (as dogma demands). Calcinated is at least a severed head above the competition here. Wretched!

Rectal Purulence

Bandcamp

SIMIAN STEEL – ‘MISSING FUCKING LINK’

International ape unit Simian Steel’s first full length, a torment of mean-as-shit Sludge featuring members of Fistula and OG IxM guitarist (and current Bass player in their re-animated ranks) Steve Watson. A pitch black evocation of tar-thick criminal Sludge and Doom caste in cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. Groove-soaked, imposingly syrupy alcoholic riffs of forlorn self-loathing locked into metronomic, battering, pendulous rhythms, heavy handed and thunderous, adorned with extremely Morrow-summoning vocal exhortations, depressions and ululation, the work of under-evolved gruff bastards in thrall to the Iron masters. Caustic, thuggish and cruel.  A direct comparison to another band is about as lazy as it gets, but c’mon, they’re called Simian Steel for fuck’s sake. They’re dancing around an enormous Iron Monkey effigy like the inbred tribes of Kong on skull island! And theirs is a brute, foul worship, their Sludge idol made utterly fucking ugly in their creator’s fearsome image – hideously aggressive, hormonally enraged, teeth bared and feral! A feast of mean-spirits for the terminally unemployable. For my money, a far more appealing proposition than Iron Monkey’s comeback full length.

Black Mold Records

TJOLGTJAR – ‘VRUGUUN’

Tjolgtjar’s final record ‘Vruguun’ is a drugged and rockin’ descent into Psychedelic Black Metal hades, and a perfect summation of what makes Tjolgtjar so special. An amazing amalgam of influences making for a formidably unique redneck Black Metal record, drunk on potent ‘shine. King Diamond and Speed Metal, Kiss and WASP, raw Darkthrone and Burzum style Black Metal, Country, Bluegrass and Southern (gothic) Rock,13th Floor Elevators and Roky Erikson, Ted Nugent and Charles Manson, little nods to Post Punk, all manner of psychedelia, Goblin, Synths and Organs, raw and reedy Black Metal Guitars with killer riffing, rasping evil vocal mixed with impassioned singing and Metal wails, wailin’ solos over hard rocking anthems, psilocybin-laced Black Rock and Metal of a completely unique formula. Satanic and Occult, raw and obscure. Some tracks adhere to a more traditional Black Metal composition, others hew closer to 70’s Hard Rock or ancient spellbound Heavy Metal, and others still combine these elements into an incredibly heady listening experience. Slight differences or emphases in production across these 24 tracks amount to a very home-made, underground sound, very high concept and low fidelity. Vruguun is an absolute delight of non traditional Black Metal Magick, deftly handling dirt-rune experimentalism and drunk as fukk anthem bangin’ across it’s running time. Crucial.

Illinoisan Thunder

Super Sargasso

Bandcamp

THE LAST SOUND – ‘VEERED’

The Last Sound is the nom de plume of Barry M, co-conspirator (with Magnetize) in Whirling Hall Of Knives, whose dissident exsanguinating techno has put the constitution of many a seasoned club-goer to the sternest test. In simple terms, WHOK rip while The Last Sound ravishes, and ‘Veered’, a previously unreleased album recorded between 2006 and 2010, documents the forging of the latter’s own distinctly less confrontational sonic identity. 9-minute scene-setter ‘Drugged On The Rugged Plain’ (no-one knows their way round an evocative title quite like TLS) captures this artful evolution in real time, morphing from tunnelling acid house to zero gravity psychedelia as gaseous whorls of synth inexorably envelop the rhythm track like a swarm of iridescent damselflies. It’s an arresting opening gambit but what follows is a transmission direct from the motherlode, nine bolts of the sweetest, sourest, most pigeonhole resistant psych-pop you’re ever likely to hear. ‘Outskirting’ seasons the cut of ‘Darklands’ era Jesus And Mary Chain with the thrust of early New Order, Barry icing the cake with a vocal so blissfully languid, it makes Kevin Shields sound like Flowdan. ‘Regenerative’, by contrast, is a gorgeous peal of peach-tinged ambience redolent of A.R. Kane at their most diaphonous, while the stunning ‘Kicked In’ flirts with both the astral and abyssal planes, a fully laden bass juggernaut ploughing full tilt into a grotto of fizzing guitar and synth. Utterly untarnished by the passage of time, ‘Veered’, offers a fascinating glimpse into the formative years of one of avant-pop’s most mercurial artists. Superb.

In anticipation of the album’s release on 22/02/24, Cruel Nature Records have kindly furnished GK with an exclusive video stream of ‘Underling’. Watch the action then head straight over to Bandcamp to grab a cassette or a digital download.

Cruel Nature Recordings

 

EFFLUENCE / BLOWTORCH SPLIT

Sick outsider Gore/Death split from the now-ceased Sickening Shit operation, peddlers of only the most intensely hostile Gore, recently resurfaced renamed as Slaughtered Records like a corpse full of putrid gas in an industrial refuse marsh. Effluence plays a brand of extra-choppy free death brutality nearly unmatched in it’s sclerotic insanity, nauseating and alienating permablasting death, a brick wall of Brutal Death Metal torment with atypical percussion elements, violent freeform ‘riff’ structures boiling and seizing, putrid superlow vocal, a free-flowing improvisational language undecipherable even to the most blast-hardened intellects. Blowtorch operates in a similar field but with half of the artistry and twice the narcotics, self harming outsider art Gorenoise Brutal Death drooling with incorrigible aggression and psychosis. Irrepressible vocal lunacies, demented half riffs grind and scour, rictus blast drums, low tech ‘production’ with the overwhelming whiff of occupational therapy set deep in the seams. Lo-fi as Avant Garde.

Effluence Bandcamp

Blowtorch youtube

HEAVY SENTENCE – ‘WARRIORS OF MADNESS’

Helion Heavy Metal 7″ from England’s Heavy Sentence, co-released by Dying Victims Productions and Hackney’s own Crypt of the Wizard. 3 tracks of persecution, mayhem and hellraising, NWOBHM worship with a streak of 1st wave gloaming Black Metal spite, crusty leather and executioner’s axe. Guitars slash and chug with heaving bollocks and swagger, conjuring darkly uplifting melodies and mellifluent mean-as-fukk leads across road dog storming drunken rhythm section, smashing and battering, awesome vocal full of booze and hate, ablaze with molten boogie licks and retrogressive Hard Rock trappings. Uproarious, despoiling Heavy Metal to drink, fight and fuck to. Knife wielding hooligans, beer drinking graveyard lurkers, road warrior freaks and bastard knights, rejoice! Slash the pose, disregard the plastic retro shit and get stuck in. Heavy Sentence is the real fucken deal.

Dying Victims Productions

Bandcamp

VICTIMS PANEL – ‘SHOW THEM’

Jay Tichy of SIDETRACKED infamy conjures a torrid steely stomp of Black Punk Metal, deeply indebted to Bone Awl and Ildjarn’s bastard lineage but with a myopic locus of influence within Hardcore – searing bleached white Black Metal scaffolded by very reductive stiff stomper beats, slashes of fuzzed, crumpled Guitars form ugly, brooding angles across the eyes, bellowed brooding vocal exhalations atop. Vicious and wicked. Like a foul bilious conjuration of influence between Negative FX, Tinner and Sump. I do feel that the devotional brevity for which Jay is known in his various projects is a little misplayed here, some of these ideas might work slightly better or land harder with a bit more room to breathe, but no matter. This is still a total starching.

Damien Records

MARTÍN ESCALANTE / TETÉ LEGUÍA / WEASEL WALTER – ‘KATYUSHA’

3 long tracks of multi-directional improvisational malfeasance to the destroy the illusion, reality shaking expressions of exuberance, power and lunacy. Totalitarian, maximalist torrent of free improvisation, an explosively intense expression of Free Jazz, a wordless primal scream dialed to 11 and vibrating with humming radioactive power. Delicacy and intonation wither like prone digits in a subzero torrent. Weasel pummels and plummets down the stairs in bursts of terminal velocity, crashing through the firmament with fearsome idiot energy and incredibly dexterous, choppy runs full of off-kilter hyper blast beats and endless rolling double bass. Leguía applies a tormenting, synapse poisoning saxophone performance best experienced behind bulletproof glass, each singing, stinging, screaming volley forced into life, choked and strangled, threatening to destroy your precious inner ear, and Escalante conjures a bass performance of the unfathomable, an iron curtain falling in plumes and rotten ruffles, coiling and piling beneath and amidst the insane percussion. Quieter moments serve to wane the friction and crank up the foul ambiance of these three demons at work(&play). A maelstrom of hyperkinetic aplomb and sweat-soaked interactive fervor, challenging and socially challenged. If you enjoy Painkiller era Zorn, Sissy Spacek or Peter Brötzmann, seek no further. Entirely essential, fun as fuck.

ugEXPLODE

ANDREJA SALPE & OLIVER MITKOVSKI – ‘POETRONIKA’

Skopje-based imprint PMG has been resequencing the genome of Slavic jazz for more than five years, but in a catalogue packed sardine tight with left turns, this audacious new venture from arch electronicist Andreja Salpe and actor Oliver Mitkovski is unquestionably one of the sharpest. Marrying shady spoken word (the word in this case being post-war Macedonian poetry) to acid-flecked minimal deep house, ‘Poetronika’ is the new paradigm of concepts that shouldn’t work but absolutely do, a slow-burning 80-minute art attack that unspools like the soundtrack to some low budget ultra-noir detective flick. Key to the album’s atmospheric gut-punch is the riveting dynamic between its creators, two artists who, on paper at least, appear to have precious little in common. Masters of syncretic dreamweaving, the duo assemble a sequence of interlocking tableaux, Mitkovski’s shadowy intonations streaking Salpe’s lambent beatscapes with the grit and grain of the dankest hip-hop. Reductive though it is to single out individual tracks from a project designed for unbroken live performance, the astonishing ‘Nataša Celaskoska’ is ‘Poetronika’ in microcosm. Ominous syncopations and an aromatic corkscrewing acid line are pebbledashed with notes from Salpe’s omnipresent Fender Rhodes while Mitkovski lurks in the shadows, waxing cryptically lyrical with the scuffed, taciturn diction of a barfly reciting passages from a Raymond Chandler novel. Evocative as the setting of a subterranean sun, ‘Poetronika’ offers escape-proof sanctuary from a deepening winter. Bask in its dark radiance.

PMGJazz

STENCHED – ‘GORGING ON MEPHITIC ROT’

Mexican one-man Death Metal project Stenched’s first demo, a putrid, sordid affair mired in salacious swampy groove, relying largely on burly mid pace tempos to batter and stupefy. Slimy death metal from deep in the sewers, surging shit-tide d-beats launch the cadaverous, morbid deadly chord structures into an uptempo toilet bowl swirlie and then down the u-bend into slow lurching deathly slop with minimum note leads rolling across the corpulent rockin’ grooves, leaking corpse juices as the guitars work over burbling bacterial Bass, topped with filthy burping low vocal halitosia, beautifully simple and sophomoric, stupefying morbid sludgy Death Metal for dumbells and sewer dwellers. If you dig on that moron, no fancy-pants shit like Undergang, Cerebral Rot, Convulse or Transgressor, hesitate no further! Gruesome.

Blood Harvest

Templum Obscenum Records

Bandcamp

 

FAUCHEUSE SELF TITLED

Faucheuse delivers a falcon uppercut to the jaw with their self titled demo, a bruising serenade of masterful Hardcore Punk. Bloody streaks of violent Rock & Roll guitars peal out outrageously uplifting, blazing consonant melody, slashing atop a steel horse of absolutely battering tumbling drums and torqued Bass rhythm section in extra-tight lockstep, and energised to everlovin’ fuck with furious vocal of desperation and power, with banging, bright, scruffy production. Faucheuse manages to explore lots of ideas here, playing with some more spare dynamics amid the torrent of fury, squeezing these tracks full of memorable hooks, mid-to-fast tempos and intriguing, uplifting melody, detouring into R&R mayhem drenched in dulcet lead work before plummeting back into ‘adult oriented d-beat’ aplomb. Makes me want to throw cops off a building. This is yet another band I’ve checked out from hearing them on Demolisten, recommended to hosts Grey and Nate by Tyler Hammer of the Kings Of Punk Podcast. Both pods are completely indispensable, bastions of correct opinion and perspective amidst a sea of Punk/Metal cultural ‘commentary’ youtube neophyte bullshit. I recommend subscribing to both immediately.

Bandcamp

THE KILL – ‘SHOWER OF BRICKS’

The Kill’s ‘Shower Of Bricks’ is an abrupt, unstoppable blast of hyper-velocitrous Grindcore in thrall to Pazuzu, made particularly piquant by the abstruse drumming of Jay Jones, also vocalist for Fuck…I’m Dead, providing a literal fucking shitstorm behind the kit here: fucker really does sound like a shower of bricks pingin’ off your skull! Careening 3 piece Grindcore pell-mell, superfast and powerful one footed blastbeats and tumult fills, full of chops and extreme power, spazzing thrash riffs and half sawing grindriffs seesawing and slashing into each other in punk-on-steroids madness, high phlegm vocal scrape scream full of utter piss and vinegar for sedentary shoppers, pugilist pub patrons and excessively chatty twats. A debilitating throat strike, death by 1000 blows in less than 330 seconds, Grindcore both technical and truculent. Brief, blunt and brutal as FUKK. This was later released as a split with fellow Aussie grinders Captain Cleanoff, whose self titled EP and full length ‘Symphonies of Slackness’ are excellent and well deserving of your time, but whose tracks here I’m unfamiliar with. “get the fuck outta my way – Before I punch some cunt out”.

Blastasfuk

JAH WARRIOR – ‘DUB FROM THE HEART’

Producer Jah Warrior’s 1997 full length ‘Dub from the Heart’, a collection of devout hard as nails psychedelic Dubs from The UK, tuff deadly steppers rendered in smoky digital studio production, fired with red-edged siren, system crushing electronic sub bass haze rolling in swollen waves, and drifting electronic percussion punch echo/delayed to decay, dread digital melodica(?) flutters and floats above the miasma with Jah minded power and manifest consonance, a shade of light above the murky Bass aquatics. As a cannabinoid sidestep into the tangential, I recently played this record repeatedly whilst re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time in a long time, Jah Warrior’s retrofuturist hard Dub vision syncopating beautifully with the cyberpunk narrative’s storyscape. Far out. I also can’t help but quote the exceptional Rewind Forward record shop review on the digital liner – “… this is one 100% crucial documentation of Jah Warrior’s signature, dreader-than-dread UK steppers sound, deep, kind of dark and fierce, overwhelmingly bass-loaded and reverb-drenched, but still mightily uplifting, in roots reggae style and fashion.”  Rock solid beginning to end. Thank you and blessings to my youngest brother for putting me on to this marvelous LP those years back, the man’s tastes and interests defy his age.

Bandcamp

BEHOLD THE ARCTOPUS – ‘INTERSTELLAR OVERTROVE’

Hyperbole inducing Fusion Jazz Prog phantasmagoria from Behold the Arctopus. I hadn’t heard anything these guys had produced in a good few years, and in that interim they’ve only gotten stranger, jettisoning their metal carapace and exposing their prone insides to the void’s mutating, corrupting influences. ‘Interstellar Overtrove’ is a post musical sarcophagus of Avant Garde Prog and experimental Fusion Jazz wrought in impossible meter, nerd chin-stroke wank shit gone absolutely Tech Death haywire! Gated to death planed flat e-drums with mental timbral intrigue, firing through insane rhythms as many stringed instruments dance, flitter and pummel Morse code notations with cool, stasis inertia sound, clear and precise like fine silicone dust, a million opaque mathematical meanings and complexities delivered straight into the fucking third eye chakra – never to be decoded or understood! Computational excess, overreach and eventual accidental ignition and burning chrome, all hard disks erased for fear of malignant fractal replication. About as far from ‘songs’ as one might travel. Some stars to guide by might include ‘Three Of a Perfect Pair’ Crimson, Steinar’s spacegrinding Psudoku or perhaps those dry neat jazzer sections on Cynic’s ‘Focus’, distortion eroded and a bizarre and impossible skeletal structure found beneath, perfectly rendered in xenomorphic alloy. Rapturously weird.

Bandcamp

NDOX ELECTRIQUE – ‘TËDD AK MAME COUMBA LAMBA AK MAME COUMBA MBANG’

François Cambuzat and Gianna Greco are specialists in building bridges between worlds. Having cut their teeth fronting art noise provocateurs Putan Club, the duo journeyed to the Djerid desert in south-western Tunisia and forged an unlikely alliance with performers of the indigenous Banga ritual, an adorcism which invites, rather than seeks to reverse, spiritual possession. The two albums which resulted, both released under the monicker Ifriqqya Electrique, were fervid fusions of glowering industrial post-punk, transcendental chant-singing and frenetic hand percussion that stand amongst the most startlingly original cross-cultural collaborations ever brought to fruition. Upping the ante yet further, Cambuzat and Greco’s latest project relocates their theatre of off-grid operations to the isolated Cap-Vert peninsula in western Senegal. A joint enterprise with members of the resident Lebu community, Ndox Electrique capitalises on an uncanny symbiosis between brawny avant-rock and the polyrhythmic cacophony of the mystical n’doëp ceremony to create an electrfying hybrid, the ultimate in sonic polarity inversions. Crucially, it’s the paths Ndox Electrique DON’T tread that make ‘Tëdd Ak Mame’ such a formidable proposition. There are no concessions here to the pappy dietary requirements of the mainstream, nor does fusion equate to dilution. This is dissident, soul-stirring music that thrives on a commonality of intent, banger following cathartic banger in an uncompromising onslaught. Marshalled by lead vocalist Rokhaya “Madame” Diéne and featuring a trio of indefatigable percussionists, the band’s Lebu contingent generate onrushing waves of ritualistic rhythm and rhyme to which Cambuzat and Greco apply a treacherous undertow: scything, doom metal-heavy guitar riffs and an interlocking matrix of saw-toothed bass and electronics. Social media is cluttered with proclamations from the cloth-eared that there’s nothing new under the sun. For those of us who take a contrary position, Ndox Electrique have just delivered a motherfucker of a citation. Essential.

Les Disques Bongo Jo