Remote - Starving Blaze And Hollow Shades

Coalesce meets Deathspell Omega?

Absolute savagery. Nasty noisey chatoic metallic hardcore stuff. Glorious stuff.

Iron Lung - White Glove Test

Once again Iron Lung prove that their lightyears beyond the rest of the 'power violence' hardcore crowd. All modern grindcore is rendered even more irrelevant than it already is. Burn Maximum Rock n Roll towers to the ground. Send every hardcore punk record made in the past few years to be melted down and recycled. Push every member of a xCelebrityNamex band under a speeding bus. Ban anyone with dreadlocks from buying a guitar. It's done. It's all over. Iron Lung are Gods.

Southern Lord on Bandcamp

They've only got a few albums up at the moment but - Southern Lord have started a bandcamp.

So far there's Nails, Baptists, Sleep, The Secret, Kromosom and Wartorn.

Hope they put up all their back catalogue on there. Bought the Khanate LP at the time but a proper flac version would be handy too.

Anyway, here's the Nails album. It'll rip your head off:-

Nails - Obscene Humanity (Southern Lord)

http://boomkat.com/downloads/637821-nails-obscene-humanity



There's a thread on Collective called Let's Talk About Dark Negative Heavy Hardcore. That's a good a description of Nails as any.

They veer between all out whirlwinds of blast beats and chaotic riffing to chunky, stomping chug riffs. Perhaps the mid-point between The Swarm and Earthmover. A bit more polished than that but the more metal production doesn't diminish the brutality.

3 short songs is the perfect length for something like this. Don't need more than five minutes of a frenzied assault.

Savage.

Army Of Flying Robots - Discography

Essential.

Cynarae - s/t

This lot get compared to Systral, Unruh, Morser, The Swarm and Left For Dead. And that's a pretty fair comparison too. There'll be a handful of people who see that (like me) whose interest is piqued.

For everyone else we're talking blistering metallic hardcore punk stuff. Recent comparisons might be the more straight ahead Drainland stuff or that new Torch Runner album.

Definitely a cut above that post-Cursed thing where everything sounds dead samey.

Cellgraft - s/t LP

Sadly it appears that this is the final Cellgraft release. Shame as they've made some of the best grindcore of recent years. And when I say grindcore i mean grindcore. In my review of their split 7" with Drainland I pointed out that they seem to take grindcore back to first principles of mixing Swans grind with fast blasts of hard core.

This stuff is genuinely equal to a band like Discordance Axis

Column Of Heaven - Mission From God

OK, the tl;dr on this is ex-Endless Blockade/Shank and is top-tier 'power violence'. It'd definitely have got a 'brutal' description from Crass Menagerie.



Can I recommend you head on over to http://survivalist-deathcult.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/mission-from-god-lp-out-now.html and read what Andy's got to say about the LP and the ideas behind the music.

It explores the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the culture of 70s Yorkshire although explicitly not in a "duuuuude, serial killers man" way. Here's a quick excerpt from the explanation:-

The simpler impetus behind this album is that Sutcliffe’s murders are part of a larger, horrifying landscape… a bleak, ruined vista of grinding poverty, institutionalized racism and sexism, police brutality, pollution and inescapable decay. Quite simply, the Yorkshire of Sutcliffe’s day is probably unimaginable to those who weren’t there. It was a time and place that warrants examination and exploration. The environment of Yorkshire at the time and Sutcliffe’s crimes are deeply interrelated, perhaps even symbiotic. Some of this album is deeply personal, much is intentionally enigmatic and some is completely straight ahead. Our desire is not to decode or spell this album out, but to encourage one to consume it on a level that is deeper than a “fuckin’ grind/noise album about a serial killer, man!”.

There's a couple of more power electronics tracks with treated speech from the time. It sounds like one of the pieces utilises the infamous hoax tape where someone pretended to be the killer and rang the police taunting them. The other piece uses what seems to be an interview from a light entertainment TV programme with the presenter giggling about Sutcliffe not having sex in prison. It's definitely the most jarring, other-worldly part of the whole thing.

Musically there's a touch of death metal in with all the power violence. I say this only because it mentions that it's not their 'death metal album' and that there was only a bit of it in there. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been primed. We're talking maybe half a riff with a bit of an Autopsy rhythm. The rest is generally along the well thought out slow-fast Crossed Out breed (ie not superficial Spazz-isms).

Torch Runner - Committed To The Ground

TL;DR = raging 90s metallic hardcore punk with a hint of (good) 'screamo'. Think Unruh, His Hero Is Gone, Systral etc.



I guess Torch Runner might be one of the reasons I started this here web log. At the weekend I was having a bit of a dig through some of the usual music download blogs for some new bands to check out. Can't remember where but one of them said there was a new Torch Runner. It was one of those blogs that, despite the fact it's offering up free downloads, actually puts a bit of an effort into the description and puts a load of links to all the bands facebooks and labels and bandcamps and all the rest of it.

I clicked on the bandcamp link and was just a few songs in when I knew it was a total banger. I'd loved their previous LP which I'd downloaded yonks ago off some mediafire blog or another. The LP version of the new one was quite limited and it'd have cost me over a tenner just for postage from the US (about $20 if i recall). Their label's stuff doesn't often make it over the pond so I'd have been quite happy with a FLAC download. Got my wallet out of my back pocked and produced my bank card........nope, no sale, no way of buying it as the option for digital downloads wasn't set. Being a prick I looked up their Facebook page and told them. They relented. I bought it. Easy.

Anyway, there'll be time enough later on for me to post about my thoughts on why paid digital downloads are good for DIY bands. More important at the moment, the music....

As said above they've got a bit of a metallicy hardcore thing going on. I guess I need to be a bit more specific. Basically, this would have been praised in Heartattack, praised in Monkeybite, praised in an old Rob Coons column in Maximum Rock n Roll whilst also possibly getting half a page in Terrorizer. Nowadays they could go down well at a screamo thing like Cry Me A River or a fest for "sketchy dudes" (ie suburban teenagers) into Holy Terror. They seem to hit that sweet spot between the punky stuff which tends towards generic Tragedy d beat and that kind of post-Cursed thing like Nails/Trap Them which, quite honestly, just blends into one bland sound to me.

I'm beginning to just rant about other music. Basically it's well worth a blast.