Isolation Tank demo 2013 (power violence)

Power violence that's filthy and harsh. no pizza mosh dude fun.

Drop Dead - s/t 1993

Lashings of thrashings from the kings of fast hardcore. It's 20 years old but still sounds as brutal as ever. They've put up all their other releases as well so dig in.

Naturally i reckon more older bands should put their back catalogue up like this.

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.

Full Of Hell - Rudiments Of Mutilation (A389)

Utter brutality. downtuned heavy stuff with noise bits. slow, atonal non-mosh riff bits with fastblasts occasionally. If you took the mid-point of stuff like Man Is The Bastard/Crossed and Unruh/Left For Dead and took a detour via Eyehategod. This could have been on Bovine or Pessimiser. Metallic hardcore that's fucked in the head. No mosh. No fun. Perfect.

Sick/Tired - King Of Dirt (power violence)

Top notch power violence. As in power violence. Not a bunch of tepid piss-weak Spazz wannabes being 'wacky'.

A friend with impeccable taste just posted about this and it's virtually unheard of for him to recommend a current PV band. I'm listening now and I can hear why. They've got the brutality but also individuality in the riffs. They're focused on tearing your brain apart rather than just soundtracking mosh dudes with over familiar riffs.

Definitely in the spirit of bands like Iron Lung or Column Of Heaven etc.

Neglected - demo (Power Violence)

The lesser spotted "non shitty new PV band" was how a friend described them. Not a bunch of half-arsed Infest riffs and lyrics about pizza. It's Iron Lung/Endless Blockade territory. Neglected are from Turkey so I guess they've got genuine reasons to be angry

Barge - No Gain 7" (Grave Mistake)

Premium quality Infest/No Comment worship.

Man Hands / L̶i̶c̶h̶ split 10"

Let's have a quick mention about how good the music is before we have a wee chat about how it's 'close, but no cigar' on the digital distribution front.

Man Hands blast through 7 tracks of tight, fast hardcore. A similar velocity and direction as Drop Dead or Hellnation. Riffs are interesting but there's none of that power violence fast-slow rhythms. Full speed ahead all the way.

Lich are great too. You may remember some of them from Battle Of Wolf 359. They've slowed the tempo down a bit and probably tuned down as well. Battering sludge fuelled brutality. One Eyed God Prophecy and Cattlepress and all that horrific savagery. Totally kick your head off live.

However, you can't hear their side. Well, you can hear one song here - http://lich.bandcamp.com/album/split-10-w-man-hands. But you can't hear the whole record.

You can buy half of the record digitally as Man Hands have got theirs up for 'pay as you like' but you can't buy the whole thing. And that's why it's 'close, but no cigar'. If you've read the description and had a quick listen then you should have come to the conclusion that it's something you'd want. However, unless you're a record collector, you can't buy the whole thing.

NB Bandcamp can now handle complicated tagging stuff for splits and compilations so it'd be an easy thing to change.

If you are a record collector here's the details on how to get a copy:-

Thanks to Robert/Adagio 830, Will & Lucy/Win Htein, Dr Tim/Dingleberry Records and Sam & Derek/Parade of Spectres the LICH/MAN HANDS 10" is finally out. We'll have it at shows, as will Lich, here's a bunch of links to buy it or trade. 7 songs from Man Hands, 3 from Lich. 500 copies.

UK
Parade of Spectres - paradeofspectres@yahoo.com http://paradeofspectres.blogspot.co.uk/
Win Htein - winhteindistro@gmail.com http://winhteinrecords.blogspot.co.uk/

EURO
Bis Aufs Messer - http://bisaufsmesser.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=22369
Adagio 830 - http://ww.adagio830.de
Dingleberry records - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dingleberry-records-and-distribution/118743564850504

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).