Posts Tagged ‘Black Sabbath’

This Summit Fever – The Beyond

Posted: 14 May 2022 in Singles and EPs
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6th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

The second ‘The Beyond’ begins to rumble from the speakers (I always prefer speakers; earphones and headphones are fine for in transit, but if you’re going to sit back and listen to music, turning it up and letting it breathe and fill your space by listening through speakers, can’t be beat) you’re slapped with solid straight-up 70s vintage. If the comparisons and parallels with the inevitable nods to Sabbath and Led Zep seem predictable, don’t for a second think that that’s all there is here.

The guitar is dense and the bass is chunky, and there’s a deep psychedelic twist to this monster slab of ball-busting stoner blues steeped in reverb… and then you backtrack and realise they’re a duo, with one guitar, drums, and vocals. What? Really? Yep.

White Stripes may have started the rock duo trend, but it’s taken a while to really become truly accepted and widespread, and you could probably contend that while the likes of Blood Red Shoes, DZ Deathrays, Yur Mum, and Lovely Eggs (who are finally gaining the recognition they richly deserve) have been doing it and doing it well for absolutely ages on the grassroots circuit, it was Royal Blood who broke the doors down contemporaneously. But since Royal Blood went off the boil after just one album, there’s an abundant space for quality duos to show that it’s possible to achieve a full band sound without a full band.

As ‘The Beyond’ showcases, This Summit Fever show how by cranking it up and playing hard, two can achieve the sound of four, and what’s more, they’ve got tunes to back it up. And this is a tune, alright.

AA

LIVE DATES

May 15th 2022 – The Asylum 2, Birmingham

June 10th 2022 – The Black Heart, London

October 22nd 2022 – Tap ’n’ Tumbler, Nottingham

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10 Gauge – Demons

Posted: 28 February 2022 in Singles and EPs
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4th March 2022

James Wells

Almost a year to the day (well, the week) after 10 Gauge announced their arrival with the release of ‘I’m Broken’, they return with ‘Demons’, which sees the Hereford quintet plunge deeper into thunderous hard rock territories, and do so with confidence and aplomb.

The oblique lyrics suggest the demons may be the kind you wrestle with in the mind rather than literal, physical ones racing around on trips up from the underworld, but perhaps ultimately the two are effectively the same thing – ugly and unpleasant, they torment and torture sadistically.

But ultimately, this single is all about the hefty riffery. Christ, it hits like a juggernaut, and lands like a punch to the solar plexus. It leaves you winded, but it’s also a rush. The guitars are thick and meaty and everything about the track evokes the spirit of Sabbath. Solid, heavy, old-school but with a contemporary slant, ‘Demons’ is an absolute beast.

Iceburn – Asclepius

Posted: 8 June 2021 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Twenty years is a long time. But that’s how long it’s been since Iceburn last graced us with new material. The shifting collective, primarily operative between 1990 and 2001 reconvened in 2007, with this current lineup again at the core.

As the band’s bio summarises, ‘The band’s initial output slowly evolved from hardcore and metal to free improvisation and noise. The 10 year arc saw the band following their own path and becoming more and more obscure as they got deeper into unknown musical worlds. By 2000 the cycle seemed complete and Iceburn did their final tour in Europe 2001. In 2007 this early core crew reunited to play a local anniversary show focused on the earliest material. Every few years since they would get together for another ‘reunion’ until that word became more of a joke, it was clear the band was back, getting together every week, and working on new material.’

And here it is: two truly megalithic tracks, each spanning the best part of twenty minutes, and packing them densely with some hard-hitting, churning, trudging, sludgy riffs.

This is some heavy, doomy, din: the riffs are Sabbath as filtered via Melvins, and let’s face it – Sabbath may have invented heavy metal, but it was Melvins who reinvented it with that gnarly, stoner twist and all the sludge.

It’s about halfway through the eighteen-minute ‘Healing the Ouroburous’ that things take a bit of a crazy turn. The lead riffing steps up to next-level flamboyant and I’m starting to think ‘this is maybe a bit much’. It’s not just that it’s technical, it’s just a bit fretwanky, even a bit Thin Lizzy, like ‘Whisky in the Jar’ jammed for fifteen minutes at a gig with three local support bands for a minor-league headliner – but then they pull it back and we’re returned to slow, lumbering territory. If there’s a brief burst where it sounds a bit Alice In Chains, it’s forgivable, because within the obvious genre framework, Iceburn bring in so much to expand the limits of convention, and it’s refreshing, especially from a band with so much history. It would have been so easy for them to just turn out a brace of droning riff beasts where not a lot happens, and no doubt they would have been lauded for their return to form and their place in the underground canon, but… well bollocks to that. Then there are the vocal – shifting between a low growl and some quite melodic moments, but all kept low in the mix.

‘Dahlia Rides the Firebird’ is another absolute bloody behemoth, a collision of Earth and Melvins, and a real slow-burner that takes suspense to a point near the limit. It takes three minutes before it even begins to take form, and then lumbers like some giant Cretaceous riff-lizard – one with big, swinging riff knackers at that. Yes, this has some swagger, and it builds, and it builds… The monster crunching riff that crashes in to punch hard in the last five minutes more than justifies the wait. When it lands, it’s absolutely fucking colossal.

Asclepius is a statement, and one which informs us that Iceburn are forward-facing and aren’t looking to recreate the past or retread old ground just to please people. And that in itself should please enough people, because this is so, so solid.

AAA

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Wizard Rifle – Wizard Rifle

Posted: 11 August 2019 in Albums
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Svart Records – 30th August 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

The Portland two-piece described as purveyors of ‘noisy metal’ haven’t wasted time on naming their third album, which lands five years on from 2014’s Here in the Deadlights, and have instead focused on the contents and rendering it as maximalist as possible. There are a fair few duos around at the moment who manage to conjure a full-band sound. It’s impressive, but how do they do it? Big amps and lots of pedals is the usual answer, but with these guys, there’s got to be something more. I mean, the sound is huge. In fact, no, it’s way bigger than huge. Alchemy. It’s gotta be.

The album’s five songs are all at least seven minutes long, and are, without exception, hefty as hell riffmongous monsters, the noisy metal style being very much of the sludgy stoner persuasion, with Melvins being the most obvious and appropriate touchstone. But they’re no half-arsed style appropriators: there’s a lot going on here, and there’s a slew of other elements in the mix. Punk and psychedelia may sound like an awkward combination, but they pull them together effortlessly, along with a dose of really gritty thrash.

‘Caveman Waltz’ doesn’t sound like it’s actually in waltz-time, but steps up from a lumbering knuckledragger of a riff to doubling the tempo halfway through and thrashing out an uptempo throb with spiralling lead fretwork weaving a sonic mesh over the thumping percussion as the vocals go full-throated holler mode.

And they’ve got tricks galore up their (wizard’s) sleeves. The twelve-minute ‘Funeral of the Sun’ melds black metal and prog to create an expansive piece that rages and snarls but also features moments of rich atmosphere and strong melody.

Closer ‘V’ drives in hard with the most overtly thrash riff, but the vocals go all psych and the lead line is mathy and then… my head’ spinning with all of it after just a minute and a half. Nine minutes in and it’s all over.

You’ll likely often read that metal is running out of ideas, and that doomy / stoner / sludge has become a predictable parody of itself. And it’s not entirely untrue. But then an act like Wizard Rifle will present themselves and completely smash all preconceptions with a blend of killer riffs and wild innovation. Here, Wizard Rifle prove that there’s still a lot of ground to be explored through permutation and hybridity, delivering an album that’s solidly rooted in familiar territories, but at the same time explores new ground and doesn’t sound quite like anything else. At least, nothing I’ve yet heard.

AA

Wizard Rifle – Wizard Rifle

Watch: ‘Pig Man’ by Black Moth

Posted: 6 August 2018 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following their storming performance at Desertfest, a run of European shows with L7, plus a one-off appearance with stoner rock legends Sleep, Black Moth show no signs of stopping in 2018 as they share a new video for ‘Pig Man’ ahead of their UK tour with Corrosion of Conformity, Orange Goblin and Fireball Ministry.

Directed by Ged Murphy/Rob Hoey and filmed by Louis Caulfield, vocalist Harriet Hyde comments on the meaning behind the track:-

‘In my endless fascination with human sexuality, I came across a brilliant book called Perv by Jesse Bering which celebrates how we’re all sexual deviants in our own unique and colourful ways. In reading it, however, one particular story stood out for its horror and absurdity…

‘Most people know of the atrocities committed towards women in 17th century New England in the Salem Witch Hunts. Deranged rumours circulated that they cut off men’s penises, bewitched them and kept them as pets! To this day, women are ‘slut-shamed’ and outcast for possessing their own innate power and sexuality.

‘A lesser known story is that of the ‘Pig Man’ hunts that obsessed the congregations of New Haven. The poor dears in their infinite repression managed to convince themselves that certain men were secretly in league with the Devil to impregnate barnyard animals. The offspring would be Satan’s children walking the earth, wreaking destruction in their orderly Christian society. It seems the arrival of a deformed pig foetus was enough to incriminate the farmhand for ‘buggery’ and lead to his brutal execution. In a sick, paranoid society, no-one is safe.’

Watch ‘Pig Man’ here:

Tour dates with Corrosion of Conformity / Orange Goblin / Fireball Ministry

Oct. 26 – Engine Rooms – Southampton 
Oct. 27 – The Institute – Birmingham 
Oct. 28 – Rock City – Nottingham 
Oct. 30 – The Ritz – Manchester

Nov. 01 – Garage – Glasgow 
Nov. 02 – The Plug – Sheffield 
Nov. 03 – Cardiff University Great Hall – Cardiff 
Nov. 04 – The Forum – London

Black Moth Trees

Drug Cult – Drug Cult

Posted: 9 June 2018 in Albums
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Ritual Productions – 21st June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s perhaps fitting that self-professed occultist doom collective Drug Cult should unveil their debut long-player to coincide with midsummer’s day and the solstice.

They open with a nine-minute sludge-trudge that’s bursting with the trappings of psychedelia and old-school hard rock: ‘Serpent Therapy’ starts so slow, with so much distance between each chord that it sounds like an ending, a protracted grinding to a halt, rather than the start. Yes, this is slow, and this is heavy. The guitars are close to collapsing under their own weight, and threaten to bury Aasha Tozer’s reverb-drowned vocals in the process. It’s the soundtrack to a bad trip into the underworld, and while there’s nothing of such epic proportions to be found during the remainder of the album’s nine tracks, the darkness remains all-pervasive.

There’s a classic, vintage quality to the songs, but it’s all sludged up, twisted and messy, and what the songs lack in duration (the majority are below the four-minute mark) they more than compensate in density. The riffs lumber slow, low, and heavy, the bass grinds just as slow and even lower: the percussion doesn’t propel, but instead lands in thunderous ricochets while the cymbals wash in tidal waves. In fact, it’s like listening to an early Melvins 45 at 33, save for the vocals, which never sound anything less than borderline deranged.

The sense of volume is immense, speaker-shredding, earth-shattering. And just when it doesn’t seem possible to drive any deeper, grind any lower, ‘Bloodstone’ reaches a new low in low, the essence of doom-laden hard rock riffing distilled to its absolute. The form is still apparent: Drug Cult don’t take it beyond the limits as Sunn O))) do, but against contemporaries like Esben and the Witch and Big Brave, Drug Cult stand out for their concision and their eschewing of passages of levity: this is unforgiving, ultra-heavyweight from beginning to end. As such, it’s a truly megalithic work. Worship it.

AA

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Witchcryer – Cry Witch

Posted: 24 December 2017 in Albums
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Ripple Music – 19th January 2018

James Wells

Maybe it’s just me – and it’s quite possible – but many of the current crop of so-called doom-metal bands are pretty tame, and are little more than Sabbath-inspired hard rock bands lacking in inspiration and keen to jump on the metal zeitgeist of circa 2015.

I’m not intentionally singling out female-fronted doom acts, but I was recently appalled by Jess and the Ancient Ones for reasons which really ought to be apparent, and those reasons aren’t a million miles away from the anguish on being presented with Witchcryer’s latest offering.

Cry Witch is better, less cliché and less Jeffersone Airplane meets The Doors, which is a relief. A major fucking relief. But it’s still so steeped in cliché and heritage as so be not so much so last year and so ersatz retro bullshit and to be deeply uncomfortable. And it’s not especially doomy.

There are some ok riffs and the thumping bass embarks on some neat little runs, and the title track, which is also the opener makes for a strong enough start, and sonically, stylistically, it’s representative of the album as a whole. So what’s the problem? Actually, that’s precisely the problem. Against, say, Black Moth, who are also of a similar ilk Witchcryer sound tame, and while there’s not much different in the two band’s approaches, the lack of real bite could be forgiven if the hooks were sharper. But the preoccupation with mining the vintage seam has apparently eclipsed any quest to forge their own identity.

AAA

Witchcryer – Cry Witch

Watch: ‘Moonbow’ by Black Moth

Posted: 10 November 2017 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Having recently announced that their new album Anatomical Venus will be released early next year, Black Moth have shared the first single from the record in the form of the psychedelic video for ‘Moonbow’, directed by Ben Foley (Foley previously worked with BM on their spectacularly kinky ‘Looner’ clip, 2015).

Vocalist Harriet Hyde comments:

‘It is an ode and an offering to the moon herself, in the hope that she will shine her silver blessings on Mothic ventures to follow. Ben Foley’s directorial work with us has gone from Looner to Lunar. His deft creative touch on ‘Moonbow’ drags the viewer with us through a psychedelic neon dreamscape – an intoxicating experience of lunar worship’

While their first 2 albums were released by New Heavy Sounds, Black Moth will have their latest / third studio album issued worldwide via Candlelight Records on February 23rd 2018, the result of an alliance between Candlelight and NHS.

Produced by Andy Hawkins (Hawk Eyes, Maximo Park) with Russ Russell (Napalm Death, Dimmu Borgir) handling the mix, this 10-track affair sees the Leeds / London outfit – vocalist Harriet Hyde, guitarists Jim Swainston & Federica Gialanze’, bassist Dave Vachon and drummer Dom McCready –  further honing the various elements of their sound to make the hooks more barbed and the focus more collective.

Lead single ‘Moonbow’ provides the first taste of things to come, successfully combining wide-eyed wonder with true metallic weight, the whole thing supported by the aforementioned clip that delivers from the off in both intensity and colour. Watch the video here:

AAA

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Listen: ‘Symptom of the Universe’ (Black Sabbath Cover) by Uniform

Posted: 30 October 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Uniform are old friends Ben Greenberg (ex-The Men, Hubble, and the producer/engineer responsible for much of the Sacred Bones catalog) and Michael Berdan (ex Drunkdriver, York Factory Complaint) and formed in New York City in 2013.

To coincide with the 28th October release of their Ghosthouse EP (which has scored Aural Aggravation’s vote), they’ve unveiled their cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Symptom of the Universe’.

Get your lugs round it here…