Posts Tagged ‘Grind’

Tyrannus / Magicide – Tory Punching Music

Posted: 16 December 2023 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Fiadh Productions – 15th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

My love of a good split release is something I’ve effused about variously here and elsewhere, and in a way, the contents of this particular split is pretty much secondary to the sentiment. The last thirteen years in the UK have been absolutely fucking shit. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. We can’t blame the government for the pandemic, but everything was shit a long time before that, and besides, we can blame them for the shitshow handling of everything, and for the way these disaster capitalist cunts milked every last penny of profit from it for their mates and their vested interests, their undisclosed shareholdings and all the rest.

And I’d keep hearing people defending Johnson, saying ‘he’s doing his best’. Only, he wasn’t. The dishevelled cretin would roll out of bed, half-cocked and probably half-cut after one of the lockdown parties he claims he didn’t know about, babbling bollocks, his only interest being self-interest. And the worst of it is that he wasn’t even the worst. And yet still people defend them, still people vote for them.

I remember watching the news after the last election, and a woman in her 70s appeared being interviewed on a street in Peterborough. She went on about how she was ‘thrilled to bits’ to have the Conservatives back and to have a Conservative MP: she ‘turned out in the pouring rain’ to put her ‘little cross’, and tells why she voted conservative, and how pleased she is that they got in:

“Well it’s the education system really. Oh, and the homeless. So many homeless people here, I’ve never seen it like this.”

And why’s that then? After years and years of Conservative government, you actually buy the line that they’re the part of change? When you say ‘the homeless’, what do you expect this government to do about them? Hire 20,000 more street cleaners by actually retaining 10,000 existing street cleaners and hiring 10,000 more over the next 40 years to come and toss them into refuse trucks? Or round them up into camps and line them up for euthanisation? I’m guessing she meant clean up the streets rather than help them, because well, where’s the fiscal value in that? Anyway, good luck with recruiting minimum wagers to dispose of the bodies once you’ve closed the door to all the Poles and other EU nationals who are currently propping the country up by doing the jobs no-one else wants.

I feel the rage. Every single day. And I feel the urge to punch Tories, and their voters, every single day, too. The current crop of Tories are fucking fascists, and anyone who supports them is complicit.

This EP’s three tracks are a head-shredding blast. Tyrannus bring us ‘Bricks And Flesh, Ashes And Iron’, five minutes of blastbeat-driven snarling black metal that’s both fast and furious, not to mention utterly relentless. It gets the pulse racing alright,and as dark and gnarly as it is, it’s pure, it’s raw, it’s exhilarating, and the guitar solo is absolutely wild.

Magicide give us two tracks, each a minute and thirty-nine seconds long. The contrast is the perfect reminder of the joy of the split release: their offerings bring a different shade of brutality, of pulverising pace. It’s a new hybrid, too, combining frenetic drum ‘n’ bass beats and an industrial edge which calls to mind turn of the millennium Pitch Shifter when they moved away from guttural industrial to create a beat-heavy, post-Prodigy Nu-metal hybrid. Black metal with tripping, stuttering rapidfire drumming, this is simply eye-popping. Thick, trudging riffs growl against grinding percussion and explosive breakbeats. There’s a load of shouting and growling, but the only audible lyric comes when everything pauses for a split second, and the line ‘this is Tory punching music’ rings out crisp and clear, in a strong Scottish accent.

And it is. The EP is full-throttle, an adrenaline rush that really gets you pumped. The message is clear and hard to disagree with for anyone with a brain or a soul. Whether you’re on board with new new labour or not, fuck the Tories. And feel the rage through this EP.

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Black Shape – BINS

Posted: 30 September 2023 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 6th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Heavy music doesn’t have to be po-faced or excessively serious, and there have been a few comedy metal and noise bands through the years. Lawnmower Deth are one which swiftly spring to mind, but the likes of Municipal Waste, and lesser-known acts like Grindcore Cakemakers also make hard noise while being a far cry from the existential rage more commonly associated with their genres. And that’s good. The world needs variety, and there’s more than one way to alleviate the grimness of life on this sorry planet.

This album from Black Shape is perhaps the absolute antithesis of Godflesh’s seminal Streetcleaner. With the lumbering weight of a runaway bin lorry, Black Shape rumble their way through eleven tracks of bin themed absurdity, utilising their knack for writing material that is as colossally heavy as it is varied and comedic. Most of the tracks are around the two-minute mark, with just a couple of four-minute outliers. On the surface it’s a whole mess of noisy shit, but closer listening soon reveals a wildly varied album which incorporates jazz, spoken word, nu-metal, rap and thrash.

‘The Beast from the North East’ is a dirty, shouty punk effort – more Anti-Nowhere League than The Pistols. Dense, muscular, with filthy sludge guitars, pant-soiling bass, and a wild solo which occupies half the song’s duration. The production is rough and raw, and this works in its favour: the guitar on ‘I Wanna be a Binman’ positively tears from the speakers, and it’s like being at a gig and standing so close to the PA that your nostrils vibrate. If you’ve never done it, you need to at least once, although earplugs are recommended. You still feel the force without fucking your hearing for the rest of your life. It’s a throbbing stomper reminiscent of Ministry circa Psalm 69. Only instead of burning for the needle, it’s a hard craving for lugging refuse. They pillage every style going here: ‘Dogshit Bin Juice’ takes a turn for the choral in the verses between ball-busting glam stomp riff breaks. It’s hilarious, but also makes you think. You sometimes hear that binmen are pretty well-paid. But would you do this, for any money?

If ‘Put Me in the Bin’ is the most overtly old-school punk cut, the recording is again more industrial, which couldn’t be more at odds with the offbeat, off-the-cuff lyrics, while ‘Once a Binman, Always a Binman’ throws a curveball with a gentle intro and unlikely lift of ‘Love Lift us Up Where We Belong’ before going full-slugging nu-metal / grunge crossover, with the meaty heft of Tad bringing the blue collar grit to proceedings. There are some moments of astute observation and social critique which land quite unexpectedly, but it just goes to show that it’s a mistake to write of a so-called ‘comedy’ album – or indeed any comedy – as shallow, lacking in content, or emotional depth. ‘The Story of How I Died’ brings lilting harp and Pam Ayres style narrative.

Beyond bin-related themes, this is not an album that’s predictable in anyway, lyrically or stylistically, with piano ballads pressed against squalling hardcore assaults. And because of the punk / thrash / metal leanings, and the overall daftness of many of the lyrics and the overall concept, Black Shape’s musicianship is likely to be overlooked. But the range is a measure of immense versatility and competence. Black Shape are the Bill Bailey of dustbins, and BINS is a work of sheer brilliance.

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Thee Alcoholics – Live At The Piper

Posted: 2 June 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 19th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’d love to avoid tedious repetition but it’s hard to review yet another Human Worth release without mentioning just how fucking great this label is, because the name means what it says – it’s a label of rare integrity, which always donates a percentage of proceeds to charitable causes, more often than not one local to the artist, and for this release by ‘shape shifting south London noise rock outfit Thee Alcoholics’, 10% of proceeds from this record will be donated to the south London based charity The Lewisham Primary Care Recovery Service.

They’re also outstanding with their radar for quality noise, and Thee Alcoholics sit comfortably on the label’s roster, delivering ‘songs that rail against injustice, intolerance and institutionalised Great British apathy – neatly wrapped around screeching, trash guitar riffs and blast beat driven bass synths. Mixing the gnarly, outsider big muff energy of early Tad and Mudhoney with the industrial crush repetition of Godflesh. Ugly vocals are buried somewhere between the Brainbombs and Girls Against Boys.’

Could it get any better? Well, actually, yes! The EP’s artwork, by Tony Mountford, tips a hat to Therapy?’s live 7inch ‘Opal Mantra’, while the recording itself is pitched as ‘a document of the journey so far – 30 minutes of agro [sic] drunk rock n roll. In the red sizzle of a load of broken equipment. The band barely holding it together in their chaotic element.’ Oh, and it’s mastered by Jon Hamilton of Part Chimp.

Human Worth may be a young label, but the sense of musical history and heritage that informs their choices is remarkable, and all of the references trace a solid lineage to the early 90s – and it’s hard to overstate just how exciting those short few years were. Because as much as it was about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine breaking the mainstream, it was about a current of alternative guitar-based music which occupied John Peel’s playlists and infinite column inches in Melody Maker (if not so much the NME). And the live ‘Opal Mantra’ EP is absolutely fucking blinder and makes for an admirable reference point, packing as it does raw and ripping renditions of ‘Innocent X’ and ‘Potato Junkie’ alongside one of the best non-album tracks ever. That a band could chuck a song like that out in such a fashion was a revelation at the time and it’s interesting to see all of these references come together here.

For me, Tad was always way more the quintessence of grunge than, say, Pearl Jam, the gritty, sweaty metal heft of songs about farming and manual labour really getting to grips with the reason the Seattle scene emerged representing the blue-collar – or perhaps more accurately the plaid-collar demographic who needed to vent after several hours of slog and grind. And Thee Alcoholics really capture that mood, often at a frantic pace that suggests a strong influence from mid- to late-eighties hardcore melded with nineties noise and grunge.

Live recordings can be difficult: too crisp and clean and so polished and overdubbed it doesn’t sound live, or otherwise just dingy and shit; this one is great because it’s not dingy and shit, but isn’t exactly ‘produced’ either: it’s dense and you can hear the audience – sometimes shouting to one another during the songs, because they’re tossers – and it all makes for a document that’s perhaps flawed to some ears, but is, as a document, absolutely perfect because you really do feel like you’re there.

Live At The Piper features live renditions of songs from their debut album released on cassette, and seven-inch releases, and it’s warts-and-all in the vein of The Fall’s Totale’s Turns – and it needs to be: it’s a proper live document rather than some polished-up, super-dubbed-up, hyper-clean fictionalised reimagination of events, as they power through eight songs in twenty-four minutes.

‘A Ghetto Thing’ is two minutes of throbbing, thrashing fury, rushing its way to the safety of a pub car park in blitzkrieg of noise, while ‘Turn on the Radio’ is built around a driving riff which switches up a key for the chorus; the vocals are half buried and the drums dominate everything and it’s all over in less than two minutes, which is time enough to do the job of grabbing you by the throat and kneeing you in the nuts several times. It’s a hell of a racket, but amidst the frenetic crashing of cymbals and general murk is a song that’s strong enough to lodge in your brain, and it’s rare for bands this noisy, this messy, to incorporate ‘catchy’ elements, favouring instead sheer force and sonic impact – which they do elsewhere, not least of all with the high-impact forty-one second detonation that is ‘Sweetheart’. Then again. ‘She’s the Man’ is built around a nagging locked-in industrial groove, but it’s also scuzzy as hell, and it’s not hard to see where the Godflesh and Girls Against Boys references come in, and it’s arguably the strongest song on the set, a low-sling grinding wheeze emerging from shards of feedback.

Six-and-a-half-minute set closer ‘Politicians’ is low, slow, and grimy – which is extremely fitting, really, and the booming, sludgy bass is just magnificent.

As with the B E L K release, Human Worth have adhered with the old hardcore ethic of releasing a band in its rawest, most unadulterated form, and it works because it preserves the energy and integrity of the moment. It ain’t pretty, but it’s real.

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Petrol Hoers – Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse

Posted: 15 August 2022 in Albums
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26th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

How did this happen? How?? I mean, it’s no bad thing – quite the opposite, in fact – but somehow, a joke band so jokey as so seem almost mythological has broken through, not just on the local scene, but nationally and with songs being played on high-profile radio stations like BBC introducing and even 6Music. They’re a way off beating Shed 7 as York’s most renowned act, but they really are gunning hard for national status right now, following the success of Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess and now Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse.

To look at the covers of early Petrol Hoers albums – or indeed, alboms – is likely enough to deter most sane people – cartoon horses with toilet-wall scrawled enormophalluses provide the housing for messy combinations of hardcore techno and grindcore, the most improbably of hybrids imaginable rendered cheaply and with not only a knowing, but a gleeful lack of sophistication.

So what happened? Not much, really, at least on the face of things. The material is still very much centred around shameful horse puns and so on, and their sound is still a weird mash-up of techno and industrial metal, kinda like Revolting Cocks gone even wronger than on recent tours. The cover art’s been toned down a bit (Horse Stuff featured Danny elegantly draped in a dressing gown in his horse head mask), and some hard touring alongside mates Horse Bastard turned the nation on to all things equine seems to be about the summary of the turn in favour for the act whose most renowned merch is a T-shirt that was born out of a hilarious misunderstanding with the printers, bearing the slogan ‘“PETROL HOERS” IN COMIC SANS CENTRE FRONT BIG AS YOU CAN TA’.

Danny Buckley isn’t daft, and the whole HOERS project is very much an escape for him – but he does it all so well. From the relentless, eye-bleeding block caps posts on social media to the tie-dye T-shirts and pants, HOERS are the full package, so to speak.

Lead single, ‘Captain Me Space Daddy’ has already had some radio play, which is an incredible achievement, considering that it’s an aggressive shouty racket that switches from grating aggrotech to some kind of cheesy Eurovision pop shanty meets early Wax Trax! that’s 100% what the fuck.

It’s exemplary of the album as a whole: fast and frantic – Ali G rapping over chiptune Cossack disco in a head-on collision with full-on raging metal abrasion with raw-throated hollering vocals. It is utterly absurd, and even knowing what to expect, you still find yourself dazed by the audacity of this insane hybrid that singlehandedly knells the death toll for postmodernism, because now, it really has all been done. The thing is – and make no mistake, it’s absolutely genius – even if you absolutely hate it, it’s impossible to deny the audacity and to admire it. ‘Honk if You Like Donk’ is pretty much self-explanatory, while ‘You Can Give Horse a Buckfast’ is a balls-out rager that slips into some kind of lederhosen-slapping ho(rs)edown. ‘You can give a horse a Buckfast / but you’ll never see me drink’, snarls the tee-total Hoers. Wait, he does this shit sober? Oh yes.

It kicks off – and boy, it kicks off – with the Hi-NRG happy horsecore / doom-grind crossover of ‘It’s Just a Mask’, and one feels for all the horseplay, there’s something quite insightful and honest about this. ‘I Would Die for Mr Crunchy’ finds The Hoers spitting vitriol about politicians and the monarchy, and again illustrates that for all the frippery and puerile puns, there is some genuine substance here, and Hoers are by no means completely crass and two-dimensional.

Closer ‘Biblically Accurate Horse’ is a pumping techno tune that invites worthy comparisons to PIG and KMFDM. It’s a bangin’ finish to a bangin’ album, and yes, yes, it really does bang all the way. It’s completely barmy, and that’s precisely why it’s brilliant.

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Watch: ‘Maximum Bastardry’ by Corrupt Moral Altar

Posted: 4 November 2020 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Corrupt Moral Altar who feature Napalm Death live guitarist John Cooke have shared the video for the nicely titled track Maximum Bastardry’ which you can watch now.

After years of being associated with that one band from the 60s you might have heard of, Liverpool has done its level best in the past decade to be a hotbed for filthy, nasty riffs, rapid, crushing blast-beats and fuck-you vocals; and Corrupt Moral Altar are one of the leading names in that movement, merging the abrasive sensibilities of  the heavy spectrum into a head-pounding cacophony of pure aural hurt.  

Gliding effortlessly between the jarring aggression of the heaviest of grind and sludge to those infectiously punky hooks, their two full lengths, 2014’s ‘Mechanical Tides’ on Season of Mist and 2017’s self-released ‘Eunoia’, barb their way into your brain stem and don’t leave your head no matter how hard you pull. You’ll be lucky if your neck stays in one piece when Corrupt Moral Altar are assaulting your eardrums.   

With new EP ‘Patiently Waiting For Wonderful Things’ set for release on 27th November (APF Records), the remaining months of 2020 are going to get a bit more brutal round these parts as Corrupt Moral Altar look to cave your skull in.

Vocalist Chris Reese comments on the video for new single ‘Maximum Bastardry’,

"Here it is, the contingency plan to what was originally going to be a 4k, 3D, multihundred pound production with more explosions and celebrity cameos than you could be bothered to say "hey, that wasn’t Kenneth Choi" at.

Instead you get this grotty DIY effort as Liverpool was recently banned from having any fun. It’s more fitting really, as this track is about the unsustainable lifestyle of someone getting wrecked every night. There can be a romanticism about drinking and drug culture, but this track explores the fact they know they are a terrible bastard, that people get them fucked up to gain amusement from the resulting behaviour and they are aware that ultimately, they’re fucking up their own life.

Live in the moment, seize the day… I say Maximum Bastardry.”

Watch the video now:

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Shrimp – Mantis Shrimp

Posted: 20 April 2020 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 29th May 2020

Mantis Shrimp is the second Shrimp release following their eponymous debut released just over a year ago, in January 2019. A collaboration between various luminaries of the underground scene in Newcastle, England, and Ryosuke Kiyasu, who has enough projects to his credit to render him a one-man music scene in Japan, they describe their sound as ‘chitinous free grind onslaught’.

Now, if ‘Shrimp’ has connotations of small fry, the proverbial puny weakling, and their debut laid waste to those associations with a devastating cacophony , then it’s perhaps worth approaching this instalment with the knowledge that the mantis shrimp is the brutal bastard of the small crustacean world: a violent predator, mantis shrimp typically eat fish, crabs, clams, snails, worms, shrimp and squid, and can take on animals significantly larger than themselves thanks to their ‘calcified clubs’

According to Wikipedia, these hard exoskeletal bastards are sometimes referred to as ‘thumb splitters’ ‘because of the animal’s ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously…—mantis shrimps have powerful claws that are used to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning, or dismembering’.

This pretty much how it feels listening to the four pieces here.

There’s a strain (and strain is an apposite word choice) of experimental jazz that sounds like the end of a piece, where the instruments all clatter and rumble as they wind down from a climax, only that is the piece, and each piece lasts an eternity. That’s this. Only with grating guitars and bowel-ripping guttural vocals, which add depth and detail to the calamitous, chaotic racket.

‘Sealed Explosion’ eases it in gently, with thirteen minutes of stop / start percussion and stuttering discord that crashes and stumbles in all directions. It’s an absolute headfuck, and it’s only more intensely difficult from hereon in, with the sludgy squall of ‘Grasping Pincers’ bubbling through a relentless racket of crashing cymbals and stammering anti-chords and screeding feedback. The lull after four and a half minutes feels like an immense relief – but then you realise there’s another ten minutes to go as Watts starts up the gasping growl (first mistyped amusingly but perhaps appropriately as ‘sharts up’) that will continues to rasp through the bewildering tempest of noise. There’s some wild funk bass played at a hundred miles an hour around the ten-minute mark, but it’s submerged beneath a brain-shredding wall of noise. That’s no criticism, just a mere statement of fact.

‘Boiling Swamp’ spring and spurs, eddying electronics and guitars that sound more like they’re tuning up than playing actual music dominate the thrumming, humming drone of feedback and bass groans and tweeting sonic contrails. It gradual descends into a bass drone miasma, while shrill top-end feedback shrieks all around. Not a lot happens, but amidst the turbulence, there are wordless howls and hollers. Or, if words, impenetrable. As they ought to be. Watts resorts to guttural snarls in the dying minutes of this chthonic noise dirge that evokes Sunn O))) minus the growling low end crossed with Whitehouse, and which leaves ‘Endless Collapsing Staircase’ in prospect.

It’s 28 minutes of trippy experimental electronica that straddles noise, power electronics and various ambient forms. Percussion rattles erratically amidst trilling industrial scrapes, gradually building through wordless vocal drones and swelling layers of extranea. Anguished howls, shrieks, and barks punctuate a mess of feedback and flailing percussion. It’s a fucking horrible mess of noise: there’s a stab at a fractured bass groove in amongst it all. It never quite gets going, and 14 minutes in, it sounds like it’s all over as it collapses into a mess of pedals, but we’re barely at the midpoint. Watts sounds like he’s being gutted in a ceremonial act that’s been incorporated into a Large Unit performance. Or something. It hurts. But it works.

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Watch: ‘Barmecide Feast’ (ft. Matt Moss of Slugdge) by Beyond Grace

Posted: 28 August 2019 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Nottingham’s Beyond Grace have released the new video for their latest single ‘Barmecide Feast’ which was released on July 1st and can be purchased from their Bandcamp page. All proceeds from the sale will be donated to local food banks.

When asked about the meaning behind the track, the band stated, “In The Arabian Nights there’s a story where a beggar is taken in by a rich man and served an imaginary meal and, after playing along with the illusion, is ultimately rewarded with a life of luxury and opulence. Of course, in the real world, this isn’t what happens. We wait and we wait, but nothing changes. We’re just told to do more with less, to keep our mouths shut, even as those upstream do their best to dam the river so that all that reaches us is the merest trickle of the wealth they’ve hoarded.”

‘Barmecide Feast’ marks the beginning of a new era for Beyond Grace. Darker, heavier, and angrier than ever, it offers a taste of what to expect from their upcoming second album, Our Kingdom Undone, aided and abetted by some suitably guttural guest vocals by Matt Moss (Slugdge) and a fittingly massive production job courtesy of Charles Elliott (Abysmal Dawn).

Watch the video here:

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Listen: ‘Music is Serious Business’ by Petrol Hoers

Posted: 20 August 2019 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Music is serious business and you have to be willing to power through on your journey to worldwide success, and Petrol Hoers (with all his Horse Problems and Cross Word Puzzles), is here to guide you.

Of the record, Hoers neighs: "I HOPE YOU ENJOY MY ALBOM PLEASE PRETEND YOU DID NOT HEAR THE BUCKFAST PUN I WOULD LIKE TO USE THAT IN ANOTHER SONG…"

Mixing elements of comedy, industrial, grindcore, gabba and punk music, Hoers is your real alternative in 2019.

Not much is known about this hefty equine phenom, but he does really like Squats, and believes that its very important while you give his new album, ‘I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess’ (released on August 31) a listen, that you do some too.

Why the long face?

Listen to ‘Music is Serious Business’ here:

Parasitic Twins / The Carnival Rejects – The Parasitic Rejects EP

Posted: 17 May 2019 in Singles and EPs
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James Wells

Having toured together, Parasitic Twins and The Carnival Rejects release a split EP. It makes sense, really: why not having shared a stage and an audience?

This is a bit of a mix, and rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraw. That’s no criticism: both bands espouse a credible punk ethic, and while so many contemporary punk acts preach it, they bot keep it real, with The Carnival Rejects’ three songs going in hard and fast and favouring energy over technical prowess. And yes, they may be a bit standard fare in some respects, with their three-chord thrashabouts and terrace-chant choruses, but that’s their thing, and there’s a substantia audience for three-chord thrashabouts with terrace-chant choruses delivered with passion.

Parasitic Twins, Max Watt and Dom Smith are altogether gnarlier, nastier, and more abrasive. Their grind/thrash/metal cover of Babylon Zoo’s ‘Spaceman’ is killer: gritty as hell and with full-weight chug and raw-throated vocals, it’s utterly brutal and barely recognisable for the most part. But from amidst the rabid racket emerges a rendition of that chorus that’s worthy of Napalm Death

‘Feel Nothing’ is even more explosively raw, a snarking mess of distortion with drums and vocals and mangled as the guitars, the chords indistinguishable in a tempest of raging overdrive that sounds like it was recorded in a garage on a phone. And it wouldn’t work if done differently: it’s not pretty music, and it wouldn’t be right to pretty it up. Instead, putting its ugly, blunt force to the fore, it hits hard like a punch to the gut.

The two bands spin different sides of the punk coin, and jointly deliver something powerful, pure, and above all, strong.

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SEEP AWAY – The Blackened Carnival of Societal Ineptitude

Posted: 29 December 2017 in Albums
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20th December 2017

There’s something uniquely enjoyable about watching a band develop from their most formative stages to become the act they aspired to be, and showed the potential to be. I first encountered Seep Away on a bill of noisy shit around Christmas in 2015, soon after they came into existence.

They describe their sound as ‘raw and punkish,’ and not that ‘there’s not too much melody, a lot of anger and a tonne of noise’. Their performance was ragged, and it was clear they were very much in development, both musically and as an act. But the sheer passion and raw energy they poured into that set was something else. They would stop and gasp for breath between songs, having played each one like it was the last song they would ever play.

Over the course of the next two years, they didn’t just get better, they got awesome. Tighter, louder, harder, harsher. Jay Sillence swiftly evolved into one of the most compelling front men you could hope to see: fearlessly in your face, anarchic and unpredictable, and it was clear watching them play that they were loving every minute.

It’s therefore sad that The Blackened Carnival of Societal Ineptitude is a parting gesture. But it’s also a cause for elation that they’re signing off with a collection of songs that encapsulate the sound – not to mention the brutal, ferocious, energy of those later live shows. Circumstance and geography may be behind the band’s demise, but better that than acrimony or creative collapse, and they’re departing on a high. The Blackened Carnival of Societal Ineptitude contains eight tracks and clocks in at around twenty-two minutes and condenses all elements of the essence of Seep Away into that.

‘Rot’ is all about the churning, pulverizing riffage, the ribcage-rattling bass and snarling vocal attack. For dingy, murky, metal-done-dirty, it’s up here with Fudge Tunnel at their best. Single cut ‘Matchstick Man’ throbs and rages. Their rendition of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ has long been alive favourite, and the studio version captures the spirit of their interpretation perfectly. You’ll be leaping round the house hollering ‘baby I like it rrrrrrrrrrroooooaaaaawwwwww!’ for a week after hearing it just once.

The album’s second cover, a take on Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ sees Sillence come on full Marilyn Manson, and they ratchet up the sneering sleaze to eleven. It’s a showy, metallic-grinding wheeze, brimming with sadistic malice. It’s also a sackful of deliciously manic and suitably irreverent fun.

‘Joie de Vivre’ returns to the snarling, churning, grunt and chug of the heavy grindy / metal / hardcore amalgam that defines the band’s sound, and it’s hard-edged and gnarly in the best possible way. It packs in all of the band’s intensity and full-throttle attack into under four minutes (and is the longest track here).

Closing the album (EP. whatever) in quirky and irreverent style, ‘The Awkward Handjob’ is a piece of silly fairground japery about, er, wanking, of course. It’s fitting that of any band, Seep Away should end their all-too-brief career with a toss-off track about tossing off.

Instead of bemoaning unfulfilled potential or mourning their departure, we should focus on the positive: Seep Away have delivered a blinder of a set here.

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