Posts Tagged ‘Heavy’

Hands Up Who Wants to Die – Nil All

Posted: 9 March 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Irish foursome Hands Up Who Wants to Die feature members of Shifting, No Spill Blood, and Wild Rocket, and – as you’d expect from an album released on Human Worth – it’s heavy. But it’s not just lumpen-headed thumping: there’s a lot to absorb on Nil All – and so much more than noise.

The opening of ‘Clothbound’ is atmospheric, subtle, intriguing. And then the bass slams in like a lump hammer. The guitar, rather than following with any direct riff, creeps around, twisting and turning, while the vocals are those of a strangled gargoyle – ugly, menacing, perturbing.

There’s a fair array of stylistic variation across the album’s eight tracks, and it’s this unusual relationship between the guitar and bass that is most intriguing. ‘0-0’ is a deconstructed jazz semi-spoken word piece where neither bass nor guitar confirm to the time signature of the drumming: Enablers may be a touchstone, but ultimately, this is something unique. The same is true of the low and slow theatrical math-rock of ‘L’inconnue’ that comes on like a dreamed reimagining of Shellac that lumbers its way into a howling psychodrama before slowly falling apart over the course of an eight and a half minutes that will make you feel like your limbs are slowly being separated from our body.

Satre famously wrote in Nausea that ‘hell is other people’ and this messy-sounding gut-churning bass-driven, feedback-strewn behemoth is a worthy soundtrack which corresponds with the urge to purge after too much time among the masses – like the excruciating torture of a trip into town on a weekend or lunchtime. It’s a crushingly heavy dirge, and the guitars nag and gnaw at your skull while the bass kicks you hard in the guts. And then it goes off-kilter and lumbers and lurches all over, and that hellish throb continues into the grainy drone of ‘Hell Is Just More Of What’s Already True’. It may only be a couple of minutes long, but it’s lugubrious as fuck.

‘God’s Favourite’ is like a three-way pileup of Shellac, Pavement, and Her Name is Calla, and these guys seem determined to drag the listener through some dark and difficult places – sonically and emotionally. This, of course, is the selling point for Nil All. It’s an album that rages, raves, groans and sighs as it explores those uncomfortable spaces and challenges the listener in a way that delivers optimal rewards. It channels the pain, anguish, and confusion of being alive and articulates it in a way you didn’t realise was possible.

Signing off with the blasting noise-fest that is ‘Ludger Sylbaris’ – a morass of booming bass and sinewy guitar havoc – Nil All is not overtly uplifting or cathartic. It’s schizophrenic, twisted, dark, unpredictable, deranged. And absolutely fucking top.

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Graphic Nature – A Mind Waiting To Die

Posted: 17 February 2023 in Albums
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Rude Records – 17th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m somewhat conflicted here. Broadly speaking, my view is that there is good music and bad music, and it’s not a question of genre: there are good songs in all styles, even if they’re the exceptions to the rule. I’m not a rabid fan of many genres – hip-hop and jazz to name but two – but really rate some songs from each of them. Apart from pop-punk, that is. That’s just the worst kind of music, period. Oh, and folk-punk can fuck off, too. Even worse than the music are the fans, especially at the end of the night at a festival. Anyway. Nu-metal. I can’t say I was ever a fan. I mean, it was a bit shit, right? At its worst, it was juvenile, dumb, and not even that heavy. But then, I was listening to Swans and Godflesh and early Pitch Shifter, bands I still point towards when offering examples of truly heavy music. I even went off Pitch Shifter when they transitioned to nu-metal. But then, I can’t say I hated all of it, and in some respects, I kinda miss it now. Is that simply nostalgia for shit because time? Or is it that there really does feel like there is no specific trend now, and everything is so fragmented there is no real sense of there being any cohesive culture or subculture?

Kent metallers Graphic Nature took their name from a track on Deftones’ Koi No Yokan album and cite Slipknot, but also Nine Inch Nails as key influences on their sound. And having formed in 2019, it’s fair to say that the band represent a new wave of nu-metal (which sounds a bit daft, but not as daft as The New Wave of New Wave that happened briefly in the early 90s, and it wasn’t only shit, but didn’t even really sound especially much like new wave). The point is that while lyrically, the subject matter is pretty obvious – death and decay, but mostly anxiety, people being fucked up, the world being fucked up – the anger and angst is channelled with a focus and force that is rather more sophisticated than some of the turn-of-the-millennium hits. There are no shit rap breaks or scratching, and pitched as an album designed to ‘start a dialogue about the issues that matter’, there’s a seriousness about A Mind Waiting To Die. ‘Rollin’’ or ‘A.D.I.D.A.S’ it is not. Thank fuck.

Halfway through the album, there’s a minute-long drum ‘n’ bass instrumental interlude. I’m not convinced it’s the most comfortable break, but it’s a necessary one, because there’s not much respite for the rest of the album’s thirteen-track duration – although the slower, sparser ‘A Twin’ which pitches the NIN influence to the fore – is a different kind of powerful.

For the most part, they combine their various influences into a dense, murky mess of fast-paced, high-octane racket, and as is the case with a fair bit of metalcore and nu-metal, the song structures tend not to focus too much on the conventions of verse/chorus, instead leaping to and from between tempos and riffs with brutal slabs of guitar, overdriven to the point that chords are compacted and become lumps of noise. There aren’t many easy inroads here, but in terms of an album that relentlessly blasts raging catharsis, well, job done. A Mind Waiting To Die simply isn’t a ‘tunes’ album: it’s gut-spilling nihilism, a mess of entrails and frayed nerves laid bare. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s harsh and heavy and they mean it.

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Watch: ‘Severance’ by Netherlands

Posted: 17 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Something unlike anything you’ve heard before, SEVERANCE is the 9th release from multi-instrumentalist, compulsive creator, and unrepentant volume addict Timo Ellis (Cibo Matto, Spacehog, Yoko Ono) under the NETHERLANDS moniker. Officially out on the 31st of March 2023 via Svart Records, SEVERANCE features all the hallmarks of Ellis’ work, including blistering post-shred guitar heroics, primal drumming, and soulful, yet searing caterwauls. But as with every NETHERLANDS release, Ellis has inexplicably found a way to ratchet up the intensity, render the dynamic shifts more extreme, and hone his menacing melange of melody and rhythm into a uniquely weaponized form of rock ‘n’ roll that reaches towards high art.

While Ellis is perpetually working, he’s not one to work with without a grander purpose than loud music for the sake of loud music. He adds:

SEVERANCE, the title track, describes the tragic predicament of how our “species” gets more and more dangerously disconnected from our experience as Earth-bound, collective animals; about how our foundational hyper-materialist (and human-supremacist) notions of civilizational “progress” and “the future” delude us to into endlessly, blindly exploiting and destroying each other, all of the Earth’s remaining life support systems…along with whatever remaining senses of beauty, magic, and mystery still even exist at this point.

An album exploring topics as heavy as the ones SEVERANCE tackles requires sonics to match. For Ellis — a prolific producer and engineer himself — the skills and peerless engineering sensibilities of tastemaking heavy music producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High On Fire) and the hallowed walls of Ballou’s God City Studio in Salem, Mass, proved the ideal space to capture the record’s massive sounds. For Ellis, Ballou’s unmatched attention to detail and “comprehensive tuning” of the drum and organic guitar sounds on SEVERANCE proved to be an x-factor in capturing the most monstrous and fully refined NETHrock release to date.

An album which makes it easy to understand why contemporary heavy metal luminaries like Joe Duplantier of Gojira and Bill Kelliher of Mastodon count themselves amongst NETHrock’s biggest fans, SEVERANCE is another chapter in the book of a band that’s consistently released heavy music on its own terms and with its own undeniable personality.

Svart Records proudly presents SEVERANCE by NETHERLANDS out on CD, black- and transparent red vinyl colorways and digital platforms on March 31st 2023.

Check the video here:

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AGLO – Into the Maze

Posted: 16 February 2023 in Albums
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Gutter Prince Cabal – 16th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There aren’t many guitar-based genres of music where one-man bands are particularly commonplace. Of course, I’m not talking about folk or acoustic-based music, but the kind of music where, on listening, you’d expect a full band. Industrial is something of an exception because early exponents like JG Thirlwell – aka Foetus – developed through the use of tape loops and studio experimentation, and the same is also true of later exponents like Nine Inch Nails, with Trent Reznor’s studio-based project evolving from being largely synthetic into a live proposition.

But black / death metal are genres unto themselves. One might joke that it’s because most of the people who make this kind of stuff have no mates or are too antisocial to form bands, although it may not be much of a joke. Either way, Melbourne-based Aaron Osborne is one of those one-man operations, handling all aspects of writing and playing to create the sound of several. And what a sound it is. If you want dark, dense, and sludgy, with bowel-loosening guttural vocals, then you’re in luck.

Into the Maze – a twenty-seven minute album – or mini-album – actually comprises two new songs plus four cuts previously released as the Collector EP.

You don’t listen to this stuff to be uplifted – but you do dive into it for escape, and Into the Maze brings that cathartic release.

The title track is monster slab of downtuned darkness. There are some guitar screeches which emerge from the relentless trudge that call to mind Fudge Tunnel, but this is denser, slower, doomier, and somehow less organic-feeling, like early Pitch Shifter but with live drums, and passing a nod to how they take ‘the swagger and groove of Entombed’s Wolverine Blues and infuse it with the tar-thick pull of doom’. But against Wolverine Blues, it’s half the pace and the lyrics are unintelligible grunts, so it’s very much an example of taking an influence and steering it in a different direction. And this is a good thing. The production is perfectly dingy and oppressive, and over the course of just short of half an hour it really grinds you down in just the way it should. In all, it’s pretty bloody brutal. I dig.

Oh, and that’s one hell of a logo.

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FVNERALS – Let the Earth Be Silent

Posted: 7 February 2023 in Albums
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Prophecy Productions – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I decided to strike out and create Aural Aggravation, the premise – at least in my head – was that I would write whatever I liked about whatever I liked, although the more detailed version of that was that I would pen essay-length reviews instead of the usual sub-three-hundred-word summaries that were, I suppose, about volume rather than depth. Equally, the idea at the time, back in 2016, was that it would be a vehicle by which to explore my relationship with music as much as the music itself. I haven’t always maintained this approach since: sometimes I’ve kicked out pieces simply chasing hits as the site has grown in its readership; others I’ve simply not felt like going deeper. And ultimately, I’ve thought ‘fuck it, my site, my platform’, and I have to say I’m comfortable with that. The quality of my writing is variable, and my typing and proofing even more so, but that’s part and parcel of keeping it real and with a view to the bigger picture that reviewing has to be – for me – about how I feel about the music I’m writing about. Because music isn’t something to simply be dissected clinically, assessed on technical merit. People listen to music because of the way it affects them, not because they’re on a battle of the bands panel critiquing like they’re judging Strictly.

You’d think that when things are unspeakably bleak and I’m facing struggles of a magnitude I find almost impossible to face, let alone articulate, the last thing I would want to do is wrap myself in a blanket of suffocatingly dark music, and that the last thing I could bear to listen to while in the process of arranging a funeral is anything by a band called FVNERALS.

But then psychology is complex.

I write to neutralise, to create distance. If it’s on the page, it’s not me, or my experience, it’s simply words. When I fell and broke my ribs some years back, I tore open the palm of my hand on landing. In shock, the first thing I did on arrival home wasn’t to clean the grit out and sterilize the bloody mess, but to photograph it. My wife asked why the hell I did that. It was a fair question. I hate blood, it makes me feel queasy, dizzy, faint. If it’s my own. A photograph of blood doesn’t bother me. So the photograph created separation. It was a hand, not my hand. If it had been my hand, I’d have probably passed out. A hand is just a picture, it’s just TV, like a movie.

I do not feel as if I am living in my own life right now. It doesn’t seem real. Having suffered a bereavement – expected, but at the same time unexpected – solace emerges from unexpected places. I’m not seeking comfort, and have no interest in exploring where I am on the journey of the five stages of bereavement. I am stepping back, and assessing the scene. It is not my life. And this is the soundtrack to my surveillance.

‘Darkness. FVNERALS have created an album that turns the emptiness of the void and the depth of the abyss into sound with their third full-length "Let the Earth Be Silent". The duo gives sonic shape to the silence of extinction that humankind brings to all life on earth and itself. Depression, isolation, and the despair that this existence brings ooze out of every note’.

Lead single and the album’s opening track, ‘Ashen Era’ sets the tone and is representative of the heavy, harrowing furrow the album ploughs, with warping, disorientating noise and disembodied vocals circulating in a mist around thunderous but muffled percussion. It’s all-immersive, dark, dense, and listening to it feels like being buried alive, but at the same time transcendental.

A crashing gong heralds the opening of the scene that is ‘Horror Eats the Light’, released back in November as a single. It’s a bass-dominated exercise in heavy, droning doom and ethereality.

The album’s song titles really do speak for the album as a whole: ‘Annihilation’, Yearning’, ‘Barren’. This is bleak and harrowing stuff. ‘Yearning’ begins brittle, before exploding into a landslide of crushing guitars bearing down. The beats – crashing a light year apar, paired with bass notes landing like detonations event minute or so, this is heavy, but a different kind of heavy.

‘Yearning’ pitches that kind of Swand circa ‘86 crawling dirginess with crushing weight paired with a sepulchral glooming ambience, while the album’s last track, ‘Barren,’ lives up to its title, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of crushing gloom with ethereal vocals which ascend heavenwards like angels on a zephyr.

Let the Earth Be Silent feels like the final shudders of a dying planet, the collapsing death throes of eternity. It’s a vast and at times quite overwhelming experience. The sound is immense and there’s something of a ceremonial feel about parts of it, but elsewhere it simply feels like the outpourings of grief and is hard to listen to under any circumstances. It chokes you up. There’s something final and ultimately funereal about the droning organ that hovers out to the end, and it leaves you to reflect on the idea – the end. It’s beyond comprehension. But on Let the Earth Be Silent, FVNERALS have created an album that paves the way towards acceptance.

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Remote Viewing – Modern Addictions

Posted: 1 February 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A shriek of feedback prefaces the gnarly blast of a monster rhythm section, thunderous drums paired with a snarling bass. And so begins ‘Short Distance Runner’, the first of six songs on Remote Viewing’s Modern Addictions. You know in an instant that it’s going to be good.

Of course, you know it’s going to be good before you hear a single sound.

Featuring members of Palehorse, Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, Nitkowski and Wound (to name but a few) is quite the underground supergroup. Plus, Modern Addictions is being released on Human Worth, which is in itself a guarantee of heavy, noisy shit of the highest calibre. So yes, you know it’s going to be good. But even then, it’s hard to be braced for something this good.

The guitar alternates between thick, sludgy chords and really sinewy lead lines that buzz and drill, twist and bend and wrap themselves around you and dig in like barbed wire. The tracks are backed back to back, making the cumulative effect of the heavy battering even more acutely felt. Single cut ‘Your Opinion is Wrong’, showcased here in December is broadly representative of the dense, chunky, churning sound of the album as a whole, but doesn’t fully convey the extent of its textures and variety.

It’s not all punishing density, and the band are keen to highlight that theirs is a sound that demonstrates a ‘broader sound that incorporates elements of hardcore, post-rock and shoegaze into the palette of sludge and noise-rock’.

There are some tight grooves amidst the racket, ‘Wasted on Purpose’ effortlessly transitions through a number of varied passages, from full-on balls-out riffage to delicate, evocative swirling post-rock chimes which gracefully convey a very different kind of emotional weight, and if the title ‘Cleveland Balloonfest ‘86’ suggests something bright and airy, sonically it’s more the Hindenburg disaster with it’s slow, low-slung growling guitar that grinds away at a crawl for six and a half anguish-filled minutes.

If ‘Watch Me For the Changes’ is a demonic dirge of epic proportions with a remarkably light ending (and you can’t help but suspect the title is perhaps a reference to the band’s directions for playing it) ,the final track, ‘A.B.B.A. ABBA’ springs an unexpected surprise as the band switch into disco mode. No, of course it doesn’t really. It’s seven minutes of dolorous doom, thick with atmosphere and dripping distortion. It’s the sound of weight so great that it feels as if it’s collapsing in on itself, decaying and crumbling on the way to a slow death, that leaves you feeling hollowed out and devastated. It’s the perfect finale to a superlative album.

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Bedsit – Dead Bands

Posted: 28 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
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26th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Hull scene has been simmering nicely for some time, and it’s a great advertisement for deprivation and off-the-track locations being melting posts for dark underground creativity.

We may have bid farewell to Chambers and Cannibal Animal, but Hull continues to throw up a wealth of dark and noisy bands, and while Low Hummer have been making some serious headway, along with BDRMM, there’s no shortage of acts emerging behind them, with Besdit making rapid progress recently.

The name is a fair summary. Anyone who as ever endured bedsit living will relate to the claustrophobic sensation of confined living. Bedsits -appropriately – carry connotations of meagreness, of low-budget gloom, and Bedsit really do convey that sense of claustrophobia.

The four-piece’s latest offering, ‘Dead Bands’, is the lead and title track from their upcoming EP, which follows up on 2020’s Pocket Toy EP. It’s a step up from the lo-fi grunge metal production of its predecessor, and sees the band consolidated on that blueprint, leaping from rough diamonds ready for development to something lean and mean, and dense and taut and truly outstanding.

It’s not just the production: the composition, the playing, the vocals, the lot – they’ve not sold out and gone super-slick by any means, but ‘Dead Bands’ is a dark, dense amalgamation of post-punk and grunge, and while it may be a celebration of bands gone before, it sounds pretty bleak in its mid-tempo, bass-driven way, paired with baritone vocals that border on the gothic. It’s a combination of the sound of 1985 and the sound of 1993 and it’s dark and its heavy, but it’s magnificently realised with some killer riffage and some blistering, blustery guitars squall and scream their way to the end.

There’s no joy to be found here, but it’s a glorious exercise in dark nihilism that has to be my single of the year so far.

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Listen: ‘Into the Maze’ by AGLO

Posted: 21 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Gutter Prince Cabal is proud to announce the release of Melbourne-based sludgy death-metal project AGLO new EP "Into The Maze", now set for release on February 16th on vinyl/digital download.

With ‘Into the Maze’, this one-man doom project created by Aaron Osborne unleash 6 filthy and crushing tracks that take the swagger and groove of Entombed’s ‘Wolverine Blues’ and infuse it with the tar-thick pull of doom. Lumbering like some slow-crawling and atrocious beast through the murk of a polluted swamp, AGLO seem to take pride in all that is rusty and ugly, delivering exceptionally murky and nasty riffs, slow and powerful drumbeats and tormented growls.

Today, AGLO unleash the title-track of the EP, check it out here:

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Captain Zero – Bullseye

Posted: 20 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

If the pandemic gave us anything other than Acute paranoia, it’s a lot of new bands. Who’d have thunk it?

This of course highlights just how different the lockdown experience was for people, dispelling the idea that we shared a collective suffering during those months. Many suffered the lack of an income, but many revelled in the newfound time available to them. Some of us, for better or for worse, got to continue to work full-time remotely while also having to squeeze in home-schooling.

Captain Zero was another band who formed during lockdown, when the tones of ‘dirty fuzz bass batterer Steve James (Geisha, Steveless) were gently dripped into the earholes of David Edgar (The Get-Outs, Superseed) and beat basher Keith Hall (Big Joan, Flag Fen)’ And the tale goes that ‘It wasn’t long before they all got in a darkened room together, turned their amps up to 6.5 and began smelting demonic demos into a fistful of filthy rock n roll bangers.’

These are the realities of forming a band and actually making music, but Captain Zero do a great job of hiding that 6.5 amp level on ‘Bullseye’, an absolutely blistering rager of a track with thick, fiery riffs and gnarly as their beards.

‘Bullseye’ is a dense metal trudge and grit and heft that’s a blast of blistering hardcore punk that’s got hints of 90s Ministry and the entirety of the grunge scene compressed into a nutshell. It’s a belter.

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Watch: ‘Throne of Rope’ by Sanzu

Posted: 13 December 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Seven long years following the release of their critically acclaimed debut full-length album Heavy Over The Home, Perth-based death-metal outfit Sanzu finally unleash new material in the form of a visualizer video for a new track off the band’s album Our Behaviour When Drowning.

Titled ‘Throne Of Rope’ this new song was written and recorded by Sanzu, mixed and mastered by George Lever at G1 Productions, and the video for the song was created by Leovannmusic.

Watch the video here:

Comments the band: "It’s great to finally be able to release something to our fans. People have been continuously asking us for new material for 7 years and that’s not something we’ve taken lightly or ignored. We’ve constantly had a duality of situations that have helped and hindered. We had the fundamental agreement that we still wanted to make music together and wanted to pursue it under the stylistic SANZU "idea". But, also month after month, year after year, massive personal and interpersonal changes, complex situations, changing tastes, members going, members going then coming back, health issues and evolving standards and ideas for music and life. All these factors were rapidly turning over faster than we could hope to produce music."

"So it’s at this point that we are really pleased to release a couple tracks we’re proud of and to show some different shades and tones being experimented with. We know and understand there may be real disappointment that the promised full length isn’t a reality yet. But we hope that the people who saw that announcement and our lengthy explanation of the trails leading to that point can trust us in knowing that the trails have not stopped! And yet we’re one step closer and one toe out of the door. So, easy does it!"

"Throne of Rope is from a handful of songs we have written over the last few years that have concepts around having children. This one is maybe more abstract and less literal than our other material as it loosely brings together ideas about toxic parenting, ownership and projected expectations. As well as the frustration a lot people can have with an outdated education system that seems at odds with human and childlike nature. This song has some deceptive qualities, if you surrender to its tone in the given moment it tends to pull you around and down without much consideration for where you were before. Coincidentally the structure also sets a frame for the concept of childhood and education that the lyrics address. With its free and flowing beginning, being full of potential that then descends into turbulence and militancy."

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