This isn’t so much an album as an unforgiving barrage of beyond-heavy ultra-distorted guitars, cage-fighting drums, utterly guttural bass, and brutalising vocals. If you’re only interested in nice and friendly finger-clicking tunes, Badlands is not for you – but if you’re pissed off beyond reason and your tastes tend toward the corner of musicland labelled ‘Extreme Metal’, it most certainly is. Read more…
Some shows are born special. Although I’m relatively new to The Hell, I’ve already become hopelessly addicted to their latest album (reviewed here) – so nothing short of a bad case of death was going to stop this show (the first of The Hell’s A Shitemare Before Christmas tour) from getting featured on TMMP. Read more…
The first time I heard about The Hell, I was advised to imagine The Lonely Island – only metal. Well, The Hell might not have Justin Timberlake crooning about how “Every Mother’s Day needs a Mother’s Night”, but they do have a bottomless bag of fat grooves and slightly less than serious lyrics. And they’re called The Hell – which should really be enough for any self-respecting metal fan. Read more…
Bursting out of the gate with a crystal-clear salute in Meshuggah’s direction and really coming into its own from second track 91367 onward, No Sleep is a dense album easily penetrable to fans of modern progressive metal, and worth the time and effort for the curious. Read more…
From the big picture perspective down to the finest details, this album is a spectacular triumph. Skyharbor’s struggle to make their latest opus more than just a fanciful dream is finally over – and they’re evidently revelling in the results, as well they should. Read more…
Outside Brighton’s favourite seafront venue, the wind is whipping up white waves that crash heavily into the shoreline. Inside, the air is moving even more violently as Idiom tear through a barnstorming set, followed in short order by Heart Of A Coward‘s crushing djent-fuelled brutality. Both bands deserve their dues for effortlessly eliciting manic reactions from a crowd set on saving their energy for the headliners. Read more…
BEAR know how to fucking rock. Tighter than a gimp suit that’s been left in the wash and as dense as a black hole’s singularity, on Mantiis Belgium’s loud-and-clear answer to the Dillinger Escape Plan take on desire, exploitation, and self-centredness via much brutal riffing and a no-nonsense video. Not for the faint of heart, but an undeniable blinder for the rest of us. Read more…
Metal’s been around for a long time now – but it never ceases to amaze me how many musicians are still finding ways to breathe new life into a genre so frequently mocked for its backward-looking retromania.
On Confrontation, Red Seas Fire take all manner of pre-existing metallic mutations and mix them into still another fresh sound. Think Korn’s first album mixed with Periphery’s latest and you have Tyrants; visualise Chester Bennington laying down vocals over a Killswitch Engage / Tesseract jam and you’ll get closing track Compass. The Gold Room, meanwhile, offers fuzzy riffs and hardcore vocals alongside catchy lyrics sure to translate live and a bit of Dillinger Escape Plan-esque mathiness toward the end, while The Grand Escape is pure djent-fuelled filth. In short, Confrontation is all killer, and absolutely no filler. Read more…
A note-one winner. Melodic tech-metal with elements of Periphery-influenced djent and (on opener Ephemeral) a fantastic Tom Morello stutter-guitar moment kept me set on staying put for this LP’s full running time. I do not regret that decision. Read more…
Djent is many things to many people: The future of metal; the best thing since the first-ever palm mute; mechanical and boring; emotionally engaging and fascinating; and so on. For me, djent is (for the most part) pure awesomeness, and a great additional ingredient capable of spicing up a genre so often held back (ironically, considering its origins) by a craving for tradition and conservatism.
Slovenian metal titans Noctiferia are not conservative, to say the least. Thank fuck. Read more…