I give you, Mr Pike
An pleasant cudgelling. A righteously refreshing bludgeon to the head. A welcome assault by an angry bear wielding a sackful of half-bricks.
You know what you’re signing up for when you lay down your notes for tickets to a High on Fire show.
Are these your balls sir?
Inter Arma are the best band you’ve never heard. Debut Sundown snuck up on me and wrapped a tire iron around my head to snaffle third spot in my 2010 end of year list with its amalgam of black metal, sludge and NWOBHM.
Typically when I fall in love a record, any follow-up will struggle fill its shoes.
On their Relapse Records debut EP, Inter Arma do more than buck that trend, they torpedo that motherfucker out of the water.
Awesome music, rubbish imagery. If you can’t have both, it’s best to have it that way round.
Lean and spry, wiry and angular as all fuck, Antigama surgically devastate your eardrums with hail upon hail of viciously precise blows.
I can’t quite believe I was oblivious to their idiosyncratic math-grind assault until last week. Now I can’t go a day without feasting on their really rather groovy lightspeed-tom-roll-drenched skronk.
This month these mentalist Poles released their first record for three years, Stop the Chaos.
What next, death metal bands called "Bobble Hat"?!
Happy new year gentle men and women, lovers of the heavy.
Gotta love serendipity.
Picked almost at random from the Southern Lord website in a bid to sate my hunger for crusty metal, Balaclava has barrelled into my life without warning and wrenched me from my festive meat coma with an almighty slap around the chops.
Crimes of Faith may be billed as “hardcore punk [played] with severe intensity” but that is selling this cracking little gem far short.
Yum, broccoli and squid for tea!
It’s safe to say Hazzard’s Cure bloody love metal. The Bay Area foursome’s self-titled debut drips passion for getting toasty and losing yourself in the sweet abyss of the heavy.
Nor are these chaps monogamous to a single metal mistress.
They love to put themselves about, flirting with elements of stoner, sludge, thrash, crust, NWOBHM, black, doom… you name it, it’s here.
