Earthburner – Stoned at Birth

I don’t think babies should be allowed to smoke marijuana. They can’t roll their own for a start…

NOT the Kyuss rip-off you might expect with a bandname and EP title like that.

Instead we get satisfyingly fearsome crusty, sludgy hardcore-inflected metal that draws from the same wellspring that nourishes great bands like Black Breath and Trap Them.

While these Ohioans (is that even a word? Google says yes, so that’s good enough for me) certainly share traits with some popular beat combos du jour, their take on this sound feels their own.

You Need to Hear: Antigama

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.

More D-beat Sir? Victims

Come on, give us a cuddle. Please?

It may be old news that I remain obsessed with Trap Them’s Darker Handcraft as the latest manifestation of my deep and visceral appreciation of the chunkier permutations of hardcore, crust and metal.

But I don’t want to completely suck the marrow from that record just yet so I’m prowling the streets for a similar fix of fierce metallic hardcore.

On My Turntable: Vreid, The KLF, Snares, YOB, Tombs

London winters are shitty

Amid the murky gloom of the grisly London winter, I warm myself by raking through the dying embers of the musical year just gone.

I love pecking like a vulture on the carcass of year-end lists, yanking out the gems I missed like so many scraps of bloody intestine .

Of course that’s in the very limited time I have left after doing my best to suck every last drop of pleasure from Trap Them’s Darker Handcraft and the Balaclava record.

I am seriously addicted. Darker Handcraft is utterly narcotic in its intensity: blissed out on buzzsaw guitar.

Anyway. On my (metaphorical) turntable this week are Vreid, The KLF, Snares, YOB and Tombs.

Top 10 Albums 2011

Speed demons or sweet feelings. The great gamut of music boiled down to that binary definition for most of 2011.

Music had only two roles: to put fire in my belly or smooth my furrowed brow.

I’m not cut out for new fatherhood, even second time around. My synapses need more help than ever to fire and my cranium is forever creaking, aching.

This list – my top 10 albums of 2011 – reflects this.

No black metal, no doom. Neither hip-hop, post-metal nor bass fuckery. Just various blends of death metal, crust and hardcore, preferably with that heartstarting Sunlight tone, or the polar opposite: the pastoral, the dreamy.