Horn's microreviews for waveriders, part deux; featuring Cauldron, Lair of the Minotaur, Northless, Graviton, and Indian

Greetings and Salutations! Horn here, with a few more wee lil' reviews for you to scan. Please do enjoy!

Cauldron- Burning Fortune:

A cruder, lumbering, crusty, heavier Dokken-- whoever writes the riffs loves that fifth-chord-to-flatted-sixth thing that George Lynch does in every other Dokken song (see: "In My Dreams," "Alone Again," and "Breaking the Chains")-- I didn't realize that this single type of riff could nearly instantly take me back to watching VHS tapes of Headbanger's Ball in 1987. Track "Rapid City" is Dokken + Motörhead....

Overall, Cauldron are Dokken with worse solos and better riffs; the vocals are about the same. [Note: a track from Cauldron's previous album, "The Striker Strikes," is the number 1 dumbest song of last year as well as the most fun.]

Lair of the Minotaur- The Ultimate Destroyer and Evil Power

I know well the line straddling parody and... whatever else there is. This has gone over it. Not that it's bad, but Evil Power is pretty much Dethklok. The Ultimate Destroyer, on the other hand, is awesome in its sheer disregard for reality.


Northless - Clandestine Abuse

The best Crowbar disciple (or cenobite?  hierophant?); they've got an obvious sense of dynamics, while also maintaining the sonic equivalence to an enduring major depressive episode.


Graviton - Massless

When listening to new tunes randomly (to reduce bias), before I could remember their name, Graviton was "that subatomic-particle band." Seriously. Each song is named for one-- a subatomic particle that is-- and is a strange yet soothing combo of ambient, Swans-like, Alice in Chains-y, progressive noise. Like most innovative music, I didn't like it at all at first, but it kept attracting me, and made me get my head around it, rather than it molding to what I wanted to hear.

It's the band for you if you've ever thought, "I love Intronaut, but they're just not weird enough for me."

"Anti-Mesons" sounds like Paul Oakenfold or DJ Tiësto, with a chorus like one of the chants from The Thin Red Line, and "Fermion" is distinctly Sonic Youth-y. Sludge finally meets up with indie rock. Overall, Massless is the best kind of music-- unclassifiable, with a genre palate so wide you may as well not bother classifying it.

Indian - Guiltless

"Benality" in particular-- if Horseback is sludge on a black metal steed, then Indian (what a dumb name, though) is that same steed having his legs blown out from under him via cannon fire, and hurtling downhill, to fall to earth among the also-dead (but what a cool sound).

With the influx of sludgy bands, particularly on Relapse records (I still like Howl and Salome the best), it seems like bands are trying to out-heavy each other by slowing speed to a point where it's nearly without time or meter all together (like Death metal kept trying to out-Satan, out-speed and out-gore each other)-- and this to such an extent that the slowest/ most without meter, like Indian or Unearthly Trance, can end up sounding like the last five minutes of live songs that your favorite bands end their encore with--

You know, that last chord, usually open, just keeps being hit-- "BONG! spacespacespace "BONG!" spacespacespacespace "BONGBONG... BONGBONGBONGBONG!!"  Guiltless sounds like that. Not that that's not cool sometimes, it is.
I just keep wondering how they'll encore.

Indian are anti-sludge/ anti-blackened sludge: not in that they don't have "sludge" characteristics, but that they retain them while eschewing MUSICAL characteristics: a floating tempo --once charitably called "rubato," like Unearthly Trance-- and seemingly (unintentionally) serialist riffs, in that they seemingly have no home key-- they're not hummable at all, and it's like they're daring you to keep up with them: they're so random as to seem intentionally so: or, as The Silence of the Lambs put it: "Like the elaborations of a bad liar."

--Horn

Earache Records' new compilation - New Noise Attack

 

Like a list on Cracked's website, I've gone through all 14 songs from Earache Records' new compilation, New Noise Attack, and stripped away the hype and puffery from each track, essentially translating each into fanspeak, or, What You'll Probably Say After Hearing Each Number.

Follow that? Yeah, you did. Nice.

Track 1-- Enforcer's "Midnight Vice": practically straight out of 1985, even production wise (light on the bass, drums doing nothing beyond bumpa-chih, bumpa-chih, bumpa-chih), this literally could've come straight from the last hour of Headbanger's Ball (were it actually around in 1985)-- sounds like Krokus.

Track 2-- White Wizzard, "Shooting Star": heavy Dokken with an Iron Maiden chorus. Will instantly transport you to 1985, unless you have no memory of that, in which case it might sound unique. Utterly derivative, but actually pretty fun.

Track 3-- Cauldron's "All or Nothing": even heavier Dokken, almost Motörhead-ish. Very cool.

Track 4-- Hour of 13, "Naked Star," is Badlands or the Black Crowes (or similar Led Zep/ Stones worshipers) [also] worshiping the devil.

Track 5-- The Soulless, "Earthbound," is similar to The Faceless or Obscura or every other tech-death band. Catchy, but nothing special.

Track 6-- The Browning [is this an Elizabeth Barrett reference or a lessening of Machinehead's "The Blackening?"] and their "Standing on the Edge" is --wait for it-- a mix of deathcore with an electronic section that sounds like Paul Oakenfold. Primary reaction to this will be "Why?"

Track 7-- Woods of Ypres, "I Was Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetary": somber solo piano opener, like a combination of Chopin and Night Ranger; becomes then a Smiths' number if Morrissey liked Rammstein.

Track 8-- Wormrot's "Erased Existence," is a fun, puckish hyperkinetic grindcore number. Quite diggable. (Also, 0:43 long.)

Track 9-- Oceano, "Weaponized." Everything that is wrong with Deathcore.

Track 10-- Cerebral Bore, "The Bald Cadaver": completely formulaic tech-death, but done so enthusiastically it's fun to hear. Like everyone in the band is too young to have any original ideas, but is so young that they have enough excitement and adrenaline to make you remember how furious death metal can be. Also there are pig squeals.

Track 11-- And Hell Followed With, "This Night is the Coroner's": cool band name and song title, but otherwise Every Technical Death Metal Band You've Ever Heard. It's like Earache, at this point, are shotgunning death metal bands into the public ears, i.e., "Let's hit them will thousands of bands that are exactly the same-- one or two or them are bound to hit home."

Track 12-- Bonded by Blood, "Prototype: Death Machine": we have some points! It's generic too, but it's not death metal! It's thrash! Bay area-style! Slow, groovy introductory number followed by a groovy mid-tempo number with a fast chorus chock-full of gang vocals. Takes you straight back to 1988.

Track 13-- SSS, "Eat me, drink me, burn me," is similarly thrash, but more east coast (think MOD, right down to the Milano-ish vocals, or even Gothic Slam)-- fun, punkish thrash ranting.

Track 14-- Diamond Plate, "Waste of Life," back to the west coast with our now-progressive thrash. Sounds like Forbidden with a less-melodic, more gutteral Russ Anderson. Good, not great. Tasty drummer, though.

So, top tracks, in order: Wormrot, Cauldron, White Wizzard, Cerebral Bore.

It's no thing, really. Horn's Here to Help.

--Horn